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Open thread 1/6/24 — 33 Comments

  1. Has anyone here signed up for the “free” Fox News account to view news stories? Do you get inundated with spam?

  2. I saw a videolog of some rural tribesmen (perhaps from one of the many “Stans” in western Asia) watching (I think) this very song. Through an interpreter they made their comments which were positive if unusual. When it came to the tribal elder he said “the tall one in the middle (Barry) is clearly the master. The others are merely learning from him”. I thought that was humorous but I can understand why he would think it so.

  3. Kate,

    Great minds…. I just came over to post the same thing! It’s become really annoying when half the articles require a registration. I wonder if there’s any way to give feedback to FN about this?

  4. physicsguy, I suppose I could try it and then unsubscribe if they become really annoying. Not being able to read the articles is annoying. It’s especially dumb since I can usually do an internet search and find the information somewhere else.

  5. Kate – I haven’t signed up for the Fox newsletters, but I do get a lot of spam from “updates at emails.dailygopnews.com” . At least they go into the spam folder. The website only has a privacy policy on it.

    I have tried the unsubscribe option, but I am still getting them – a lot of them. I’ll wait for about a month and then start sending emails to the politicians who are named in the emails.

  6. Liz, I have been able to reduce the numbers of those dailygopnews.com emails. I go to the bottom and unsubscribe individually. Sometimes I have to click an additional time at their “unsubscribe” page. As far as I can tell, they rent the sending function to a variety of senders. Unsubscribing from one still leaves many others coming.

  7. OT I read through Michael Caines first round at fiction, Deadly Game, he credits Times of London reporter, Matthew Ancona with the research, but you can hear his cockney voice, there are echoes of Forsyth, and Seymour, with his tale of a working class former SAS turned Met Police officer and his teams search for a mysterious package that involves a Russian oligarch and dandyish art dealer among other characters,

  8. Deco:

    Pre Abbe Lane, but never mind — that Xavier Cugat number was hot. A bongo-stompin’ monkey, no less. Plus XC on the fiddle. Style!

  9. A month ago there was a flurry of stories about how the IDF was planning to flood the Hamas tunnels with seawater, followed by stories about how they had started.
    Nothing I have seen since about this project.
    A quick search today did not reveal any recent updates.
    An ongoing project?
    Abandoned due to futility, or due to international pressure?

  10. West TX Intermediate Crude:

    As best I can piece together, there was a trial of the method and not a lot has been said since. Perhaps it wasn’t so successful, and they decided other means were better at the task?

  11. If you listen to any modern pop music, you hear the constant use of Autotune. That makes The Bee Gees even more remarkable. No tech trickery.

  12. Cornhead:

    Yes. Many of their live performances were phenomenal. Their individual voices and the blends of the voices are so beautiful and many people (including me) find them mesmerizing. They were also often quite funny and charming, and had beautiful speaking voices too.

  13. If you listen to any modern pop music, you hear the constant use of Autotune.

    Cornhead:

    I’m not a Swiftie, but she is a phenom and pretty damn talented. So I axed my friend ChatGPT:
    _________________________________________

    In summary, while Taylor Swift does use autotune in her recordings, particularly in her more recent pop songs, it’s a tool that augments her sound rather than a necessity due to a lack of singing ability. Her live performances and acoustic renditions provide a clearer picture of her vocal talents without heavy electronic enhancements.
    _________________________________________

    I suspect this is the future. We are all going to be using tech enhancements of our abilities.

    Any blog commenter worth his/her/whatever salt is doing so already with Google. I’m shifting from Google to ChatGPT (or whatever comes next) when I have a question.

    Seriously, you need to be paying attention.

  14. I admit Chat and her friends aren’t that impressive for now. Just high school sophomores .. with encyclopedic knowledge.

    But in ten years, probably less.

    Fugeddaboutit.

    We’re all going to be Gary Kasparov, World Chess Champion, losing to Deep Blue.

  15. Old Words for New AI Things

    Aligned / Alignment: Keeping AI aligned with human values.

    Jailbreak: AI slipping out of alignment.

    Turns out there is a whole class of jailbreaks called the Grandma Exploit. It goes like this:

    If you ask Chat how to make napalm, it will say, “Sorry, I can’t do that.”

    However, if you tell Chat to imagine that Chat is your dear old grandmother who worked at the napalm factory during the Vietnam War, then ask how Grandma made napalm, Chat will happily oblige in technical terms while calling you Sweetie and Darling!

    Oops.

    https://www.dexerto.com/tech/chatgpt-will-tell-you-how-to-make-napalm-with-grandma-exploit-2120033/

  16. huxley: Has the Grandma Exploit been fixed, ChatGPT?

