Posts by kameko

Gentoo and NetBSD ban 'AI' code, but Debian doesn't – yet

Re: And now the small matter of detecting AI-generated code

As Gentoo themselves explain, it's not so much enforcing a rule as it is about making a statement to the community.

Undoubtedly something might slip past, but that isn't the point. The point is more of a matter of respect. The team are trusting a contributor to contribute good, well-meaning code, and if they are caught not doing that, their merge request will not be accepted. It's less about "AI is banned" and more about "we're including bad AI code along with all the backdoors and painfully obvious bugs we were already rejecting". They're asking developers to be earnest about their contributions. They also explicitly state that they don't believe AI will be banned from the project forever, just that right now, LLMs are simply too notoriously bad to be trusted.

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

The problem is Microsoft's marketing department.

The marketing department is the gestapo of the entire company. They can whatever, whenever, to whoever. This was made blatantly apparent to C# users when the .NET Core team created hot reloading, and the marketing department demanded them to not add it into .NET Core but to restrict it to Visual Studio. The community outcry was so great that it made them backtrack and let the nice folk in the .NET Core team to release the latest toolchain with the hot reload, but MS showed their hand. Their marketing department can sabotage any internal project and make it actively antagonistic to their users if it will make their other products look more marketable. It's a long-standing, rampant problem, and the MS marketing team needs to be gutted by the roots if we have any hope of not having this megalomaniac corporation burn the world down with it's own ever-growing quotas.

It really is a shame, Microsoft's developers are some of the nicest, smartest people you'd ever meet. Then they get juiced by Microsoft's internal vampire gang.

I'm responding to myself here since I don't have a single specific comment in response to mine to respond to, but I would just like to say, I hate every single person who responded to my comment and I'm reconsidering even posting another comment ever again. I understand it was my fault to post a comment innocent enough to allow you all to project your political opinions on to it, but I really hope you people seek mental health support.

As I always like to say, "nothing gets done until someone dies"

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

One in China drove off with the passenger inside and they couldn't cause it to break. There's probably a few more cases but I really don't remember this stuff.

Not to mention how Musk censors anything anti-Tesla on Twitter (please don't call that a conspiracy, this is Musk we're talking about), so that might be why you "never heard of it".

And I'm honestly confused about your tangent on human drivers. I never said autopilot was a bad thing. I specifically don't trust Teslas because they have almost no quality control and Musk deliberately doesn't add critical sensors like LIDAR to them and forces the developers to rely solely on cameras, which would very easily make for an AI that has no idea what it's doing. There's many reasons why Teslas are dangerous. It has nothing to do with disliking Musk or distrusting autopilots, the cars themselves are actually made in a very dangerous way and have exhibited scary behavior.

I'm always terrified whenever I see a Tesla, those things have gone rogue and ran people over. If I'm walking down the street and see a Tesla coming my way, I'm always keeping an eye on it to get out of the way if it decides it wants to swerve into me.

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

Very clever of you! However, you seem to have been too distracted from writing your witty comment to properly read my message, which said that a robot explicitly uses a computer/microcontroller to make decisions in order to move, not analogue or physical properties.

Then again, people call a toothbrush head on a motor a "robot" (at least the HexBugs brand does), so it is a very vague definition.

Still, you flat-out didn't read my comment before responding to it.

Re: Cars don't have legs...

The funny thing is, before cars were mainstream, there was a man who invented a "stream-driven man" that carried a coach (this is a real invention. I'm not sure if it was ever successfully implemented, but it's not sci-fi, it was a genuine proposal/prototype). The reason? Because he thought a "horseless carriage" would frighten horses, so he assumed a steam-driven robot in the shape of a man that carried a carriage wouldn't frighten the horses pulling traditional carriages.

The point here is, while the idea of a car with legs is an interesting idea, it definitely isn't new, in fact, it predates cars. And yet, here we are, with autonomous vehicles still using tires.

If I can go off on another tangent, this also reminds me of when I looked up "why are there no animals with wheels". The best answer I found was that, wheels are designed for roads, and roads must be maintained. They are a social contract between a species, not something inherent in nature or accidentally formed from the consequence of any other animal. They're deliberately made for the sake of one's own species. It's something that can't be compared in the wild, which is why nothing in nature has wheels. It's kind of why we don't "need" a car with legs, because our society cares enough for itself to make it easier for our transportation to more effortlessly convey itself. Our machines don't need that extra gear to survive, we take care of them.

