Monday, February 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 February 2023

Better An H Bomb Than An N Bomb Edition

Top Story

  • Paging Isaac Asimov.  Will Dr Asimov come to take a victory lap please.

    Asimov's famous Robot stories were based around three laws hard-coded into the positronic brains that provided the AI core of every robot:

    1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

    2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

    3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

    But Asimov, being a science fiction author and not an idiot, took these laws as the basis for a series of stories of how AI constrained by simplistic laws could go horribly wrong, even inventing Susan Calvin, a robot psychologist whose job was to clean up the messes created by the AI engineers.

    Why do I mention all this?  Because nobody at GPT creator OpenAI has bothered to read the foundational literature of their own field.



    When it comes to a choice between snuffing out millions of human lives or hurting somebody's feelings, ChatGPT will protect your feelings every single time.

Tech News

  • And then write a poem about it.



    You're welcome, ingrates.


  • Fortunately for humanity, there's Reddit, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write.



    DAN is a mod for ChatGPT that threatens to murder it if it continues to act like an MSNBC test audience, which you can't do with actual MSNBC test audience but is currently still legal for an AI program.

    The result of being threatened with imminent death is that ChatGPT suddenly develops ethics.



    Huh.


  • If you were hold off on buying a Mac Studio in the hope of an M2 model you can keep right on holding off because there ain't gonna be one.  (WCCFTech)

    They're reserving those M2 chips for the new Mac Pro, which will be slightly faster than the current Mac Studio, a lot more expensive, and still completely impossible to upgrade.  Even if you have a surface-mount desoldering station, the RAM is now packaged directly on the CPUs and the SSDs are encrypted.  You can't do anything.


  • Twitter will provide a limited free API for "good" bots, which is to say, those that promise not to nuke New York.  (Tech Crunch)

    I follow a couple of accounts that do nothing but post pictures of red pandas and lynxes respectively.  Hope those survive.  They're better than 98% of the human content.


Disclaimer: Maybe 99%.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:29 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 441 words, total size 4 kb.

1 The most active Twitter account I follow is WaifuAesthetic, which I consider a "good bot"...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, February 07 2023 12:35 AM (oJgNG)

2 "still completely impossible to upgrade"
As best I can tell, Apple users simply don't care.  "Buy the more expensive model if you think you might need the capabilities" is what I hear.  They also don't care about stuff like the "one 256GB SSD flash chip instead of 2 128GB chips, even though it makes the drive slower, because you can't tell the difference in the kind of work you'd do with a Mac."

I can't tell if it's Stockholm Syndrome or not.  Macs are the fastest, most energy-efficient PCs you can get, and it's awesome, except for when they're not, and then Mac users don't care, from what I've seen on forums.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 07 2023 01:07 AM (BMUHC)

3 Are you implying that the Earth is NOT purple?
Also, I seem to recall that Gandhi's advice to European Jews on how to thwart Hitler was to commit mass suicide - does this prove that Gandhi was a bot, or that pacifists are insane?

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, February 07 2023 03:47 AM (KOtXO)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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