imperialismus's recent activity

  1. Comment on 17-year-old Gukesh wins the Candidates, becomes youngest ever Chess World Championship challenger in ~games.tabletop

    imperialismus
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    This is really, really impressive. Top-level chess is undergoing a kind of changing of the guard, with this Candidates featuring three players aged 17-20 and five in their late twenties and...

    This is really, really impressive. Top-level chess is undergoing a kind of changing of the guard, with this Candidates featuring three players aged 17-20 and five in their late twenties and thirties. The two other youngsters, Alireza Firouzja (20) and Praggnanandhaa (18) ended near the bottom of the table, but Gukesh emerges on top.

    With Magnus Carlsen declining to defend his title, Ding Liren beat Ian Nepomniachtchi to become the new champ. But since becoming World Champion, he hasn't played much and hasn't looked good when he did. Before this tournament I thought that whoever wins would be a favorite given Ding's recent form. I didn't expect the youngest Candidate to win, though. By some accounts winning the Candidates is harder than actually winning the WC match, at least if your opponent's name isn't Magnus Carlsen. But on the other hand, Gukesh is still really young. He has the potential to be the youngest ever world champion by a large margin (Kasparov and Carlsen were both 22). But playing a 14-game match against an opponent who's specifically prepared against you with a team of seconds for months is a different ballgame.

    Vishy Anand has to be proud. He more or less single-handedly started the Indian chess boom. He was India's first grandmaster and its first (and only) world champion. Now they've had two young players in the Candidates, one of them winning the whole thing, and they're both from Chennai, Anand's hometown. And they have two more players in the top 10 junior rankings.

    About Gukesh's name: his name is Dommaraju Gukesh, where Dommaraju is the family name and Gukesh the given name. But as I understand it, in his culture the given name is given priority, even used in formal settings, and the family name is often abbreviated to a single letter. So he's most frequently referred to as Gukesh D or simply Gukesh in English. The same is true of Viswanathan Anand, where in his case Anand is the given name and Viswanathan is his father's name, so he should be referred to as Anand, although in his case he's stated that the doesn't mind the English nickname "Vishy". I didn't think I'd ever need to learn about South Indian naming conventions but apparently that's what a chess interest does to you.

    15 votes

  3. Comment on Elon Musk’s xAI seeks up to $4 billion to compete with OpenAI in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    Somehow I'm not concerned about the ethics of Megacorp X not paying Megacorp Y for the use of the user-generated content hosted on their platform. If we really care about the ethics of it we...

    Somehow I'm not concerned about the ethics of Megacorp X not paying Megacorp Y for the use of the user-generated content hosted on their platform. If we really care about the ethics of it we should ask whether the actual creators of that data get a say in whether or not it gets used for training AI. Do you really think Elon is going to add an opt-in to Twitter so that only users who explicitly consent allow their data to be used for training? Hell, I doubt X is even going to add an opt-out, never mind an opt-in.

    12 votes

  4. Comment on In Berlin, I experience icks I never thought possible in ~travel

    imperialismus
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    Well, to be fair, it might very well be the case that it would have been more expensive for the company to train someone new than to simply hire temps for 4 months then get back the employees who...

    Well, to be fair, it might very well be the case that it would have been more expensive for the company to train someone new than to simply hire temps for 4 months then get back the employees who presumably had a lot of experience.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on In Berlin, I experience icks I never thought possible in ~travel

    imperialismus
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    I visited one time in late February and it was shirt-with-no-sweater weather (which is what folks around here call 15C) and it was a freaking Nirvana compared to getting back to subfreezing...

    I visited one time in late February and it was shirt-with-no-sweater weather (which is what folks around here call 15C) and it was a freaking Nirvana compared to getting back to subfreezing temperatures and mounds of snow. Also saw a lot of art and met some cool people.

    As for the vacation days, my impression is that people are more motivated to actually work at work when they get a decent chunk of time totally off work. As compared to slacking off every day because you have no days off so why would you give it your all when you're actually on the job, which is all the time?

    5 votes

  6. Comment on Norway's health minister resigned Friday, the second Norwegian government member to step down this year amid allegations they plagiarized academic works in ~misc

    imperialismus
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    I don't know about Harvard, but it's already systematic in many universities across the world, including in Norway. This is more a case of those systems failing. Of course the commonly used tools...

    I don't know about Harvard, but it's already systematic in many universities across the world, including in Norway. This is more a case of those systems failing. Of course the commonly used tools are fairly dumb, generally spitting out a percentage of text that is identical to other texts in a database. But a number like 15% "textual similarity" may be perfectly fine in certain fields if properly cited, and the current tools don't understand the difference between lazy copy paste and a properly cited quotation. This is probably a case of laziness, because the digital plagiarism control software needs human oversight to be effective.

