News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Futurebot

Re:Accountability Sinks on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:14AM (#41900639)
What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:

- "Sin Eaters"

- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company

- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)

- Certain religious martyrs

That's exciting, especially the discovery stuff. Thanks!
Cool idea. Are you planning to add profile photo, description, and location support like Letterboxd has? Maybe messaging?

Also, is there a way to find who else has listened to what I've listened to?

Re:Dynamic Programming is not Black Magic on Sunday January 14, 2024 @12:28PM (#38992333)
I like the short forumlation to explain it: "Dynamic Programming is approximately recursion + memoization + guessing"
Re:OpenAI's Misalignment and Microsoft's Gain on Monday November 20, 2023 @12:59PM (#38351629)
"The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to organize a company."

Alternatively, we could have these companies turned into research organizations run by the government and funded by taxes they way most research (e.g. pharmaceuticals) should be. There's more than one way to get good research done, and having it public removes many strange incentives and conflicts of interest.

Re:ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers” on Thursday March 23, 2023 @06:06PM (#35281948)
The next grail here would be the automatic use of more trustworthy systems like WA when using ChatGPT in general. If one were to ask it to write an essay on a subject, that it'd infer which pieces need fact-checking based on confidence intervals of snippets of discernable and differentiable data, then run a query against said trustworthy system.

With this improvement, it would at least never get dates or measurements wrong.

I don't think we can ever solve the problem of needing real editors and fact checkers as ultimate sources of truth for ChatGPT's output, especially when it's for something critical, but for many tasks, this would be a major improvement.

Licensing, copyright takedowns, and partnership agreements make things that appear seemingly simple in fact quite complicated. That, and supporting a myriad of devices (plus different versions of those devices with different capabilities, plus all the different store integrations and their quirks) make for a very complicated set of organizational requirements.

There's no good answer here in markets this complicated

Re:Unreliability at Scale on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @06:40PM (#27534285)
Another in a long line of unexpected causes for system errors, the classic being the cosmic ray:

"When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe.

While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices. It's called a single-event upset or SEU.

During an SEU, particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet."

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3171677/computer-crash...

Those of us who do high-level development generally treat these underlying systems as infallible, but as we continue to scale - and more money and lives are on the line - we'll need to get used to the idea of not only not trusting the underlying hardware as the article states, but may have to get to the point where we have "ECC at the system level." We already have this in various distributed systems tech, but this tends to be application-specific. The next step would be to incorporate it directly into datastores generally.

This also suggests that heterogeneous hardware architectures can have an advantage in situations where data integrity is critical, even with the increased administration, hardware, and ops costs. Finally, it also highlights the importance of data audits and reconciliations for even non-suspect data on a regular basis, preferably with the aforementioned heterogeneous setup.

Yes, you should. Everyone should get a home, medical benefits, education, all of it. Period. If you work on top of that, great. If not, OK.
We're an oligarchy, that's why:

'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'

Older »