Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: Unpopular opinion…..

What a load of bullshit. Illinois' biometrics law was widely publicized, and anyone doing corporate law in Illinois should know about it. This isn't some mysterious tangle of obscure regulations; it's something the managers and execs had no reason not to be aware of from the get-go.

Re: Not any loss

Anyone that's eaten there will agree

Oh, do fuck off. Not everyone is you.

Re: Culinary experience

Shrug. It's certainly not good food, but as bad food, I'll take White Castle over a good number of the alternatives.

Re: Only the first one counts?

Doing it hundred times (my name, my fingerprint) more doesn’t make much difference.

Whether you feel there's additional damage is irrelevant to the case. What the law says is what matters.

In this case, White Castle repeatedly, frequently, and knowingly violated the law. The Illinois Supreme Court has just issued a finding that all those violations were, in fact, violations. That's establishing precedent for interpreting the law. Whether each violation significantly increased the actual harm done wasn't the question at hand.

I also disagree with your evaluation, because repetition creates a moral hazard (it normalizes the practice) and potential for abuse (if the fingerprint-reading terminals are compromised at a later date, for example). But, again, that doesn't matter, from a legal point of view.

Re: Only the first one counts?

Based on your commenting history, that's easy to believe. Try thinking critically, perhaps.

Re: Only the first one counts?

They suffered by having a right granted to them by the Illinois legislature violated. That's all that's necessary for a finding adverse to the defendant in this action.

Anything beyond that is irrelevant to the case, and your introduction of the question is disingenuous or foolish.

Re: Only the first one counts?

No, in the US it also means being tried for the same crime multiple times (or more precisely that an acquittal is usually with prejudice, so the case can't be retried). The person who introduced the term into the discussion was using it incorrectly.

The back-up camera is one of very few innovations in automobile controls from recent years that I approve of. Maybe blind-spot indicators, though it's hard to say because my car doesn't have them, and I've never had an issue with my car's blind spots. (I have my wing mirrors adjusted properly, which certainly helps.)

I hate adaptive cruise control (and fortunately don't have it in my current car). My car has a rain-sensing mode for the windshield wipers, which I've used a few times (precipitation tends to be very local around here) but wouldn't miss if it were gone. Auto stop/start? Don't like it, don't need it. Self-parking? Learned helplessness. Lane following / departure warning? Obnoxious. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto? There's no fucking way I'm linking my phone to my car. And so on with most of the modern tech.

Re: re: How About

Touch in a hob and oven makes sense.

For the oven controls perhaps. For the stovetop I'll disagree. Knobs are easy to find quickly without looking and trivial to operate. With very little experience it doesn't require any conscious supervision at all.

Re: My car has clean, unsmudged surfaces

My Toyota is a 1992 Truck (that's the actual model name, according to the manual). I bought it a few years ago. It's never failed to start on the first attempt, and I've yet to get around to doing any significant maintenance on it. 4WD works great. Air conditioning still works. Right side channel on the stereo is out, but I think that's the head unit (which is aftermarket).

It's not fast, but man, I love those old, over-built Toyotas.

Came here to find and upvote this comment.

A pox on touchscreens. And, no, I don't need them for navigation, either. If I wanted a navigation system built into the car, a physical keyboard would work a hell of a lot better.

Re: Sydney fell in love with a NY Times reporter

When presented with evidence that he doesn't it loses its shit and says he is in charge of a worldwide conspiracy to doctor all of his photos, trick and hurt Bing, and wipe out humanity and then it goes into a loop where it repeats four times that he's got a beard for every answer.

Those seem like very plausible vectors for it to have in the model, given the training data. To be honest I'd be more concerned if this sort of output were more difficult to elicit.

Re: Apparently it learns....

I think it's quite unlikely that any GPT LLM, including whichever generation and flavor is implementing Sydney, is actually manifesting qualia or behavior such as "tantrums", "lying" (which implies intent), or "sociopathic tendencies". What's much more probable is that it has gradients in its parameter space which get encoded as prose that simulates those things.

While I'm a monist and believe the human CNS and its effects are purely mechanical,¹ and therefore could be realized by conventional computation given sufficient resources, existing transformer LLMs don't appear to have anywhere close to the necessary complexity. For anything resembling human cognition I think we're going to need a model with multiple competencies in very loose orchestration, more like EfficientZero, and a much wider diversity of inputs. And (again for human-like cognition) the model needs strong limitations on its introspective capabilities; you can't be human-like without an unconscious.

