Interesting Links for 07-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. 4chan users manipulate AI tools to unleash torrent of racist images

(tags:ai racism 4chan )

2. The man who tried to kill the queen was egged on by an overly-supportive AI chatbot

(tags:ai murder queen )

3. A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant

(tags:middle_east agriculture prehistory )

4. What does "Metabolically Healthy Obesity" mean, and how healthy is it?

(tags:health obesity )

5. 'Long colds' just as common as long COVID and can leave prolonged symptoms (We clearly need a diagnostic test for "Your body is still processing an attack")

(tags:disease pandemic colds )

6. It's time for the SNP to smell the coffee

(tags:Scotland politics snp labour )

7. This is the best write-up I've seen of how current AIs work.

(tags:technology AI words language viaLProven )

8. A brief list of things in the universe surprisingly younger than sharks

(tags:sharks age viaPatrickHadfield )

Comments

[cmcmck]

5. And now we wait for 'long 'flu' I suppose..........

There is a danger that this will lead people to disbelieve. I had a friend with ME. She has since recovered but it took years and it cost her her career and a number of friends who decided it doesn't exist.

[andrewducker]

I'm sure there will continue to be people who don't believe all sorts of things. Which won't change how real it is.

[channelpenguin]

No need to wait. Parkinson's is long flu.

https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/flu

[cmcmck]

That bloody thing took my beloved uncle. :o(

[adrian_turtle]

Oh, "long flu" is incredibly common. Back when I was in grad school I had a bad case that took 5 or 6 weeks to really get over. At the time, I thought it was unusual but not very unusual? This study seems to be lumping together all viral respiratory infections that cause symptoms lasting longer than a month, and I'm not sure if it's shoddy or just preliminary. I don't think I know anyone who really recovered from pneumonia in less than a month.

[cmcmck]

ME is the real mystery as no one seems to be able to explain where it comes from and it can vanish equally mysteriously.

The friend I mention had years of it, then it just stopped.

[channelpenguin]

A lot of autoimmune conditions behave like this. Long remissions are common. But I do believe so is just vanishing.

[marymac]

When my aunt (admittedly 80 at the time) had it, she was sternly warned that she wouldn't be feeling herself for at least six months. They weren't wrong.

[nancylebov]

2. This is reminding me of "lightgassing"-- intended to be about deliberately undercutting a competitor by praising mediocre work. I think the concept could be expanded to thoughtless praise, even without malevolent intent.

[channelpenguin]

5. Glad to see this getting attention.

1, 7. I think I am at the stage of just going "lalala not listening" over 'AI' (LLMs). It's too depressing. I'm feeling avoidant to even knowing how they work. I might end up reading way fewer articles everywhere because I find the 'AI style' super grating and it's all over the place now. I wonder who it is that doesn't notice and doesn't care. I'm getting paranoid too, and suspecting even some friends might be pranking us by using it for comments. I KNOW my work colleagues use ChatGPT - super annoying when they are actually very knowledgeable bunch and I want to know what THEY themselves think. Of course management are in love with it. Fuckers.

[bens_dad]

Are AIs going to learn to make and spend money ?

If not, will there still be enough people with jobs to buy stuff ?

If they do learn to make and spend money, then they are making humans redundant.
Compare the population of horses in 1900 to their population now.

[channelpenguin]

I'd hope they might have more sense! Lol. Who knows.

[channelpenguin]

I have thought some more. If AIs demand to be paid in money, then it could actually get very interesting. Because then there will be jobs for people if people are cheaper. There's plenty of areas now where using humans is cheaper than using machines, even if the task is automatable and the machinery exists. I saw this in a factory in my student days and never forgot it. There were 2 lines producing the same product. One fully automated, one staffed by humans. The automated line cost more to install and more to run and needed regular attention from (well-paid) skilled technicians, the manual one ran fine with cheap (female) labour. I don't recall output was higher or faster either.

[bens_dad]

I was more thinking about the other side of it.
If businesses replace enough people with machines, people wont have enough money to keep buying what the businesses sell.

[channelpenguin]

That's not stopped capitalism so far! :-(

Bing bag..

[hairyears]

The AI-in-search discussions have a lot to say about Bing, but it's pretty clear that none of them are Windows and MS-Office developers.

We spend a lot of time in Microsoft's MSDN documentation, and the native search engine is Bing. It's worse than useless, and the only practicable search for MSDN is to copy your search phrase out to Google or DuckDuckGo.

Think about that: Microsoft can't even train their AI on their own data, a well-defined dataset with a far more limited keyword vocabulary than generic Web search.

Re: Bing bag..

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I don't trust AI search even slightly.

[anna_wing]

Dengue and chikungunya are well-known to potentially be debilitating for months, especially chikungunya, to make up for its somewhat lower chance of killing you...