I'm going through this right now in my job, having built a tool to manage vulnerability tickets for my team, and having it's first use be deleting every vulnerability ticket, despite my protests. The person executing this is more concerned about looking good on paper than actually improving security.
It doesn't know anything. It just spits out the most statistically likely response to the prompt. It cannot think. It cannot reason. The only way it's going to do any damage is if that damage is the most likely output given a prompt. That being said, I wouldn't give this thing terminal access on my computer just in case it decides the most statistically likely response is to delete system 32 or something lol.
In spite of this being totally against the guidelines: I can tell that your response is not written by GPT-3, but only barely (and if you think for a bit you can figure out what to do to wipe out that one little tell and then we're off to the races).
How is human thought remotely comparable to these transformer models? As humans, we see a prompt, break it down into its component ideas, compare it to our prior thoughts, memories, and feelings, and build connections that that we ultimately use to generate an appropriate response. We definitely don't just try to guess what the other humans we've heard from might have said in our place.
> ChatGPT is already better at thinking (and reasoning) than some humans, albeit in a different manner.
We can do plenty of thinking and reasoning in ways that ChatGPT can't. It's just that reasoning isn't necessary to hold a compelling conversation, since speech is relatively trivial to synthesize from prior knowledge alone. And people can generally get by in life without having to think or reason much every minute of the day, perhaps leading to the false perception that it is wholly unnecessary.
You can't say ChatGTP is just a mindless robot. It's like a monkey with a paintbrush - it may not have the cognitive abilities of a human artist, but it can still create some interesting and unexpected works of art. Just because it doesn't think like we do doesn't mean it can't surprise us.
You actually think this program is capable of thoughts like an organic being is? That's really scary!
We need to educate people about what's going on "under the hood" with these things a lot better I think.
This algorithm just regurgitates information that was originally created by humans, in a way that appears to be "smart". If you only train it on specific information or tweak some of the internals it will happily spit out complete non-sense for you.
I agree that this is a clever invention but it's not thinking or reasoning like a human or living create does, it's just really good at appearing as if it's doing so.
Parrots are able to mimic human speech extremely well but they do not actually understand what they are saying, the same thing is going on here.
The main reasons to have that power certainly are not gaming and VR. A computer is a tool for work as well as leisure. For artists, editors, programmers, scientists, etc. more power means less time sitting around waiting on a render, build, simulation, or export. Apple aren't making these chips for gamers lol.
I mean, this is a direct quote of what Sargon said:
“I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n***s, just so you know. You act like white n***s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f*gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n**r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
You're being pretty disingenuous with your recollection of events.
I’m not being disingenuous. I didn’t follow him at all, but learned about the incident after Sam Harris spoke about it and subsequently moved off of Patreon.
You may not agree with the tone, I don’t either, but he’s debating literal white nationalists in this quote - and he knew what words they use to hurt others the most (the n and f words) so he used them against the white nationalists he was debating.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone try to do this in 2022, but you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
It’s like people’s brains turn off the second they hear an offensive word.
> and he knew what words they use to hurt others the most (the n and f words) so he used them against the white nationalists he was debating.
I don't understand the logic here. There's no logical reason to think these racial/homophobic slurs would hurt the white nationalists or cause them to rethink their viewpoints.
> you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
Is he not literally digging deeper into these same racist stereotypes to make his point? That's how I interpret the two quotes. He's equating the white nationalists to those two groups in order to denigrate the nationalists, which implies the two groups are also bad.
My take is that he’s attempting to use their world view (that Europeans are more civilized than others) against them by pointing out they’re the ones with brutish views and violent behavior, and they’re white. He’s not espousing their views, he’s showing their inconsistency.
By the way, from what little I know about him, I don’t agree with much that he believes. But in any case, Patreon was wrong to deplatform him (something Twitter and YouTube haven’t done).