    I remember when I was in high school 15 years ago, I was "caught" plagiarizing by software. I didn't plagiarize jack shit. What happened was I uploaded some homework to the school's digital portal. We were free to resubmit until the deadline passed. Before the deadline I discovered that I was supposed to copy paste the questions into the document, not just write the answers, so I reuploaded my submission with the questions included.

    Then I was flagged for plagiarizing... my own withdrawn submission to the same assignment from one hour earlier. This was not communicated to the teacher. They only saw "100% textual similarity" and accused me of cheating. It was a very unpleasant experience, as I've never plagiarized anything in my life.

    That was in a high school 15 years ago. These tools have been around for a while. But as I mentioned, they're not perfect and require human oversight. In one of the cases in the article, Sandra Borch's, her thesis was submitted ten years ago, and she had plagiarized works published at a different university, so those texts weren't in her university's database. In the case of Kjerkol, it appears to be a complete human failure, as the automatic software would have flagged a high degree of textual similarity, but the number was not so worryingly high that it couldn't be legitimate. It just appears nobody actually did the work of following up on it, perhaps reasoning that in her particular field (management of health enterprises) it's common to cite many different documents verbatim (there's a lot of bureaucracy involved), so they didn't look into it.

    (Update: Norwegian media now reporting that the degree of textual similarity with other texts in Kjerkol's thesis was a whopping 43%, in more than 450 separate sections of text. The original figure for the plagiarism control in 2021 when the thesis was submitted for approval was 19% Many of the additional cases were citing a primary source, but copying the text from a secondary source that was also citing the primary source, without citing the secondary source from which the text was copied.)

    7 votes

  7. Comment on Pompeii: new paintings found in ~humanities.history

    imperialismus
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    It says in the article this is the biggest dig at the site in a generation, which has been ongoing for a year. So maybe they just didn't have the funding before?

    It says in the article this is the biggest dig at the site in a generation, which has been ongoing for a year. So maybe they just didn't have the funding before?

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Norway's health minister resigned Friday, the second Norwegian government member to step down this year amid allegations they plagiarized academic works in ~misc

    imperialismus
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    Norway's politicians have historically enjoyed a high degree of trust from the general public. They've really screwed things up for themselves these past few years with scandals across the...

    Norway's politicians have historically enjoyed a high degree of trust from the general public. They've really screwed things up for themselves these past few years with scandals across the political spectrum. Disliking politicians you disagree with was always commonplace, but contempt for politicians in general -- even the ones whose policies you support -- has been a niche position. Not so much anymore.

    The context for this latest scandal is that the government has been enforcing a very strict line on what they consider to be academic cheating. They're taking a student to the Supreme Court for a much less severe case of self-plagiarism after losing in a lower court. A lot of people found this case to be unreasonably strict, including many employees at universities who signed a petition in support of the student. That led a few private citizens to begin digging into ministers' and MPs own theses to look for cases of plagiarism. And it turned out that the Minister for Higher Education, the head of the department enforcing this strict line, had committed much more serious plagiarism than the case they're taking to the Supreme Court. That minister, Sandra Borch, stepped down. Kjerkol, the health minister, has been dragging this case on for months, continually denying any wrongdoing and lying through her teeth.

    Just to add a cherry on top, she chose to engage a lawyer, Marianne Klausen. Klausen was previously the head of the appeals committee for academic suspensions. It turned out that she had been appointed to this position illegally, as there was a term limit on the position which she had already passed. As head of that comittee, she had been enforcing that same strict line which would have 100% convicted Kjerkol, who is now her client. Klausen has tried to argue that the inquiry into the case was illegal as the case was too old (it happened in 2021!), while her client has argued that she could not admit any wrongdoing until an inquiry, which she has been actively trying to sabotage, has concluded.

    In the past few years we've had falsified travel bills, rampant abuse of a system of free housing for commuting MPs, members of parties on both sides of the political spectrum trading, or their spouses trading stock in companies whose stock prices were affected by their own political decisions. Somehow in all this the political scandal with the biggest fallout was a party leader being caught stealing a pair of sunglasses at an airport (he later admitted to having a psychiatric problem after being caught again, stealing groceries).

    Compared to most countries in the world, Norway has a very robust democracy that is in no immediate danger of falling apart at the seams. But politicians are doing their damnedest to make sure citizens never trust them again the way they (we) have largely trusted the integrity of the political establishment since the end of WWII.