We're likely to get non-human-like AGI first, the way things are going, and it's going to be very difficult to get agreement on whether we have it or not. Even if we had effective ASI we wouldn't get universal agreement on whether it was "real intelligence" or sapient,² though we might have some consensus among researchers.

¹And that only by the chemistry of classical physics. I don't for a moment buy the arguments about non-deterministic or quantum effects being required for human cognition.

²Sapient, not sentient. Sentience is the wrong benchmark. It's a category error. Sentience is a prerequisite for human-like cognition but very far from sufficient for it, and quite possibly not a requirement at all for cognition in general.

There's evidence of pretty extensive agriculture and irrigation systems, but for whatever reason, the water dried up.

The pre-Columbian irrigation cultures generally failed due to salinification of the irrigated ground, a problem for nearly all irrigation-dependent agriculture. (Egypt is one of the rare exceptions, because the flooding of the Nile deposits fresh silt to counter the increase in halogens precipitating out of the irrigation water.) Salts in the soil decrease the osmotic pressure, and deflocculate colloidal soils, making it harder for plant root systems to grow.

While there were certainly climactic cycles in precipitation, it's salinification that kills irrigation. That's been true since farmers in the Fertile Crescent had to gradually shift from wheat to barley (a much more salt-tolerant grain) thousands of years ago.

Re: The catch...

What's the plan for Manhattan after sea level rise, for example?

Sell the upper-floor apartments as ocean-front property.

Re: American Midwest

Yes. OP's comment is inaccurate, since Ohio and Michigan, at least, are typically included in "the Midwest", unless the speaker is trying to distinguish "the Rust Belt" from the Midwest. Whether you include Kentucky and Tennessee is more contentious. But of course there's no real standard definition of the term.

(The US Census Bureau changed the name of Region 2 from "North Central Region" to "Midwestern United States" in ... god, was it really way back in 1984? Anyway, arguably that's the "standard" version of "the Midwest", though it's not exactly the same term. Region 2 includes Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas, and those are really Great Plains for most people, so bah, forget that.)

It was "the west" for the earliest part of US history; Ohio and Michigan were often referred to as "the Old Northwest" in the 19th century, and that's why you have, say, Eaton Rapids, Michigan, at one time being famous as "the Saratoga of the West". (These days, of course, few places aside from Saratoga Springs consider themselves the Saratoga of anything. Hot springs no longer enjoy that level of respect in the US.)

It was "mid" in the sense that it wasn't either coast, nor part of the Plains or the Great American Desert or the Stuff We Stole From Mexico.

Re: Argh!

It's almost like commenting is flawed and not fit for purpose.

Re: contacting Tesla

They're having a few problems with Full Auto-Responding.

Re: "Tesla has reportedly fired employees [..] just a day after workers announced plans to unionize"

Just post a message on Truth Social that the strikers are holding drag shows, and you'll get your jackbooted thugs for free.

Re: This is called technical debt

Your two posts are the only two instances I have ever seen of someone using this peculiar meaning of "technical debt". If you're going to invent problems, perhaps you'd like to coin new terms for them, rather than using exiting ones inappropriately?

Re: Why Does it Need an App

Tesla's don't! Pull up, plugin, done. No App, no credit card reader with security and failure issues, no smart phone required. It just works. Tesla vehicles comunicate with the charger and automatically handle accounting and charge characteristics, you don't have to do anything.

Aww, it's so cute to see the kids enjoying being surveiled. Who needs privacy, or indeed any control over any of your data, when you have convenience?

Re: Of course chargers must be standard

More so than some data-harvesting smartphone app created by bottom-of-the-barrel developers whose idea of security is TLS with certificate verification turned off.

Credit cards are a hell of a lot more robust than anything that uses a smartphone, too. Smartphones are fragile.

Paying with an app is terrible for the consumer. There are few advantages and glaring disadvantages.

Re: wait! what??!?

To be honest, these days, if you'll be traveling to or from a number of countries – definitely including the US – it's not a real good idea to bring your phone at all. Take a cheap phone with your SIM if you must have your current number and plan; otherwise a burner SIM.

Smartphones are valuable, fragile, easy to steal, and often of interest to authorities. It's bad enough carrying them around your usual stomping grounds.

Re: Fake fake crypto investor scam?

Rug pull. They happen all the time; check out Molly White's web3isgoinggreat.com.

Re: someone they REALLY know and trust guiding them

Obviously the moral of the story is to avoid meetings in hotels in Barcelona.

I mean, it's Barcelona. Get out and see the sights. You could be in a hotel anywhere.