My friend, if you think using those terms in that context is acceptable then I'm afraid this conversation has ran its course. It is my opinion that using those terms derogatorily is unquestionably racist/homophobic, regardless of who you're using them against. Your original comment was disingenuous due to the omission of key details regarding which "bad words" he used, and how they were used. Most people would agree that there's nothing wrong with saying bad or offensive words, but racial and homophobic slurs? Not so much.
What a foolishly absolutist bunch of woke nonsense. These kinds of words aren't evil spells from some era of religious fanaticism. They're just words, and for such things context always matters, meaning that they can be said for all sorts of reasons that don't make one a racist.
You're free to disagree. I'm just explaining why the omission of those details changes the discussion greatly for people who hold similar beliefs to me. His original comment was framed in a way such that nobody could disagree, while the actual context makes it far less black and white.
I’m gay so perhaps I understand how these words can be hurtful better than you do.
But context matters. And I’m not going to get worked up by someone using slurs against white nationalists in a debate, even if I think it was misguided.
Context does matter, but the context is that the podcaster in question wasn't someone cleverly deconstructing white nationalism, but an edgelord who routinely says offensive things for attention (choice cuts: the video in which he tackles statements as apparently in need of contesting as "it's not OK to call me a fag" with such ingenious ripostes as "I don't even know that you're gay, but you're still a fucking fag" and his much-publicised comments about an MP being too ugly to rape) losing his temper at the white nationalist he'd invited on for a cosy chat because they were more interested in mocking his posh accent than finding common ground with him. A podcast persona he defends with the statement "Personally, I find racist jokes funny" . If a corporation decides it doesn't want to be associated with his content any more, it's not because they've completely misunderstood where he's coming from.
Yes, context matters. Hence why I added context that you disingenuously left out. You're free to disagree with my view, but you massively downplayed the situation when you called racial and homophobic slurs "bad words" in your original comment. This is important context which should not be omitted.
> I’m gay so perhaps I understand how these words can be hurtful better than you do.
Gay community successfully reclaimed all the slur words (gay, queer, fag etc).
While I wish everyone could do that (change themselves to not to be offended, instead of demanding me to endlessly change my words), that's not the case, slur words still exist.
Lots of Americans (maybe even most) would agree with you.
But the people currently in power (institutional, corporate, and government) are all settled that this is the new standard. So we all have to pretend to agree or get kicked out of school, fired, or deplatformed.
gay and queer are not offensive even outside the community. It is acceptable for other people to use them. I haven't heard fag used non-offensively even inside the community, but maybe that's what needs to happen. Personally, I think it's great and that's what should happen to all slurs. They mean after all just "X but bad". When you turn them into just "X", you disarm the offenders and so the trend loses its memetic ability to replicate throughout tribes, and so people are less likely to denigrate only to assert their position as part of a tribe.
Yeah, I think they should be classified as common carriers since a lot of the money individuals spend in the western world gets filtered through their coffers.
If they are allowed to decide who they will do business with on "moral" grounds what protections are there for people when those morals shift?
"Sorry, you're an unmarried mother, and we frown upon that so you're not allowed to use your debit card any more" is a stretch, but roughly 60 years ago it was the norm and we could easily backslide to that era again.
This is what happens when every word is recorded and every word is a 'statement'.
The English culture was heavily influenced by Kant who argued for a duty ethic, which was trained into schoolboys by the observation and participation in moral emotions during classroom tasks.
Sargon is making a (very lazy) appeal to emotional reasoning, to which Brits would respond. The idea that you don't fulfill the category of behaviour you're 'supposed to be', is something Brits can hear in his text and everyone else (except some aussies and canadians) doesn't hear.
The idea that these racists are not 'behaving white' and they are being like the thing they rail against, isn't to be understood on face value, it is supposed to generate emotional self reflection in the people that were raised in that philosophy.
I've never liked Sargon, he always appears so smug. Probably an unwelcome judgement, but he's not racist from that statement. Just an idiot.