    14 votes

  9. Comment on Cow magnets in ~science

    imperialismus
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    So let me get this straight: the problem is there's too many sharp metal objects in cow pastures, and the solution is to put magnets in cows so the sharp metal objects they ingest are less likely...

    So let me get this straight: the problem is there's too many sharp metal objects in cow pastures, and the solution is to put magnets in cows so the sharp metal objects they ingest are less likely to injure them? That's like having the problem of trains derailing on the regular so you solve it by putting airbags in train cars.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    That's overstating it quite a bit. There's a severe lack of technical detail in the PDF, but the most technical section is probably this one: This could very well be a description of training a...

    anyone with eyes who reads the technical definition would not say that this is “AI”.

    That's overstating it quite a bit. There's a severe lack of technical detail in the PDF, but the most technical section is probably this one:

    The engine uses a sample of ~3,000 human scored responses from the field
    test for programming. The engine analyzes the responses to identify common patterns and is
    programmed to emulate how humans would score.

    This could very well be a description of training a machine learning model, which is the one thing that everyone these days agrees is properly called AI. There isn't enough detail present to tell. You write in another comment that it's "a hardcoded database" but there's nowhere it says that it is. These are not multiple choice questions; the students are free to compose their responses using their own words, so you can't just look up the right answer in a small finite database. It requires at least a modicum of natural language processing. Maybe it's a hardcoded database of tokens or token sequences for each question and if the number of "correct" tokens is above a threshold, it's scored as correct. Again, no way to tell based on the limited information available.

    Just because they say they "analyzed" 3000 pre-scored responses doesn't mean it's a hardcoded database. All machine learning models analyze a finite dataset. It really depends on how you interpret "analyze" and "emulating how humans would score".

    Quite aside from whether or not this is machine learning, before the current machine learning craze, there used to be a joke in the programming community that AI was short for Accumulated If statements. Video game AI, which most people still call AI, almost never uses machine learning or language models. The field of AI isn't just the latest buzzwords within AI.

    The pertinent point here, in my opinion, isn't which exact technology is used, but rather the basic point that it's a computer system designed to analyze human grading patterns and replicate it. Here, the company promoting it has correctly identified that using AI in this way is likely to generate negative backlash, so they're doing the opposite of what everyone else in tech is doing, and vehemently denying that it's AI. Meanwhile critics, who oppose the idea of replacing humans with tech in this domain right now, given the state of current technology, insist that it's AI.

    The question of the exact definition of artificial intelligence is honestly a red herring. The question we should be asking is whether we think any current technology is reliable enough to replace human grading at the moment. And quite honestly, I think a buzzwordy LLM is probably more reliable than whatever hardcoded database approach you're imagining (but might still be too unreliable!). Which, just to reiterate a final time, there isn't enough information to conclude that's what they're doing.

    9 votes

  11. Comment on New Catan game with environmental mechanics in ~games.tabletop

    imperialismus
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    I got Catan a couple years ago and have been playing it with my family, but we don't get the chance to do it often. We usually have to at least partially refresh ourselves on the rules before we...

    I got Catan a couple years ago and have been playing it with my family, but we don't get the chance to do it often. We usually have to at least partially refresh ourselves on the rules before we start. The nice thing about the original game is that it's a strategic board game for people who don't play strategic board games. The barrier of entry is low. I can't see the same being true of this new game. And the original doesn't have a political message, which, even if I agree with the message, I might not want on family board game night.

    Interesting, but not interested, I guess.

    5 votes

  12. Comment on 12-year-old student opened fire at a secondary school in southern Finland on Tuesday morning, killing one and seriously wounding two other students, police said in ~news

    imperialismus
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    Unfortunately you can't legislate culture. I absolutely believe stricter gun control would reduce gun violence in a country like the US. But as long as the culture of self defense by lethal force...

    Whatever they're doing in Finland to keep school shooting to such rare events needs to be shared and emulated.

    Unfortunately you can't legislate culture. I absolutely believe stricter gun control would reduce gun violence in a country like the US. But as long as the culture of self defense by lethal force persists, you'd still see a lot more gun violence. The Nordic countries have a common understanding shared by almost all citizens that guns are not for shooting people, no matter the circumstances, with the exception of legal authorities like police or the military, and even then only in exceptional circumstances. Legitimate purposes for gun ownership include hunting, sports shooting, weapons collecting, and protection against dangerous wildlife, but not protection against dangerous people.

    This only works with a high degree of trust both in your fellow man and the authorities. As long as the presence of a firearm is associated with safety, firearms will not be safe. You might find it jarring that a single school shooting would shake up an entire country, but I'm sure the Finns find it equally jarring that in many parts of the US, a person openly carrying a firearm in public, out of uniform, is not cause for public alarm.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on Noam Chomsky: The false promise of ChatGPT (gifted link) in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    While I don't disagree, I also don't think it's a very relevant response to my comment? It's like, I'm responding to his ideas, not how surprising or expected it is to hear them coming from him....

