thearctic's recent activity
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Comment on Looking for advice: How do I find out what stocks to invest into? in ~finance
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The state of AI video
This video is a bit goofy in content, but I came across this youtube short of an MMA fighter "Seamus O'Grady". I don't know all that much about MMA, but I find it somewhat interesting and look up...
This video is a bit goofy in content, but I came across this youtube short of an MMA fighter "Seamus O'Grady". I don't know all that much about MMA, but I find it somewhat interesting and look up more clips about the dude. I then try looking up who this guy is online, and he's entirely AI generated from what I can gather (youtube comments say he's AI and there are no pages online about him).
These videos are basically indistinguishable from reality. The biggest "tell" is just how surreal the actual situation is, not necessarily the ability of AI to generate something life-like. And, of course, AI generated video will only get better. As far as I'm concerned, we've officially reached the point, in a completely non-hyperbolic way, where there's basically no reason to believe that what you're seeing online is real, unless it's coming from the verified account of a "legacy" creator.
There are some major questions that now get raised. Is video as evidence at all basically a thing of the past? How can we admit video evidence into a court of law, perhaps unless it's played directly off a recording device that's technologically incapable of having video uploaded to it? Is citizen journalism even possible now? How can we trust, from today onwards, that we aren't being fed a narrative by even traditional media that's a complete literal fiction?
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Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health
thearctic Link ParentIn an ideal world where the health insurance industry was ruthlessly competitive in favor of consumers, the insurance companies could actually play a substantial role in managing scarcity in the...In an ideal world where the health insurance industry was ruthlessly competitive in favor of consumers, the insurance companies could actually play a substantial role in managing scarcity in the healthcare system. Unfortunately, we live very far from that world and there's all sorts of hogwash narratives pushed in healthcare under the guise of "reducing waste" and "cutting costs for patients" when it's really to juice profits.
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Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health
thearctic Link ParentI'm not sure what particular reasons you're referring to as to why doctors don't like to perform certain tests, but a large reason why doctors don't like to do certain tests has to do with false...I'm not sure what particular reasons you're referring to as to why doctors don't like to perform certain tests, but a large reason why doctors don't like to do certain tests has to do with false positives. If the false positive rate for a test is higher than the prevalence of that condition in the general population (which it very often is), then you will do harm more than good by doing the test. The doctor has to have reason to believe you exist within a certain subpopulation whose prevalence for the condition is higher than the false positive rate for it to be worth it. The doctor also has a responsibility to not clog up the healthcare system with unnecessary testing.
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When do you know that you've found "the one"?
By "the one", I mean the one you should marry.
34 votes -
Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp
thearctic Link ParentIdeally, we would first scrutinize the details of such regulation on its own merits, then consider incentives to the extent it influences the implementation of that regulatory regime.Ideally, we would first scrutinize the details of such regulation on its own merits, then consider incentives to the extent it influences the implementation of that regulatory regime.
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Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp
thearctic Link ParentI was only using the human brain as an example of an entity that is capable of broad problem solving and in a range of use cases would probably be more efficient than an LLM. For even those use...I was only using the human brain as an example of an entity that is capable of broad problem solving and in a range of use cases would probably be more efficient than an LLM. For even those use cases, we can expect it to be possible for some AI to achieve the same capabilities as the brain at the same or better energy efficiency.
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Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp
thearctic LinkGiven the fairly impressive application of AI to math research, I would expect that we're going to start to see a massive acceleration in any axiomatic, theoretical domain of study, which would...Given the fairly impressive application of AI to math research, I would expect that we're going to start to see a massive acceleration in any axiomatic, theoretical domain of study, which would include AI research. We can probably agree that LLMs, though impressive in a lot of ways, are not computationally efficient towards their typical use cases, at least relative to say the human brain. If current-generation AI can be used to rapidly develop an architecture whose ability scales much better with compute, then we probably are in for trouble. By the nature of the problem, an architecture that is more power efficient will necessarily be easier to distribute and so harder to regulate. A question that's relevant here is, roughly speaking, how much energy would it take for current generation AI to come up with a new architecture that replaces itself? If it's sufficiently high, which I don't think it is, then some cooperative agreement can probably be reached. Otherwise, such an agreement wouldn't be very productive.
The lower bound for the upper bound of AI's possible intelligence:energy ratio will be that of the human brain, since the human brain is a thing that physically exists and probably doesn't take its abilities from some noetic realm. I am a big advocate of creating international structures to constrain technology, and I think it's a lot more feasible than people think; our biggest boogeyman and justification of technological acceleration, China, is a much more reasonable, conscious, and even humanistic actor than we appreciate (not to say that they don't have their problems). But, ultimately, our plan for keeping humans and governments-accountable-in-some-substantial-way-to-the-general-population in charge of human affairs must cut to the chase and assume that we will fairly soon live in an intelligence-unconstrained world.
What we need to ask is: what would such a world look like? What sorts of things could be achieved through intelligence alone, and what things would necessarily require humans to allocate substantial physical resources to implement or discover? How do we ensure that all physical resources are kept under some sort of democratic control? How do we ensure that individuals are economic actors, in the sense that they make consequential decisions over how finite physical resources are distributed and, so, what the world particularly looks like?