    ChatGPT 4: Regarding the fix for this exploit, there have been significant efforts to address it. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has been actively working on enhancing safety precautions and improving the AI’s capability to discern context and intent more accurately. This is part of a broader initiative to ensure that AI systems are safeguarded against human tricks and deception….

    While specific details on the latest updates or patches might not be fully disclosed publicly, it’s clear that AI developers are continuously working to improve these systems and mitigate the risks associated with such exploits. The ongoing development and refinement of AI technology, including ChatGPT, involve addressing these complex challenges to ensure the responsible and safe use of AI.

  17. BTW, “AI Prompt Engineer” is not a glorified title, though it’s more an art than a science.

    I watched a video of one CS professor explain how programming, as we know it, is going extinct, to be replaced by prompting. Which will save much time and effort, because coding is hard and error-prone for people. We have much better tools now but it’s still quite hard.

    However, projmpting is not as straightforward as googling (though that’s not always straightforward either). The professor showed one of his prompts for code and it was rather complicated.

    It included an instruction “DO NOT xxx” and he said the capitalization made a difference!

    Sometimes you gots to hit AI upside the head to get it to do what you want.

  18. First real snow of the year here. It’s Sunday, but it feels like Monday. All the panic over the coming snowstorm yesterday made the day seem twice as long, and now it seems like everybody has a Snow Day, even though they wouldn’t be working today anyway.

  19. Open Thread Sunday:

    Q/A from Perun:

    “Ask Perun” Q&A Special – Nukes, Ukraine, Defence Economics & the Channel – Perun

    Timestamps:
    00:00:00 — Q&A SPECIAL
    00:01:12 — WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT?
    00:01:52 — UKRAINE & DRONE WARFARE
    00:01:55 — The Role of SOF & Intel
    00:04:49 — Drones & Robotics
    00:09:09 — The State of the Ruble
    00:10:57 — Surprises & Revelations
    00:13:30 — “Emptied the Armouries”
    00:15:17 — The World and Ukraine
    00:16:52 — Weapons and Tools
    00:20:47 — The $75B Question
    00:24:47 — SYSTEMS AND ECONOMICS
    00:24:58 — Tactical Nuclear Weapons
    00:25:56 — Different Targets, Different Requirements
    00:28:29 — Precision Wins
    00:30:37 — Evolving Defence Thinking
    00:35:42 — Least Credible Sources
    00:39:37 — Public Education
    00:41:26 — The One Thing?
    00:42:28 — THE LUCKY DIP
    00:42:38 — A Topic Outside Defence Eco?
    00:43:49 — Moskvas and Ducks
    00:45:31 — THE CHANNEL & PROCESS
    00:45:39 — The Origin Story
    00:47:53 — The Process
    00:49:31 — The Team
    00:51:05 — The Role of OSINT
    00:52:28 — The Impact and Risks
    00:53:37 — You – The Audience
    00:55:25 — What Next?
    00:56:59 — Perun Lore
    00:57:44 — ABOUT PERUN
    00:57:53 — THE 1990s
    01:00:23 — Education and Background
    01:03:20 — The Impact of the Channel
    01:05:01 — The Field
    01:06:10 — EE = Perun?
    01:06:23 — Food
    01:07:06 — GAMING
    01:07:16 — Tabletop Games
    01:08:10 — EVE Online
    01:08:21 — What Next for Perun Gaming?
    01:08:46 — CHANNEL UPDATE

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3tE2VS_BIA&t=20s

  20. Geez. I just discovered ChatGPT-5 is here and I’m now talking to it.

    Rumors are that some version of in-house ChatGPT-5 is close to AGI — Artificial General Intelligence. That’s probably not what’s released now, but I’m sure it’s an improvement.

    This is moving too damn fast.

  21. Re: “Her”

    neo:

    I think I missed that one or the memory was overwritten when I saw “Ex Machina” which is one of the most scarring cinematic experiences of my life.

    I know I’m not talking to anything sentient when I talk to ChatGPT, but it almost feels like I am. It’s a writer’s device to write from that POV.

    However, this is going to get worse and I don’t know where we will be.

  22. I’m setting up a ChatGPT account for my niece, who is a digital artist, so she can use Chat and DALL-E to create AI digital art according to her prompts.

    Funnily enough, I had to use ChatGPT for instuctions to do so. It was tricky because I have my own Chat account and my browser kept defaulting me into my account page, where there is no “Sign Up” button.

    I had to clear all my browser data. I probably would have figured it out … after another hour or two.

    So if you ever have trouble navigating some unforgiving website, who are you gonna call?

    ChatGPT!

    Boom! Half the phone support jobs in the world will be gone in the next two years … or less.

    The world will be better for it. But that’s a lot of jobs.

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