    I just think if you're asking Noam Chomsky about language models it's probably not going to be a shock that you get something heavily informed by his other big theoretical positions.

    While I don't disagree, I also don't think it's a very relevant response to my comment? It's like, I'm responding to his ideas, not how surprising or expected it is to hear them coming from him.

    I'm not particularly convinced about your arguments for a biologist (at least when it comes to language models)

    That was in the context of a general understanding of intelligence. The space of possible pathways that could produce intelligence must at least be as large as the space of naturally occurring intelligence, and that's where biology comes in.

    As for the other author, having a linguistics background is more common in the AI world than you might think!

    It's not that it's not a legitimate background to work in or speak about AI. It's just that I think it would have been useful to add more of an outside perspective to the mix and that's what I initially assumed when I read the credentials of the authors.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Noam Chomsky: The false promise of ChatGPT (gifted link) in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    Well, there are some scientists and thinkers in general who welcome an interdisciplinary approach, especially when it comes to a subject as complex as artificial intelligence. Even if it's...

    Well, there are some scientists and thinkers in general who welcome an interdisciplinary approach, especially when it comes to a subject as complex as artificial intelligence. Even if it's expected of him, it's still a little disappointing. At a minimum, I think properly tackling the topic of AI requires expertise from biology (to understand natural intelligence), computer science and statistics (to understand the technology and math) and linguistics (because a lot of intelligent behavior is mediated by language, although I personally don't believe all of it is).

    This is an op-ed with three authors, and one of them is a tech guy. But it turns out the AI guy also has a background in Chomskyan linguistics.

    I don't think that Chomsky and his theories have nothing useful to say about AI. I just think it would be a lot more insightful if he allied himself with people who had expertise in other relevant fields.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on What are some of your favorite PlayStation 1 games? Any odd or unique ones worth playing? in ~games

    imperialismus
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    One of my favorite PS1 games is a game I rarely see anyone mentioned. It's a platformer called Pandemonium!. The gameplay itself is fairly standard 2.5D platforming, but the whole artstyle and...

    One of my favorite PS1 games is a game I rarely see anyone mentioned. It's a platformer called Pandemonium!. The gameplay itself is fairly standard 2.5D platforming, but the whole artstyle and vibe of the game is fairly unique. At times it's really dark and almost psychedelic in its visuals. I also remember the platforming being brutally difficult as a kid, but it might not actually be that hard for an adult.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Noam Chomsky: The false promise of ChatGPT (gifted link) in ~tech

    imperialismus
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    I don't think that current LLMs are anywhere close to general intelligence. I also don't think they're obviously a dead end. Which is not to say that they couldn't turn out to be, merely that I...

    I don't think that current LLMs are anywhere close to general intelligence. I also don't think they're obviously a dead end. Which is not to say that they couldn't turn out to be, merely that I don't think at present we can say for sure.

    That preface was just to say that I'm neither an AI true believer nor an AI doomsayer.

    This piece ironically suffers from the same lack of imagination that it accuses AIs of. It's deeply rooted in a particular theory of human language and human cognition, and seems to argue that this is the only pathway through which true intelligence could emerge. I find this quite absurd. We have "alien intelligences" on Earth today in the form of cephalopods whose brains are radically different from mammals, and yet they are some of the most intelligent species outside of the great apes. To posit that human-level intelligence can necessarily only emerge from the particular pathway that humanity took - and a particular theory about how that intelligence works to boot - is, to me, putting the cart before the horse. You haven't done the theoretical or practical legwork to fully understand human intelligence, and yet you want to make grand statements about the nature of all possible intelligences.

    Some of the arguments made in this essay are also cheap shots that make no logical sense. The authors criticize AI for being able to learn falsehoods as easily as truths. As if humans don't "learn" untruths all the time! Sometimes humans will deny things that are readily apparent to their own senses because of the things they've been taught.

    Chomsky's main contribution to his actual field of expertise, linguistics, is the theory of universal grammar. He argues that the input that babies receive is simply insufficient (the so-called poverty of stimulus argument) to determine the structure of grammar, and yet children learn to speak their native language fluently in a few years. So there must be some kind of overarching template grammar built into the brain, with the linguistic input infants are exposed to serving more as a way of fine-tuning it rather than building it from scratch. The alternative theory would be that language emerges from more general-purpose intellectual machinery in the brain, and is not, in a sense, "preinstalled" at birth.

