theneverfox
@theneverfox@pawb.social
- Comment on You know that generative AI browser assistant extension is probably beaming everything to the cloud, right? 2 days ago:
A $500 one is plenty, even phones can run models good enough to be useful (if not near as quickly)
- Comment on All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets 2 weeks ago:
Okay… Well it goes back to my point, you’re looking at this like animals are machines, despite all evidence
Apollo doesn’t know 26 words, he knows dozens, even hundreds. He can identify the composition of novel materials based on the framework taught to him - not always correctly based on our understanding, but there’s an internal logic. He tests the hardness, the sound, the appearance (the primary sense for birds, even more so than humans) and he makes an educated guess based on what he knows
Koko begged for a cat, despite never having seen one outside of picture books. She was offended when they gave her a cat shaped toy. She grieved when they told her the cat was hit by a car, and later articulated understanding the cat was dead
My mom’s dog knew dozens of names, when my mom said “theneverfox is coming over tomorrow” she’d get excited, and wait by the door the next afternoon - not the same day (I was her favorite)
And I was her favorite because I could read her body language, I knew when she had an itch and she could tell me where, and she only trusted me to hold her because I knew when she felt secure and when she wanted to get down
My dad got a cockatoo when I was a child, and she trusted no one - until I started making origami in front of her, and decided to give them to her. She was fascinated by how I folded it, and would try to unfold it when I gave her little boats. Two days of that, and we became friends - she would fly down where I pointed and back onto my shoulder because it amused me…I didn’t train her, I never fed her, we just formed a bond… Except she would attack everyone else, so she was sold soon after
I was dog sitting an abused rescue who would barely let me put the leash on her to walk her - aside from when she needed to go out she wouldn’t be in the same room as me, even when food was involved. Then I sang ave Maria, and she watched from upstairs - and then she came down, and I became the second person she would let pet her
I’ve gotten deer into petting range and seagulls to approach me within inches - no food involved, just mirroring their body language and trying to understand.
You can try to explain it away, but animals are happy to communicate - they just have to be curious and you have to meet them hallway
You can try to explain it ask away, and most do, but that’s pseudoscience - taking the answer and fitting it back to observations
Animals have their own wants. That’s undeniable. The idea that they’re doing it mechanically and humans aren’t is insane
- Comment on All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets 2 weeks ago:
The record is now like 26 in a minute or something, by a guy who has done videos on his bird’s training for years. I think the bird’s name is Apollo
They have arguments over what things are, like you can’t convince Apollo a lizard isn’t a bug, because Apollo has understood a bug to be a little critter he could potentially eat. You can’t convince him ceramic tile isn’t made of rock, because he’s kinda got a point
Apollo babbles to himself when he’s alone too, but you know what? So do I. Especially when I’m trying to pick up a foreign language, I’ll practice words until they feel natural on my tongue
And everyone seems so quick to forget Koko or label her an exception. She basically spoke in poetry, understood mortality, and described herself as a good gorilla person when asked what she was
Animals understand, it’s just rare to find ones that are motivated to sit and communicate on our terms. Every “special” human trait, from language to culture to sense of self and abstract thinking seems to be pretty common, we keep finding it in many animals so we keep moving the goalposts
- Comment on It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning. 3 weeks ago:
I’m sure it’s probably just going to be pulling relevant data, which is a pretty good use case if it’s citing sources - military stuff tends to use absurd amounts of manpower to avoid mistakes, so I can’t imagine they’ll be trusting it anytime soon
- Comment on It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning. 3 weeks ago:
Probably because of Hollywood - for some reason they always seem to shake with their left hands, which always stands out to me
I’m not sure what the reason is, but I’m sure it’s related
- Comment on Boeing Has Lost a Staggering Amount of Money on Its Starliner Catastrophe 1 month ago:
The problem is that there’s an incentive to game the system, especially when there’s requirements that restrict how the government picks contract winners