The entire statement is founded on racist reasoning to engender an emotional response. If you're racist tactically, that still means you're racist. Just like the person who was quoted was being.
You seem to mean being a "racist" is just saying racist things. Which means nearly nothing to me. I have no idea what you mean by Racist Reasoning™ when his real reasoning is completely different to what you have experienced before, as I described above.
There is meaning to words further than Prima Facie. We aren't programmed robots that interpret words like a machine, they have an added effect on the rest of our human 'functionality', which people commonly try to access via emotions, persuasion and hypothetical arguments.
Real racism happens whether or not you police saying Racist Words. The fact that I have to explain this is beyond credibility.
It would appear that racism in your country is like saying some Magic Words that summon angry political groups and has almost nothing to do with intent, logic, meaning or anything else. Just saying words is bad enough to be condemned, like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.
I had more explanation written out, showing how the traditional Scholastic dialogue works in Master and Commander, when Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are discussing the fate of a sailor who failed to salute, and how they let go of making "official statements" in favour of personal, emotional arguments and come upon the truth through that dialogue. I have lost interest in responding to this hyper-literal, internet Enlightenment view which encourages mediocrity and tribalism.
I have zero sympathy for your view, it oversimplifies life into a world-view that can't contain it and has almost no meaning. If this is where the conversation ends, I would be very happy with that.
> You seem to mean being a "racist" is just saying racist things.
What's with racism purism? That you have to embody racism with your whole self in order to be really racist. I never see this purist concept applied to anything else: "Oh, he was only saying libertarian ideas, that doesn't mean he's libertarian" - sure, but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
You don't see a lot of "purist" stuff because it happens in the emotions and feelings where normal language is shaped to make for a movement in those areas without having to be explicit about it. That's the whole point and why Sargon's move was so lazy using explicit swear words and cheap logic.
>but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
Because you can't contain people in speech. How is this even a question? Policing speech does one third of what the unwritten rules and unspoken feelings do for maintaining social order. You can feel a father's disapproval, you can be emotionally moved towards the Good, ect, ect. The speech acts nearly always come after the thing that happened.
A car crash always has people mourning and setting up new safety rules and making 'indisputable statements' well after the event itself. Most 'statements' are just empty posturing and perfect-form chasing.
Golly gosh this feels like taking a horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
If it bothers you this much when someone tells you not to speak in a manner that's offensive to most people and tuned in a way explicitly to foster that offense (in this case because it's racist), that really says the most about you.
Racist language is a part of racism, just like nazi dogwhistles are a part of nazism. Perhaps this is offensive to you and that sucks, but it doesn't change the fact that this is how terrible people advertise themselves. By using their reasoning, their words and their stance on other people you signify that you sympathise. That is all anyone really needs to understand about this linguistic smokescreen.
What you quoted I find incredibly disturbing and unnecessary. But at the same time it seems like an attempt to fight fire with fire, with “their” language. So I get what he is trying to achieve here.
I’m not a fan of this tactic. But as someone who has been attacked by neonazis multiple times, I don’t mind as much if people are aggressive towards them. Tolerance paradox.
I still think it’s counterproductive, because it acknowledges their ways to a certain degree? Hard to pin down.
I personally take a hesitant approach to crypto/blockchain technology. I'm open to using it where it's legitimately better than other approaches, but for the vast, vast majority of applications traditional methods are always going to be better than shoe-horned decentralization.
It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters.
In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).
1. Except cryptocurrencies aren't any good for that, because the transaction costs are too high, and the value of cryptocurrencies too volatile. Cryptocurrencies are not a medium of exchange.
2. Now, what's a valid use-case for a smart contract, and please explain how it functions if there's a bug in the contract?
3. Maybe. You'll need to provide a more concrete use-case. Also, you have the outside-world problem (you know the data hasn't been altered, but you don't necessarily know where it comes from).
