Geek Stuff category archive

Compassionate? El Reg reports

Amid debate about whether AI will kill everyone as a result of continuous self-improvement, it appears that models will kill animals in a simulated environment rather than spend extra fuel avoiding them. Some models did so at strikingly high rates.

Researchers affiliated with Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML) and the University of Warwick in the UK set out to measure the extent to which AI models demonstrate compassion. They describe their work in a preprint paper titled “HarvestBench: Measuring Whether LLM Agents Will Pay to Avoid Killing Animals.”

Follow the link for more about their experiments.

At El Reg, Thomas Claburn looks at AI and posits that

. . . the real problem isn’t the models themselves, but the companies who carelessly unleash them on the world and don’t take any responsibility for what their products do.

Methinks he has a point. Follow the link for his reasoning.

Mageia v. 9 with the IceWM window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection. (And, no, I don’t know what city that is. I wish I did.)

A serial infringer? Axios reports that “(s)ome of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging ‘one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.'”

Details at the link.

Even as the Colorado shrinks, Big Tech drinks. From El Reg:

Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Your BFF? At the Psychology Today website, F. Diane Barth reminds us that “(t)here is no capacity in AI bots for conflict or self-awareness.”

Going rogue? Security maven Bruce Schneier argues that the genie may have escaped from the bottle.

Mind-numbing? At the Psychology Today website, Patrick L. Plaisance argues that “. . . the design and use of AI assistants are arguably destroying our digital opportunities to cultivate curiosity.”

There’s a reason some persons call them “pervert glasses.”

Just because you can do it with computers, doesn’t mean you should.

A thumb on the scales of justice? At Above the Law, Joe Patrice reports that a lawyer attempted to send a secret message to any AI agent that might read his plea. A snippet:

A court employee in Connecticut noticed an unusual stretch of white space in a filing. Upon closer inspection, the “nothing” turned out to be 3-point, white-on-white text. It would be invisible to any human casually reading reading the page, but perfectly legible to any software that happened to ingest the document.

Methinks “AI” does not stand for “artificial intelligence.”

It stands for “antisocial invidiousness.”

Stephen L. Carter is fed up with our surveillance society. Methinks he makes some good points. A snippet:

It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 19th century, when cameras were young, it was considered discourteous to take a person’s picture without permission. Now, once we’ve exited our homes, our images are being recorded constantly. In cities and suburbs and, increasingly, rural areas, cameras along the road are accepted as a fact of life.

I have a quibble, though. He blames government. I think might have more accurate pointed his accusatory finger at Big Tech.

They’re the pushers; government is the pushee.

Immoderate moderation.

. . . and meet a new kind of hijacker: One who tries to hijack your wifi and, with it, your data.