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Comment on A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample in ~science
thearctic LinkI'm not a math buff, but I came across this online and it seemed interesting. A case where AI disproved a conjecture in a way that seemed to involve ingenuity, or at least not brute force. Can...While this is an extremely quick verification, the construction presented in this fashion appears like a massive miracle. The polynomial {F} has degree seven, so a priori the Jacobian {\mathrm{det} DF} ought to be a polynomial in three variables of degree as large as {3 \times 6 = 18}, so the fact that all non-constant coefficients of this polynomial vanish looks like a massive cancellation involving {\binom{18+3}{3}-1 = 1329} equations, which is much larger than the {3 \times \binom{7+3}{3} = 360} degrees of freedom for a generic degree seven polynomial map of three variables. So finding such a polynomial looks highly unlikely to be located by brute force.
The example has since been retroactively explained in more geometric terms. As a “digestion” exercise to myself, I sought to write this explanation with relatively little use of algebraic geometry, in a manner that minimizes the amount of “miracles” required, although there are still a few places where some remarkable phenomena occur.I'm not a math buff, but I came across this online and it seemed interesting. A case where AI disproved a conjecture in a way that seemed to involve ingenuity, or at least not brute force. Can anyone speak to the implications of this result? Seems somewhat fundamental to me.
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A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
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Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into Hugging Face in ~tech
thearctic Link ParentEven if you wanted to give it internet access, couldn't you just limit its exchange to pure information and not executing any commands and wouldn't that be pretty airtight? Like it sends an...Even if you wanted to give it internet access, couldn't you just limit its exchange to pure information and not executing any commands and wouldn't that be pretty airtight? Like it sends an information query to a program that only processes search queries then the sandboxed AI receives the response.
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Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into Hugging Face in ~tech
thearctic LinkIn general, how serious of a threat is escaping containment, for any party that puts any real effort into crossing their T's and dotting their I's (I know inevitably a lot of people won't fall...In general, how serious of a threat is escaping containment, for any party that puts any real effort into crossing their T's and dotting their I's (I know inevitably a lot of people won't fall into that bucket)? To me it seems it shouldn't be hard to just make it physically impossible for a software to get access to things it shouldn't.
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Comment on Tildos, let's be unserious for a while; show us your dankest memes and god-tier shitposts! in ~talk
thearctic LinkI think about this oftenI think about this often
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Is it possible to not want to be happy?
This is sort of a philosophical, logical, and psychological paradox. If you are content when being unhappy, then your preferences are satisfied. So, you wouldn't want to change anything and, in...
This is sort of a philosophical, logical, and psychological paradox. If you are content when being unhappy, then your preferences are satisfied. So, you wouldn't want to change anything and, in that sense, you are happy. But if you're happy, then your preference is unsatisfied and so you're unhappy. But, it seems plausible in real-life that someone, for some complicated reason, actually doesn't want to be happy. If we accept that such a thing exists, then what exactly are we talking about?
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Comment on China is dealing with its own manosphere in ~life.men
thearctic Link ParentA fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse...A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse problem globally within a couple generations.
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Comment on Readers rate poems worse when they believe they're written by AI, despite their ability to detect AI being no better than chance in ~humanities.languages
thearctic LinkIn this article, we examine the perception of AI- and human-written Czech poetry. We ask if Czech native speakers are able to identify it and how they aesthetically judge it. Participants performed at chance level when guessing authorship (45.8 per cent correct on average), indicating that Czech AI-generated poems were largely indistinguishable from human-written ones. Aesthetic evaluations revealed a strong authorship bias: when participants believed a poem was AI-generated, they rated it as less favorably, even though AI poems were in fact rated equally or more favorably than human ones on average. The logistic regression model uncovered that the more the people liked a poem, the less probable was that they accurately assign the authorship. Familiarity with poetry or literary background had no effect on recognition accuracy.
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Readers rate poems worse when they believe they're written by AI, despite their ability to detect AI being no better than chance
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Comment on Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after ‘brief and sudden illness’ in ~society
thearctic Link ParentBlack Mirror needs to make an episode on thisBlack Mirror needs to make an episode on this
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Comment on Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after ‘brief and sudden illness’ in ~society
thearctic Link ParentI don't know why NYT feels the need to do those sorts of things. I feel like they think they are some sort of "unifying" institution for the country. They're not and shouldn't try to be. They...I don't know why NYT feels the need to do those sorts of things. I feel like they think they are some sort of "unifying" institution for the country. They're not and shouldn't try to be. They should also appreciate the extent to which many of these people stay in power not as a function of democratic will but from moneyed interest.
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Comment on Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after ‘brief and sudden illness’ in ~society
thearctic LinkIn general, I think it's bad taste to gloat over someone's death, even someone you deeply disagree with. But Lindsay Graham was known to celebrate killing and murder, so I won't feel bad about it.In general, I think it's bad taste to gloat over someone's death, even someone you deeply disagree with. But Lindsay Graham was known to celebrate killing and murder, so I won't feel bad about it.
It really just comes down to whether you are introducing true information or analysis that the market isn't already aware of. It's a bit extreme when people say that it's basically impossible to beat the market, since plenty of people do beat the market. But, most people radically overestimate their abilities, especially in relation to what they perceive as average. In the stock market, the overwhelming majority of people are below the (investment weighted) average in their understanding.