Skip to main content

bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵 reshared this.


Nothing makes you hate cars more than living on a busy street, forced to listen to their din day in and day out. >:(

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud — Not Just Bikes

Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.

The book "Curbing Traffic" has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.

This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.

#FuckCars #urbanism

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

every time I contemplate "upgrading" the stock exhaust on my bike, I remember it's already louder than a car exhaust.

Most car exhausts, anyway. Not the M3 that my neighbour across the road drives.

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

The last place I lived was originally on a country road and was generally pretty quiet. But growing up population of the nearby city meant more and more traffic, and subdivisions (one was which ended up against my back property line). By the time I moved, the area had become solidly suburbia and the road became a major secondary road and quite noisy

bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵 reshared this.


From here:

There is no 'free' market, and there never has been. The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information. This is a completely false assumption, and has been proven so time after time.

It completely ignores human nature whereby someone will always lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their own ends -- this is what we see here.

Industry players will always form cartels and collude in anti-consumer behavior -- price fixing being the prime example.

Without someone to keep corporations in line, the market would steadily skew to all of the power being in the hands of a few.

There is no such thing as a 'free' market, and there simply never has been. It's a utopian myth which can never be true.

People who go around spouting about the 'free' market are either naive, self deluded, or actively lying.

#capitalism

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

damn, so we've had 11 years of this very thing getting worse.

when will people get it?! people keep voting for these pro corporate parties and it's depressing

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

Said parties have both rigged it to be this way and have convinced the people that this is the only way it can ever be. :(
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

well, the same is happening here in the Netherlands. people have been voting the neoliberals into power for decades, despite things going to shit, and other parties being available here.

it's the propaganda that's working; most people still believe that free market capitalism is great, and it will take a lot more downfall before they understand it's shit.

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie same in UK, but I think its also because neoliberalism provided short term gains - a young adult working in the skilled trades or the remaining middle level office jobs which exist and haven't been outsourced/replaced by AI can afford to get a used Audi on finance and just about run it - they get scared of green/left parties as they think "tax will go up and petrol will be £2/2€ a litre again" and that's a powerful paranoia (especially if they are in a long term relationship and have now got kids to feed/fund through school)
in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie about 10 years ago when I had learned just enough Dutch to read sites where younger folk hung out (and chat to them) I learned a fair few thought all the bicycles, good public transport (which folk in UK often envy!) and the high cost of learning to drive (which is same as UK) was imposed by "big government/EU" and they wanted to have cars just like young people in UK, enjoyed watching Top Gear and thought folk in UK and USA had more "freedom" (and those youths would be 30-40+ by now, many with families of their own)

At least you are highly unlikely to get Nexit as everyone can see the mess the UK is now in 5 years later..

in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@vfrmedia UK has been a lovely warning sign for us indeed!

..tho people have been voting far right the past few years despite Trump, so maybe most people don't really understand warning signs 😅

and about that dutch youth; keep in mind we've had neoliberal rule for decades now, so the whole "free market good, nationalization bad" has been really hammered in.

not sure if we'll get rid of it in my lifetime tbh. but most of the lovely social policies we have left stem from the more progressive governing we had before I was born 😅

btw why did you learn dutch? (maybe I asked before)

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie I moved to Suffolk, which is not /that/ far from the Netherlands (especially at the point of Lowestoft which is the furthest Eastern part of England) and has many cultural and trade links with NL, also I am a former radio pirate and was always curious about the pirate radio scene there and started listening to the stations and wanted to learn the language (piratenzenders are quite surreal, with 3 different languages of music and songs which are a mix of synthpop/disco, country and western and seashanties 😁 )
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@vfrmedia ohh right I think you mentioned that before! those piratenzenders sure are something else :D it's funny how it combines, eh, "rural culture" with everything else!
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

I love pirate radio!

I don't know if it's actually a pirate station, here's an FM broadcaster near Quinault Lake here that plays all kinds of odds and ends with weird stuff in between. It might fall under LPFM, but I doubt the FCC would hassle them anyway since it's in the middle of nowhere and low power.

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

@vfrmedia what's LPFM?