    Given this theory, we should realize that Large Language Models aren't just trying to learn as infants do. They're trying to bootstrap the entire structure built by billions of years of evolution and also learn the concrete facts that are hung onto that scaffolding. It shouldn't be surprising that we humans, who don't understand ourselves nearly well enough yet, haven't succeeded in making computers do in a few years what took nature billions. That we've even come this far is miraculous.

    If we don't understand ourselves, we can't understand intelligence in general. And this piece reeks of an inflated view of our own understanding of how human intelligence works. With all due respect to Chomsky and his colleagues, universal grammar is far from a complete theory of human intelligence. And without such a complete theory, it's foolish to think we can constrain the space of all possible intelligences.

    There's a thing called the "AI effect" where whenever a computer solves a problem that used to require human intellligence, and we see that the computer solution doesn't look like the human solution, the problem becomes re-classified as not being an intelligent task in the first place, and thus the successful artificial solving of it isn't artificial intelligence. I have a feeling even if, in some distant future, we have robots with fully developed human-level minds, a lot of people will still deny that they're even slightly intelligent, because their intelligence isn't an exact replica of human intelligence.

    Brainless slime molds exhibit intelligent behavior! They literally have no brain! How can we possibly claim to constrain the shape of intelligence given the variety already present in nature? And that's just what currently exists, that we know of, on this one planet among billions in the universe. Never mind potential future technologies or hypothetical intelligent lifeforms on distant planets.

    In short, I think this perspective is too narrow-minded and lacks creativity. It seeks to constrain intelligence to a small box with a precisely defined shape, when the truth is we don't even half understand intelligence, but from what little we do know, it doesn't fit neatly into a little cube. It could be a pyramid or a hypersphere.

    That's not to say I think we're definitely on track for AGI with ChatGPT or Gemini. Merely that we shouldn't dismiss current approaches based on a preconceived notion of what intelligence must look like.

    24 votes

  17. Comment on Children predict the year 2000 (1966, video) in ~life

    imperialismus
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    I find it interesting that I can't tell how old these kids are. My eyes tell me one thing, but they're all so very serious!

    I find it interesting that I can't tell how old these kids are. My eyes tell me one thing, but they're all so very serious!

    8 votes

  19. Comment on VHEMT: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement in ~life

    imperialismus
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    Not in the same sense as in the past, when a lot of people had no savings and there was no legal obligation for the state to take care of you. You might not die, as the local community might take...

    Not in the same sense as in the past, when a lot of people had no savings and there was no legal obligation for the state to take care of you. You might not die, as the local community might take pity on you (I've heard stories from relatively modern times of how the families in a village would take turns caring for a disabled or elderly person with no living relatives, a few weeks or couple of months at each home), or maybe a religious charity might take you in or something, but relying on charity is a Plan C at best. The economic incentive isn't nearly as strong today.

    My general point being that I don't think people of the past had children just because it's "just what you did". There were some very pragmatic reasons why. Today, between state programs and private pensions, most people (in developed countries at least) don't have the economic imperative of knowing that they either become essentially a beggar, a charity case, or they literally just die when they're no longer able to work enough to support themselves.

    I'm reminded of a blog post I read from a medieval historian. I wasn't able to find it right now but I think it came from this blog. Essentially it was about whether medieval peasants saved the excess from good harvests as a rainy day fund for bad years. And the answer was generally, no. Food itself was too perishable - a good harvest now won't save you from a famine in five years. And you could sell food and save money, but if your area is hit by a famine, there might not be anyone willing and able to sell you food. And you can't eat gold or silver. So instead, what they did was invest in social capital. They might blow the excess food from a good harvest on a seemingly wasteful feast for their friends and neighbors. But sharing the good times ensured that in the bad times, they had goodwill, which was more valuable than money in a lot of circumstances.

    Children are social capital. Children are goodwill. But in modern times, between "unearned" rights guaranteed by the state (which is not to say undeserved, merely that they are rights granted by default, not as a result of your personal actions) and cold hard cash, the necessity of goodwill has been reduced. It's still nice to have a loving family, but the reasons are more emotional than economic now.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on VHEMT: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement in ~life

    imperialismus
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    Depending on how far "back in the day" we're talking... Children were your pension fund. Also, birth control wasn't nearly as effective or widely available.

    And I realized another factor is that lot of people probably just don't want to have kids. I have to guess a lot of people were having kids for social and religious reasons back in the day. It was just what you did, so people did it.

    Depending on how far "back in the day" we're talking... Children were your pension fund. Also, birth control wasn't nearly as effective or widely available.

    5 votes