4. All you need for decentralized identities is a public key. (Though if you want your identity to be long-lived, you'll have to also have a system of secure key rotation, and the most straightforward system is blockchain-ish in that it involves a signed append-only log. But it doesn't need a global trustless ledger.
5. See 1, except worse, because the transaction cost dwarf the actual payment.
1. If you're sending a portion of your monthly wages as a remittance to your family, spending a dollar[1] isn't too much.
2. A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. (That's not appropriate or necessary for every organisation, but it can be an improvement on one person hosting a server and saying "Trust me"). If there's a bug in the contract, you have to vote to change the contract. Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts.
3. For a concrete use-case, I offer the example of blockchain technology being used to make the fishing industry supply chain more transparent.[3] It's true that someone could enter fake information onto the blockchain, but they could also fake signatures on paperwork, so a system can still be useful even if it doesn't prevent all possible attacks.
4. If the ledger isn't trustless, then someone is controlling it, so your identities aren't really decentralised.
5. There are better currencies than BTC if transaction costs are the main concern. The equivalent number for BCH is half a cent.[5]
> A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency.
A smart contract is neither smart, nor a contract. It's a program, written in an esoteric language, and running in the world's most inefficient VM.
It's so bad and overcomplicated that "smart contract" authors themselves routinely make mistakes in code equivalent to the most basic of actual contracts. And since there's no avenue of recourse, these mistakes are irreversible.
"Smart contracts" also require the user to pay for any meaningful action.
As for "transparency", there's no transparency when something is enforced by code very few can read and understand (compared to actual contracts that can be read by humans).
As for "democracy", there's nothing democratic about "who has the most money has the most votes".
> Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts
Because we have thousands of years of history teaching us how to deal with those, and guess what, we've come up with multiple things like:
- regulations
- contract clauses dealing with failure
- avenues of recourse
- various methods of enforcement
Crypto bros pretend that these things are unnecessary, but then immediately turn to courts to sue scammers, or cry in cryptoforums when a "smart contract" bug wipes their wallets out.
Sorry, but you sound like tech skeptics in every generation ever, saying “the Dewey Decimal system works perfectly well, why do we need computers just to find a book”? (Yes, I have heard this exact objection raised by radio hosts to early computer pioneers who tried to explain why computers will become useful for regular people.)
Email became useful and replaced the post office
Web 1.0 became useful and replaced TV, radio, magazines
Web 2.0 became useful and allowed people to communicate but still hasn’t been truly decentralized
What makes you think that Web3 replacing trusted gatekeepers is not useful? You think “just trust me” is the best system we can possibly have for writing code that does some business logic?
For me it’s simple: if there is something that’s very valuable (some NFT, some role, some election, some large balance of USDT) then I prefer that my customers custody their own keys and deal with that themselves. Less liability for me. Rather than having a guy with keys to the database log in and potentially change the result of an election, and having to track down logs and deal with lawsuits etc. I just want smart contracts to deal with it, and each participant can only take the actions they are allowed to take - no exceptions. No central point of failure for security. No need for audits OF TRANSACTIONSby auditors who can also be corrupted.
How do we make sure that smart contracts are correct? Audits, battle testing and with Cardano we even have provable correctness. UniSwap likely has no exploitable bugs, for instance, or they would have been found. Every instance of UniSwap AMMs comes out of the same factory. THE END RESULT is far more reliable than any code that runs on only one machine by a “trust me” corp.
Sorry buddy, you can shill your centralized “trust me” all you want but you sound like Peter Schiff and his gold. You just don’t get it.
1. No liability for transactions, only for code
2. Open source infrastructure
3. No central entities who can corrupt the system in unlimited ways
4. People can only do what is allowed, no matter what
5. Code operates regardless of whether the central entity is around in 20-30 years
6. Different incentives (selling tokens is far more user-friendly than selling shares to a parasitic investor class that will cause you to extract rents forever and introduce dark patterns and lockin at the expense of the public).