I wonder if maybe the FCC is a bit more relaxed these days since people listen to FM radio less (or well, I imagine that they do)

in reply to Neil E. Hodges Neil E. Hodges reshared this.

the "free market" is to economics what the frictionless spherical cow is to high school physics.

The very existence of corporations means there is no free market. Corporations are a legal construct of governments that grants a business (and later even a mere collection of assets) status as a district entity separated to some degree from the owners and workers within.

As such, there is no choice between "government vs corporations" because they are *two sides of the same coin*...it is all one big hegemony.

We have all been thoroughly conditioned to think otherwise for a couple of centuries now. It is thoroughly ingrained the minds of everyone in the "free world" that corporations are the capitalist free market and government is the socialist planned economy but that is pure BS.

The biggest economies in the world have arrived in the same place from two different directions...the US being a corporatocratic regime and China practising state capitalism.

As such deregulation just means re-regulation.


in reply to Neil E. Hodges

≠ PHYSICAL REMOVAL WILL BE REQUIRED ≠ is ignored

Neil E. Hodges doesn't like this.



. @clover mentioned a few days ago that AI-generated images are becoming more and more yellow as the LLMs are trained on the output of other LLM runs. #ModelCollapse #AI #LLMs


Does anyone know of a good list of user-agent headers for #AI / #LLM scrapers?
#ai #LLM



Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: reshared this.


A.I. is a Religious Cult with Karen Hao — Adam Conover


Silicon Valley has started treating AI like a religion. Literally. This week, Adam sits down with Karen Hao, author of EMPIRE OF AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI to talk about what it means for all of us when tech bros with infinite money think they’re inventing god. Find Karen's book at factuallypod.com/books


#AGI #AI #LLM

#ai #LLM #AGI
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


Considering that LLMs can only generate derivative works, I wonder if we'll get to the point where corporations that use it will start going after the creators of the original works, claiming that the LLM-generated works are the originals and that the actual original works are violating copyright. 0_0

#AI #LLM #LLMs

#ai #LLMs #LLM

DJ Deep House Arrest reshared this.


Digital Tar Pits - How to Fight Back Against A.I.


A new movement aimed at poisoning A.I. models like ChatGPT has gained traction after hackers have been attempting to trap said models in a never ending ‘Tar Pit’ of nonsense. After reading an Ars Technica interview, I tracked down a hacker developing tools to poison AI training data. Tools such as ‘Nepenthes’ are designed to confuse and corrupt the models that scrape the internet for their learning. But can we really stop A.I. from turning the web into a mess of low-quality, regurgitated slop?


#AI #LLM #LLMs

#ai #LLMs #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

Using the power of what is essentially the predecessor of LLMs to defeat them.

Poetic. :P

Jay Peach reshared this.


stefani banerian reshared this.


These lines from Video Killed the Radio Star just make me think of generative #AI now. :( #LLM #LLMs

They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine on new technology
And now I understand the problems you could see
#ai #LLMs #LLM

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


You know how companies are "reshaping" LLMs in response to them producing results they don't like (termed "hallucinations" for marketing purposes), even though the data they trained the LLMs on included at least chunks of whatever resulted in said "bad" results?

Imagine getting a lobotomy every time you said something people didn't like. 0_0

#AI #LLM

#ai #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

If you say "it's just a computer program", you contradict the marketing that LLMs are able to "think". :P


AI Vision Explained (and How to Avoid Paying for It) — FortNine

Motorcycle AI Vision is coming. But what is it really worth?

#motorcycle #LLM #AI

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


Doesn't using an #LLM to create large portions of your codebase mean that you end up with a lot of code that nobody understands unless they put in the time to go through it and learn what it's doing? If so, it's not much different from writing the code from scratch in the long one. :/

(Yes, I know about boilerplate and do think that's a valid use case as long as you know what the boilerplate is doing.)