But getting back to OP's point: Right. Who the hell would think "here's some rando wants to give us $2M, no need for due diligence"? Even in a startup I'd have the company lawyer and some financial advisor with fiduciary responsibility and experience in the VC realm looking at the proposal very closely. I spent some years working for a startup, and we always needed cash, but you can be sure no investments happened without that kind of review.

Re: Some good points raised in the article...

'everybody' on this planet wants to avoid taxes

I don't. Taxes are the price¹ for living in civilization. I prefer that to the alternative and am content to pay my share.

Frankly, I get a little annoyed at hearing that I hate taxes and would avoid paying them if I could (or variations thereof; a friend once declared that "everyone cheats on their taxes", a rather obnoxious assumption that I let pass at the time). Well, I could get out of a good bit of it if I indeed wanted to. I don't.

Honestly, these days I'd be highly suspicious of an investor who wanted me to fly to another country to close the deal. No thanks, pal. Travel is fine; travel for work is fine. But a meeting like that can certainly take place online and there's no way in hell I'd trust some stranger who insisted on a face-to-face for this sort of thing. It's clearly a sunk-costs pressure tactic – much easier to say "no" if you haven't spent hours and dollars getting there.

¹Or arguably not even that; they can be seen as just an inefficiency in the distribution of purchasing-power tokens to members of the polis.

Re: A fool and his money, indeed...

Agreed. Studies have shown that security-practices training does have a useful effect on rates of falling victim to general attacks such as broadcast phishing, but the real benefit from adopting a security mindset is to get in the habit of applying defenses in depth and using tools as well as personal judgement. Reducing the attack surface, running things with reduced privileges, employing a good back up strategy, and so on. Obviously it's still important to try to be careful, but belts-and-braces should be in place to back you up.

They're completely wrong about this, though. Studies have shown that using electronic communications a lot increases the risk of being phished, and IT competence and general knowledge does not decrease it, for example. Employees in the IT Services sector are significantly more likely than the median to click through on phishing emails.

There are various theories about the mechanism, but many people think it's simply a matter of comfort with technology leading to less conscious supervision of actions. In this case, the victims are tech early adopters, which makes them even more inclined to trust technology and thus even more vulnerable.

And, of course, thinking that you have better defenses for precisely the reason that you have worse ones compounds the problem.

It's the same reason why financial officers fall for financial scams.

The Middle Ages called – they'd like their theory of soul back.

I am not a fan of Stable Diffusion et alia, and I greatly sympathize with the artists whose styles are being copied.

However, all the handwaving claims about human creativity being somehow qualitatively different from what SD is doing are very much in need of supporting evidence. There's a whole bunch of untheorized, mystifying dualism in these discussions hidden under a thin veneer of (often misapplied) technical terminology.

I'm not aware of any empirical evidence suggesting that identifying patterns in random data (such as seeing constellations) is anything other than the brain applying already-learned patterns to it. Go ahead, dualists – cite a methodologically-sound study that shows I'm wrong.

Minds are just the effects of machines. They aren't a separate category.

Re: Quality of life?

I like walking, but it doesn't generally get the heart rate up into the "aerobic exercise" zone for a sustained period (maybe if I'm briskly hiking up a pretty steep mountain trail). And some aerobic exercise every week helps keep the blood pressure down, which I prefer to medicating for it, if possible. I've shifted from running to cycling for that, though, because it too is easier on the joints, plus it's productive – I can run errands cycling, but that's not feasible when running for geographical (and sweatiness) reasons.

Honestly most of my physical exercise, on a time-spent basis, comes from chores around the household and working on the buildings and grounds. Firewood doesn't buck and split itself. That's time I don't mind spending.

Re: Quality of life?

Statistically it's looking good! None of the subjects in the experiment (N=1) have died yet.

Re: "quickly distill information"

Depends on your definition of "impressive", I suppose. I don't find it surprising that a transformer LLM with that many parameters would 1) be trained on jive samples, and 2) locate the appropriate part of the representation space in response to a prompt.

Your particular example could be handled with the ML techniques of the '80s – a bunch of output filters using PCFGs, a decision tree to select the filter, a HMM for base "parody" text generation. ("Parody" was a term of art in natural language processing circles of the era, referring to Shannon's suggestion of using a PRNG as input and running a language model backward to try to produce plausible prose or speech.) True, that becomes infeasible at scale – each filter has to be implemented manually, or at least learned from human-labeled samples (supervised) – while a big transformer with a big training corpus can learn to do it unsupervised, or with only a final supervised tuning step. But for each specific instance we've been there, done that, read the machine-generated description of the t-shirt.

Transformer architecture and LLMs are novel steps in the evolution of natural language processing. But they present as far more radical than they actually are.