If it’s fixed cost, they cut every corner to be picked, then deliver something shitty and the government either lives with it or awards a second contract to fix it. Sometimes they don’t even complete it - sometimes there’s a bail where you put up collateral meant to be used as punishment and so someone else can be paid to finish your failed contract, but with large companies there’s often so much proprietary shit/institutional knowledge that no one else could reasonably complete the contract without starting over… So they can fail a contract and still come back for more
If it’s cost plus, big contractors take a loss initially to basically buy revenue streams they can milk indefinitely. Sure, they can only make so much per head, but that’s money they know will be coming in so they’re incentivized to push the headcount on the project to the limit and keep the party going as long as possible
That’s the problem with rules, if you have clear boundaries corporations will inevitably exploit them. They are meant to fight corruption or bad/incompetent actors, but by codifying all of it they clearly divide what is illegal and what isn’t, setting it all up to be gamed
- Comment on Meta execs obsessed over beating OpenAI's GPT-4 internally, court filings reveal 2 months ago:
That’s basically what’s down stream from an open source model. Llama derivatives are what I use on my mid range gaming computer, and honestly they’re comparable. They can handle fewer details at a time, but they’re faster and way more efficient… Once you add in rag and tool use, they’re better than models 200x their size
- Comment on Google Ads Testing Showing Same Ad From Same Advertiser On Same Search Results Page 3 months ago:
At least they’re at the stage of enshitification where they fuck over the advertisers… Too bad it came after making the product unusable
- Comment on Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion 3 months ago:
It’s very achievable - if you wrote out simple functions to complete larger objectives, you could feed in test results and the code, and you could easily provide enough context to keep it on task
- Comment on Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion 3 months ago:
Agreed. It’s nice to see others who see the potential for AI without being some easy solution to all problems
The truth is, it’s incredibly useful, but more like a super intern than a coworker. It knows many things you don’t, it can do things faster than you, sometimes even better, but it’s an intern - it can do menial tasks and sometimes surprise you with unexpected insight, but it doesn’t understand the full picture and will make mistakes, and that’s on you
Luckily, there’s a lot of menial tasks it can help with, and a lot of ways to make small (7-13b) models outperform big ones with conventional programming. Anything that can be done in conventional code should be, and even if it won’t make billions there’s many places it can work like mighty putty to make things that make our lives better
- Comment on Google is launching a new Android feature to drive users back into their installed apps 10 months ago:
No Google, that is not your core mission. Your core mission is letting us search the web, and you’re intentionally shitting the bed
- Comment on ChatGPT's 'hallucination' problem hit with another privacy complaint in EU 10 months ago:
Ok… Why the fuck is anyone asking LLMs for personal data? This doesn’t sound like an LLM problem, it sounds like someone is exploiting a gap in the law unethically before the law catches up
- Comment on Hasbro exec says Baldur's Gate 3 "proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games," supports Larian's plan to "take the time we need" 1 year ago:
Thanks, that increases my anticipation a bit, while giving me reasonable expectations
I tend to be obsessive with games until I’m done - I bought and installed it, but haven’t started playing for a reason, I’ll probably get 1.5-2 complete playthroughs within a week or two, I need to have a couple weeks of solid work before I dig in - a good rpg will take up most of my time until I’m done
- Comment on Hasbro exec says Baldur's Gate 3 "proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games," supports Larian's plan to "take the time we need" 1 year ago:
I liked the story, I think Jonny was integrated fantastically, and the mechanics were decent
My only complaint is there wasn’t enough. Not enough cyberware, not enough branches in the story, not enough ways to feel the power growth as your character levels and gets better gear
All in all, I don’t get the hate. It was a good game. With more time to flesh it out it could’ve been an instant classic, the bones are all there… I’ve got the dlc sitting in my library for when I’m ready to devote the time to dig into it
- Comment on Try it 1 year ago:
In fairness, it’s not really the same
Think more like a slurry of connective tissue, bits of fat, and scraps of meat pressure washed off the bone and swept into a drain. The legally allowable quantities of cleaning chemicals and feces are also pretty concerning…
I’m happy to eat sausage, even blood sausage, despite knowing what it is and how it’s made… but hotdogs are gross in a unique and unnatural way
- Comment on Bad day 1 year ago:
I thought it was a dudes armpit. It’s lopsided, like a pectoral with a little cushioning