#AI #programming

in reply to Steven Sandoval

It also worries me that a lot of people will forget how to write the more difficult code that they're offloading onto code generators (LLM or otherwise). They'll basically become captive customers out of fear of losing their jobs. :/
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

@baltakatei you shouldn't be allowed to use it professionally until you proved you can work competently without it.
in reply to Blurry Moon

I hope that will be the case long-term, but I have the bad feeling it won't be. :/
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Blurry Moon

but will people who get the licence be fit to pass the exam again after say a decade of atrophy?
This entry was edited (1 year ago)



What if part of the push for #LLMs ('AI') is sort of a 'gateway drug" for getting people into programming? It teaches how to format queries, albeit using human language instead of special syntaxes. 🤔

#LLM #AIs #AI #ArtificalIntelligence


Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


I kind of prefer traditional search engines over textual LLMs that require the input of coherent sentences for the models to "understand". The older way was like driving stick or riding a "normal" motorcycle, while LLMs are like driving automatic or riding a gasoline-powered motorscooter. 🤪 #LLM #AI
#ai #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

Consider trying Perplexity - my main use-case is to just type in an unfamiliar word and press send. It comes back with a paragraph to explain what the word means, with linked citations to the web pages that the information came from. It has almost replaced Google/Bing on my phone, since "what does that word mean" covers 90% of my phone searches anyway.

I used it last night to learn that the unfamiliar word on a menu was a type of goat cheese that I had not heard of before.



LLMs really are just the next evolution of search engines. #AI #LLM
#ai #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

...or improvement in searching skills, obsoletes the need for llm.


I read somewhere that when someone uses an #LLM / " #AI" to "create" art, it's more like commissioning an artist with a request rather than actually being the artist. Seems like a reasonable way to think about it.
#ai #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

and not commissioning an actual artist but a fraud who will steal some art and package it up in plausible deniability for you.

Coach Pāṇini ® reshared this.


Engineers are supposed to target efficiency and quality, but LLMs/"AI" are the opposite of that. They're exceedingly energy hungry and produce mediocre results that still require human intervention after the fact. Seems like a dead end until we've figured out better ways to implement them. 🤷‍♂️

#LLM #AI

#ai #LLM
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

It seems like if all the public domain books in the world are not enough to teach you to write well, it’s not a very good model of language.



Valheru Rides reshared this.


reshared this



What Grok’s recent OpenAI snafu teaches us about LLM model collapse

Instead, it was model collapse—though Babuschkin didn’t use those exact words. “The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data,” he wrote. “This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it.” Grok was notably set up to pull from livestreams of internet content, including X’s feed of posts, which was identified as a potential issue by experts who spoke to Fast Company a month ago.

“It really shows that these models are not going to be reliable in the long run if they learn from post-LLM age data—without being able to tell what data has been machine-generated, the quality of the outputs will continue to decline,” says Catherine Flick, a professor of ethics and games technology at Staffordshire University.

The reason for that decline is the recursive nature of the LLM loop—and exactly what could have caused the snafu with Grok. “What appears to have happened here is that Elon Musk has taken a less capable model,” says Ross Anderson, one of the coauthors of the original paper that coined the term model collapse, “and he’s then fine-tuned it, it seems, by getting lots of ChatGPT-produced content from various places.” Such a scenario would be precisely what Anderson and his colleagues warned could happen come to life. (xAI did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

#LLM #AI

#ai #LLM

M Dell reshared this.


Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


When you think about it, "AI" visual art is really just collages. 🤔 #AI #LLM
#ai #LLM

reshared this

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

#Dada and #Surrealism did it long before. It are some new techniques to get random unexpected. #AI throws out a bag full of it with an eye glimps. It's still the artist, the viewer to judge the result. In a #Fluxus
And the results are a Mix of what the #KI had seen, and everybody knew before. It's just stunning perfectly done.
Now for an artist not to seem just like AI, mass product, he has to be as unperfect as an AI never would be. It is the idea, #Konzeptkunst what makes #conceptual #art
This entry was edited (2 years ago)


Has the #AI hype train cooled down yet?
#ai

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


LLMs are AIs in the same way that a kid's tricycle is an automobile. #AI #LLM #ChatGPT

Unknown parent

Neil E. Hodges
Cat, I farted.
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

!y wife's name is Cat. This is heard in my how all day, every day.


What if we replaced rich people with #AI? 🤔
#ai

reshared this



Why think when you could let an algorithm do it for you? :P #AI
#ai


What we thought #AI was going to be: Intelligent robots and self-flying cars.
What AI ended up being: Bullshit generators.
#ai