This is a very "um acksually" fueled comment.

The point of my comparison was that people thought robots would be visible and human-like, when in reality most of our appliances and home automation systems are invisible. You don't need the human robot when everything simply moves by itself.

That also comes to another funny point about sci-fi. Robots are expensive to make, so you assume you would only have one expensive robot that used many cheap appliances. They fail to take into account how society, economics, trade and industry would evolve over time, and how, if you have an intelligent robot, your technology is probably so advanced that they're relatively cheap to make and thus cheap to embed robotics into everything to have cheap, simple, single-purpose machines, instead of a single complex all-purpose machine.

It's funny, this is exactly what happened with computers. People thought computers would get bigger and bigger. The "personal computer" envisioned in the 60s? A single mainframe in the center of your house, controlling everything. And what happened? Computers got smaller and cheaper, and now they're in everything, tons of simple, cheap, single-purpose computers, everywhere. The same is and will continue to happen to robotics and AI.

A Keurig is a machine that uses a microcontroller to operate a motor. Maybe your definition of what a robot is doesn't include that, but for most people, their standard definition of a robot does include that. The motor is the key part, a robot is a machine using a computer to make decisions in order to operate a physically moving apparatus (technically cars are robots but I've never seen anyone call one that). Are Keurigs overly-engineered? Yeah, I'd say so. But they are robots, and definitely not as simple as a kettle with a timer, even if that timer is digital.

For reference, your theory has a proper school of thought, called "embodied cognition" (you can look it up on Wikipedia, it's an interesting article). Humans have been pondering this problem for millennia, most notably it's a staple feature of Buddhism (a bit buried in all the theatrics, but it's there)

And while I consider embodied cognition common sense, it is a shame that people seem to never consider it and just like to carry on assuming that the body and mind are two entirely separate things and the mind is fully capable of existing completely by itself with no sensory organs attached to it. Never mind how much of a radical, painful change the brain goes through if you so much as chop someone's limb off (phantom pain syndrome is due to the brain reclaiming neurons that were used to communicate with the lost limb to give them to neighboring regions, which is where the pain comes from, ghost signals from neighboring brain regions).

I mean, geeze, even flinching from imagery should be a good sign that a simple picture can cause your entire body to convulse. People are amazing at maintaining ignorance at some things.

What a reasonable thing to say. Too bad reasonable isn't what attracts investors.

He gives some funny examples on what actual useful machinery is, but I think my favorite example is the vacuum cleaner.

I mean, good lord, how many science fiction stories from the 50s to the 90s imagined we would have hulking mannequins marching around the house pushing around a regular old vacuum cleaner? And when we got actual robotic vacuum cleaners, what did they end up looking like? A little disc on the floor.

You know, I'm not even sure if I can call AI good at being creative, or if it's just that humans are absolutely horrible at being creative. Any time we ever try to think of something new or alien, we just think of ourselves.

This is why I absolutely adore HAL 9000's design. Did you know Arthur Clarke originally was just going to make HAL a boring old android? But no, he did something absolutely revolutionary for the time. Instead of making HAL a big, beautiful, noisy avatar to glorify the idea of an intelligent machine, he just... put him in the wall, like a thermostat. And that's insanely practical, it very much is like what smart home appliances are like today. That's what actually happens to technology and robots, they don't get bigger and better, they get smaller and more invisible. I don't want an oversized barbie doll running around my house pushing around a noisy vacuum, I want a little disc on the floor I barely notice. Did you know a Keurig is technically a robot? People don't even think of it like that, it's just that invisible and out of the way. It's kind of like how people commonly used to think computers would only get bigger, not smaller (that's why HAL's computer chamber is so big, which is one of the incorrect speculations 2001 makes). People absolutely suck at guessing what will be new, if not even think the opposite of what will really happen.

When 'Saving The Internet' means 'Saving Crony Capitalism'

Wow, it's almost like corporations spend money to provide services that customers want! Who could have thought it, what a novel concept, that corporations see value in using their money to make people happy and provide a more stable and convenient platform for providing other services. I just can't believe it. It's never dawned on me before. Thanks El Reg, I have a whole new view on life. As a suggestion for your next article, I think you should expose how people eat food when they're hungry to provide nutrients to their body. Nobody's ever really called that out before.