

deleted by creator
Mostly a lurker.
I read books to pay the bills.
She/her/they
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@Viskio_Neta_Kafo I assume it’s big data corpus linguistics; each word/phrase is assigned an identifier and then compared to the corpora the LLM holds to see what words are commonly grouped. Linguists have used corpora for decades to quantitatively analyse language; here are some open ones https://www.english-corpora.org/ - the LLM I assume identifies the likely lang “type” to choose a good corpus, identifies question tags & words in key positions, finds common response structures and starts building.
@dogslayeggs I know you were only talking about cars. My point is you can’t only think about cars because there are too many other factors, including drivers of other cars who don’t know whether or not they can go if the other “driver” doesn’t indicate whether they’ve seen them or not. It’s not about “banning people for not waving”, it’s that if someone doesn’t let the other person through, nobody moves. The endpoint will be everyone hating Waymos and always going first.
@dogslayeggs this is not a good solution unless you’re expecting to mandate that all pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, guide dogs, whatever, wear them too, and that all existing cars are retrofitted with them. Kind of dystopian.
@Aux I’d call it “predictably unpredictable”! Plus the “cyclist swerving round a pothole” roulette.
@ripcord unpredictable but maybe not standard practice? Just a guess, could be a bad assumption! British driving culture is reliant on eye contact and waves and nods and flashes - you have to signal if you’re giving way (to other drivers as well), and say thank you; lots of places where there’s only room for one vehicle on a two way road and someone has to decide who’s going. Might be my failure of imagination but I don’t know how that works with no driver.
@SippyCup I have never heard a single good thing from anyone who works with or for them.
@MoreFPSmorebetter it’s not called jaywalking here, it’s just called crossing the road, and there are plenty of places where if it’s busy if you just kind of wait hopefully someone will wave you across. Or you look for a big enough gap that you can’t make it all the way across but a driver will see you and have to slow. We also have zebra crossings which you just wait next to and drivers have to stop; up to the driver to interpret if someone is just standing around or waiting to cross.
@MoreFPSmorebetter @vegeta I just can’t see this type of tech working in places with a more pedestrian-first culture / more unpredictable human behaviour, i.e. countries without jaywalking laws. If you tried to drive this through London and people realised it will just have to automatically stop for you (and also *won’t* stop for you out of politeness if you wait hopefully) then everyone will just walk in front of it. What’s the plan, special “don’t stop the Waymo” laws?
@Curious_Canid @vegeta this is the case for the Amazon “just walk out” shops as well. Like Waymo they frame it as the humans “just doing the hard part” but who knows what “annotating” means in this context? And notably it’s clearly more expensive to run than they thought as they’ve decided to do Dash Carts instead which looks like it’s basically a portable self-service checkout. The customer does the checking. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india
@meco03211 @Jayk0b cars can’t either - it’s a false premise. Not everything is drive-thru. How far is, say, the bakery section from your car when you go to the supermarket?
@octopus_ink yes I think we will eventually learn (there is clearly a lot of pushback against the idea that AI is a positive marketing term), and it’s also definitely the fault of marketing, to try to condition us into thinking we desperately need a sentient computer to help us instead of knowing good search terms. I am deeply uncomfortable with how people are using LLMs as a search engine or a future prediction machine.
it’s like seeing faces in wood knots or Jesus in toast
@manicdave Even saying it’s “trying” to do something is a mischaracterisation. I do the same, but as a society we need new vocab for LLMs to stop people anthropomorphizing them so much. It is just a word frequency machine. It can’t read or write or think or feel or say or listen or understand or hallucinate or know truth from lies. It just calculates. For some reason people recognise it in the image processing ones but they can’t see that the word ones do the exact same thing.
@NotSteve_ @alphabethunter the funniest ones are people who go “to Europe” on holiday and then get confused when they can’t get exactly the coffee they are used to. I do think the algorithm pushes this stuff in people’s faces though. I left after the day the US wasn’t on it and I suddenly got shown Aussies and Canadians and English-speaking Africans and Europeans. Made me realise quite how bad the feed was normally.
@NotSteve_ @alphabethunter spent some time on TikTok between the election and the inauguration and the defaultism is reeeeally apparent on there. There was a big thing about Robbie Williams being “some guy who was big in the UK” at Christmas, and recently another one about how jacket potatoes and baked beans are “war rations”. And endlessly recurring takes on how the US is more culturally diverse than Europe because it is … bigger. The video element makes it all so much more *out there*.
@Hossenfeffer but when it comes down to it I think really we’ve ceded our understanding of morality to “the market” anyway. It’s bad when politicians say to do it but if “the people” follow (or if, for example, we regulate schools so they *have* to follow) and that’s the only way to make it sell then it’s ok. Majority rules, I guess. But my personal feeling is that when it comes to pure morality it’s about where the power lies. And often that’s the power of controlling the narrative.
@Hossenfeffer as with everything it usually boils down to who has the power/control. An (adult) reader can choose what they read or how they interpret it, and can also often control what a child reads and how that child interprets it too. A subject cannot choose how they are read about, so it is up to the writer and publisher to control that message and reduce misinterpretation where possible. It’s a similar framework to cultural appropriation or “doing an accent”. Are you punching up or down?
@Hossenfeffer well “this is offensive [to the subject]” is more valid than “this is dangerous [to the reader]” for one. A subject can’t choose what the reader thinks of them afterwards - they have to hope that the reader understands enough context to realise they are, actually, equally human. A reader, in contrast, gets to choose whether they agree with the premise. Otherwise history would have destroyed all copies of every religious book, or Mein Kampf or the Little Red Book or Das Kapital.
@daddy32 @aesthelete yup I’m sure it’s worth quite a lot to some larger private investors