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Intentionally or not, you are presenting a false equivalency.

I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the machine learning tools that are generally useful and the current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on us.


One person's unethical AI product is another's accessibility tool. Where the line is drawn isn't as obvious as you're implying.

It is unethical to me to provide an accessibility tool that lies.

LLMs do not lie. That implies agency and intentionality that they do not have.

LLMs are approximately right. That means they're sometimes wrong, which sucks. But they can do things for which no 100% accurate tool exists, and maybe could not possibly exist. So take it or leave it.


No way to ever know in which condition that being somewhat accurate is going to be good enough or not. And no way to know how accurate the thing is before engaging with it so you have to babysit it... "Can do things" is carrying a lot of load in your statement. It makes the car with no brakes and you tell it not to do that so it makes you one without an accelerator either.

>That implies agency and intentionality that they do not have.

No, but the companies have agencies. LLMs lie, and they only get fixed when companies are sued. Close enough.


So provide one that "makes a mistake" instead.

Sure https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/man-asked-chatgpt-cut...

Not going to go back and forth on thos as you inevitably try to nitpick "oh but the chatbot didn't say to do that"


If it was actually being given away as an accessiblity tool, then I would agree with you.

It kind of is that clear. It's IP laundering and oligarchic leveraging of communal resources.


1. Intellectual property is a fiction that should not exist.

2. Open source models exist.


Well yes on both counts.

The only thing worse than intellectual property is a special exception for people rich enough to use it.

I have hope for open source models, I use them.


Based.

How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.

You have reasonably available context here. "This year" seems more than enough on it's own.

I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the public and IP laundering.


>Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some

You can be among a a swamp and say "but my corner is clean". This is the exact opposite of the rotten barrel metaphor. You're trying to claim your sole apple is so how not rotted compared to the fermenting that is came from.


Putting aside the "useful" comment, because many find LLMs useful; let me guess, you're the one deciding whether it's ethical or not?

I feel obligated to point out that basically no commercial service that relies on a big tech company has better than 99.99% uptime anymore. Your example isn't just hyperbolic, it avoid the actual problem. It isn't that "a bit more reliable" is "nontrivial less reliable than 5 years ago."


I worked in DHTs in grad school. I still double take that Google and other companies "computers dedicated to a task" numbers are missing 2 digits from what I expected. We have a lot of room left for expansion, we just have to relax centralized management expectations.


The history of Nietzsche's work and the context it was used in makes this conversation complicated.

Its one of those situations where the root philosophy is correct "moral frameworks are arbitrary and thier enforcement mechanism are falling apart so we have to try something new" isn't a hard argument to justify. The problem is that it leaves "Something new" a totally blank check for anybody seeking power to fill in. To claim "This is the new natural morality".

Nietzsche is right, god is dead. But claiming to take gods place is the precursor to an apocalypse (They happen a lot more often than most people realize)


I mean… what is the assumed replacement, then? Residual moral sensibilities from our obsolete judeochristian heritage?


Just as a random proposal, not even lightly thought out. In priority order with realistic exceptions:

- do your best to be not dead, safe, and healthy for the next few years

- do your best to make those around you not dead, safe, and healthy for the next few years

- do your best to treat others around you how you would wish to be treated

- do your best to treat others around you how THEY would wish to be treated.


Yes. There is a quote from james allen that I like. "There is no greatness without goodness"


So, the Golden Rule?


With the caveat of safety and well-being it is on the list. But note that it isn't the highest one.


You'd have a hard time justifying the argument that moral frameworks are arbitrary. First, they have complicated internal structures that aren't well understood even today. See, e.g., the various "paradoxes" of modal logics used in ethics. Second, since we're all the same social primate species, moral rules are surprisingly consistent globally. Third, the Romantic and anti-Enlightenment streams that Nietzsche was a part of generally did away with the need to justify claims. This vibe-based approach is a big part of why people like Nietzsche are sometimes viewed more as literary figures than philosophers.

Nietzsche was very strongly in favor of the aristocracy and opposed to democracy. Traditional mass market religion was always something the ruling class saw as beneath them. For a long time the ruling class was the priestly class, so they literally made the rules of religion. That was no longer true in Nietzsche's day, but his views on morality are still influenced by the fact that he's writing motivational works for the ruling class.


Ugh. Nietzsche.

It's just not interesting, its not really foundational, it weirdly adopts the value frame of what it rejects, its arrogant, much of it is trivially false.

It's like hearing someone talking about reading Von Mises or Ayn Rand or Myers Briggs types for the first time.

It's like, I'm too old and well informed now to find any of them interesting or of value, maybe they're a developmental phase and are ok if you don't get stuck in them.

Read them sure, but if you're the type of person who believes what they read and can't engage with it critically your better off reading more substantive and true works, like cheaper by the dozen or the boxcar children, or the musicians of brennan or read more interesting, modern, informed work like Wheeler.


Not for the purposes of these numbers. They totally use GCP (and even "bill" themselves) but it is all isolated to one "Organization" that often gets special handling.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite If you want a preview of the next decade without changing how we are acting.

agreed that this isn't the solution.


Wikipedia's opening description is incredibly milquetoast: "opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality".


Honestly, I am genuinely curious if there are some good books/articles about Luddite, although I don't think this is an apples to orange comparison, I am just willing to open up my view-point and to take counter arguments (to preferably sharpen my arguments in and of itselves) but as with all things, I can be wrong, I usually am. But I don't think thats the case just because of how I feel like there is something to be said about how AI itself really scraped the whole world without their right, nobody consented to it and in some places, the consent is straight up ignored even

It wasn't as if the machines were looking at every piece of cloth generated by the worker pre revolution without/ignoring their consent. Like, there is a big difference but I personally don't even think that their view-point of resisting change should be criticised.

I think its fair to resist change, since not all change is equal. Its okay to fight for what you believe in as long as you try to educate yourself about the other side's opinion and try to put it all logically without much* biases.


Syncthing is easily the most effective FOSS I actively use. It just works and runs on everything.


This is an electric motorcycle with pedals. The presence of pedals that only-technically contribute to motion is a regulatory-dodge not an intended feature.


As long as it only moves if you're peddling, it passes the regulatory test.


I don't think this is true, class 2 e-bikes are allowed a thumb throttle up to 20mph


This is a Class 3, so it needs pedals to hit 28mph. It also has a throttle up to 20mph for class 2 operation.


That's not how the regulation works. You can't have a multi-class bicycle. It can either have a throttle, or it can exceed 20, but not both.


Apparently Californa requires a label for what class the bike is[1]. I have never seen such a label on an e-bike and I've seen a lot of e-bikes in CA.

1: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... (312.5.c)


There are just a lot of illegal Chinese electric motorcycles on the roads in California. That doesn't make them e-bikes though.


I stand corrected. I did not know that class 2 allows for throttle-only operation.


They don't actually show any results. Of any kind.

I have some spare compute credits and I'm taking it for a spin here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1XL91kdwMWQQf1xu1_zS...

I'm posting there before it completes, note that you have to reload to see progress. There should eventually be images at the end that show reconstructions from samples.



Yeah, "cargo cult" is abused as a term. Those islanders were smarter than what is happening here.

We use it dismissively but "cargo cult" behaviour is entirely reasonable. You know an effect is possible, and you observe novel things corellating with it. You try them to test the causality. It looks silly when you know the lesson already, but it was intelligent and reasonable behaviour the entire way.

The current situation is bubble denial, not cargo culting. Blaming cargo culting is a mechanism of bubble denial here.


It's called "science experiments", except when it produces the null result.


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