that you need to get conspiracy theorists to sit down and do the treatment. With their general level of paranoia around a) tech, b) science, and c) manipulation, that not likely to happen.

You overestimate how hard it is to get a conspiracy theorist to click on something. I don’t know, it seems promising to me. I more worry that it can be used to sell things more nefarious than “climate change is real”.

you need a level of “AI” that isn’t going to start hallucinating and instead enforce the subjects’ conspiracy beliefs. Despite techbros’ hype of the technology, I’m not convinced we’re anywhere close.

They used a purpose-finetuned GPT-4 model for this study, and it didn’t go off script in that way once. I bet you could make it if you really tried, but if you’re doing adversarial prompting then you’re not the target for this thing anyway.

The interaction between society and technology continues to be borderline impossible to predict. I hope less true factually beliefs are still harder to defend, at least.

If it’s outside Russia, sure. It’s probably going to be something (or some things) in international space if it’s a retaliation for something in international space. Or at least, it should be, because I don’t really buy the “direct war with Russia would be fine” jerk.

Yeah, I don’t get that. Federation is the option to have a hyper-custom server that does weird things, or to make your own server with blackjack and hookers if you don’t like your current one, without losing access to community and content. Most people aren’t nerds, though, so if you want plag-and-play an instance like lemmy.world is great.

If you want a small bubble you actually don’t want federation.

Mastodon is just an impenetrable mess from a UX perspective.

How does it compare to Lemmy?

Great, so the perverse incentives aren’t beatable then. Time to bug lawmakers, I guess?

On the bright side, Lemmy feels just about like Reddit to use, so that bodes well for us.

Okay, so I’m going to tell you where the new Twitter is in the blue swirly.

I know, I know, easier said than done to actually guide them through, but if they’re at that level it’s just a different setting on the magic box.

Yeah, I feel like this should be surmountable. At worst, you skip the whole concept of federation and just tell them exactly where to sign up.

But still yes, once NATO works out which Russian stuff to take out in response.

Probably the ghost tankers, right?

I feel like the “tits” they would get for that “tat” would be pretty bad for them. NATO breaks toys better than they ever will.

I don’t really think it would start WWIII on it’s own, though.

Ooooooohhh! I never made that connection.

What’s the problem? They’re just not sure which instance to go with?

I guess, haha. A quantum circuit is going to use something else (Josephson junction or laser), though, so even there it’s just in an auxiliary component. Except not, because this thing doesn’t sound real, at least as advertised.

Yeah, I don’t even need to read this to smell the garbage. AI + Quantum, and put together in a way that doesn’t make sense. Does it have crystals too?

Yes, but they used a buzzword. /s

This is basically a clickbait critique of clickbait.

But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

There’s no mechanism in LLMs that allow for anything. It’s a blackbox. Everything we know about them is empirical.

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

It’s a lot like a brain. A small, unidirectional brain, but a brain.

LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

I’ll bet you a month’s salary that this guy couldn’t explain said math to me. Somebody just told him this, and he’s extrapolated way more than he should from “math”.

I could possibly implement one of these things from memory, given the weights. Definitely if I’m allowed a few reference checks.

Okay, this article is pretty long, so I’m not going to read it all, but it’s not just in front of naive audiences that LLMs seem capable of complex tasks. Measured scientifically, there’s still a lot there. I get the sense the author’s conclusion was a motivated one.

Man, anything would be better than swipe apps. I’d use that.

They’re a thing mainly because an “app designed to be deleted” is not a good way to make money. Almost all the big sites have switched over to swiping for that reason.

While I think the basic idea of deliberately introducing friction is interesting, I’d say the philosophers cited are making what’s really a psychology statement, and so exceeding their qualifications, which irks me. The essay itself is philosophy, at least in the “design philosophy” sense.

If you are designing friction in, how do you go about it without turning away users? BeReal is the first successful-ish example that comes to mind. Forcing you to post at an inconvenient time is arguably friction-y, but people sign up in that case because the friction is experienced socially all at once, and it’s a statement against the atmosphere conventional social media creates. For more practical tools that might be hard to replicate.

Enshittification goes brrrr.

So just another layer of suck on an already completely compromised machine, I guess.

It sounds like there’s no way to patch it once it’s the exploit has been used on a machine, though, so until one goes out it’s open season.