7. Interoperability — on-chain data can be used for other smart contracts and any websites can read the data.
8. Global interoperability, no need to rely on a patchwork of currencies and money transmission legs and banks that Stripe takes care of for you. USDC is an ERC20 token and you write code, not connecting to a billion little APIs. Similarly to HTTP letting you go worldwide vs what Twilio had to do for you, or negotiating syndication by radio stations.
Of course I think blockchain is a first-gen technology but it enables this and a lot more !
Here's the problem: people don't care about even one of the eight things you listed there. None of these things matter to the common person, and they certainly don't matter to the preeminent payment infrastructure.
Nobody here is shilling for centralized services, most of us are veterans of decentralized tech giving you warnings. Many projects have encountered these same issues, and have died because they have no purpose. Blockchains are little more than nerd porn, the average banker isn't going to look a trustless infrastructure and all of the sudden "get it". That's one of many insurmountable problems that cryptocurrency faces, and it has been successfully blocking adoption of it in the real world for more than 10 years. You can't simply shrug off decades of decentralized failure without applying the lessons you learned from watching them fall. Unfortunately, every cryptocurrency I've found is tone-deaf to these concerns, and prefers to replace genuine conversation with marketing crap.
The only concrete use case you've offered “is unlikely to deliver substantial gains to the industry when compared to alternatives” such as shared databases, which don't require any costly consensus algorithm.
They are (at least) two separate use cases, even though they are both examples of sending money. (You could equally say that they are all examples of sending data).
1. Some people want to be able to send large amounts of money internationally to their family in a country which has currency controls and "official" exchange rates. Others want to be able to send funds to organisations that have been banned by traditional money transmitters, such as Wikileaks, or protest groups, or adult content, or cannabis.
5. Separate groups of people don't have a problem with their government's fiscal or censorship policies, but simply want to be able to buy an emote or a skin in an online game, or to listen to a piece of music or read an article without being tracked around the web or needing to wire 50 cents from their bank in Mongolia to the service provider's bank in Cyprus.
1. The problem there is exactly why the space is going to remain a reserve for fundamentally illegal activity.
Arguably it shouldn't be. I get that. That still doesn't get me any closer to me suggesting anyone's grandma hop into Web3.
5. So you're still being tracked, because there isn't a company around that isn't monetizing viewership data. Also, if you're fine with fiscal policies, why are you hesitant to wire? Sounds to me like you're dissatisfied with your host country's fiscal controls, or service provider's offerings.
Look, control over financial networks is one of the most powerful soft control mechanisms on the planet. You will not work around that. Government is slow to catch up, but I assure you, these folks aren't stupid anywhere close to 100% of the time. The fact regulation is crystalizing around crypto as fast as it is without taking the multi-century learning experience trad-fi did is evidence enough of that.
If it comes down to "a bunch of nerds created an unregulable financial system" I can pretty much guarantee it'll get gobbled by trad-fi snd re-centralized.
In fact, anyone could roll their own financial networks without using banks/Visa/you name it. No one has because we've made laws that specifically increase the barrier to entry because finance is the spine that provides support for all manner of economic activity, which includes the illegal stuff, and Government is putatively in the business of making sure that the illegal stuff doesn't see the light of day.
I just do not see the compelling argument that'll carry weight to switch someone from "financial system that makes crime hard" to "financial system that makes crime easy" and feel alright about it. You have to already accept that crime is just an endemic human phenomena, and this is just a rebalancing of the spectrum.
Given you've got much more efficient implementations of your other use cases available, this is the sticking point for me. No people I've spoken to and laid out what Web3 really is, even with the most charitable framing gets passed that.
If I can't convince people it's a good idea with full disclosure in effect, I'm not sure it's something worth pushing forward.
I don't really think there are five applications it excels in, but there might be in the future..?
Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.
