Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

The general problem with AI when using neural networks is that we humans really don't understand much what's going on in there, and how it determines its results. An AI is basically an answer to a given problem where we do fail to create an algorithm, so instead we do use this approach. And aside it's nice name such a thing is really, really dumb because it can only do one thing well, and has no awareness about what it is doing. It's at best the intelligence level of less an insect, deciding stuff on an instinct, nothing more. Aside that neural networks are a simplified theory on how real brains do work, so much stuff has been cut out as well you can find in biological brains.

Such an AI is for humans always a black box, we are literally still in the beginning of understanding how an AI decides stuff at all. It's good if it works the way we want it to, but if not, then "debugging" it becomes a nightmare.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I think it's a dangerous name. People have expectations from AI, after a lifetime of robots and machine minds and Asmov and Clarke and Multivac and HAL-9000 and Data and C3PO and people think of AI as an actual human-like entity with agency and everything.

These are artificial stupids.

 

[Free]

The real problem with AI these days is that the term has been made off with by programming and marketing scoundrels who mainly want to increase their pay scale. That's how we end up with articles like Eight Easy Steps To Get Started Learning Artificial Intelligence.

The original conception of AI is still pure science fiction, and will be for some time to come.

I recall reading about neural networks as a young teen, written about in books from the seventies (my library was behind the times...). Even with the heightened enthusiasm for the advancements they believed cognitive and computing sciences combined would bring about (in the past 50 years, not much), they mostly did their best to keep a lid on the idea neural nets were a quick gateway to AI. They were big on the idea of highly distributed, cooperative computative systems providing "intelligent" interactions, but usually avoided calling it the be all to an eventual computerized brain.

I guess the minority who didn't play it safe description-wise won out.

 

[bubblesort]

The real problem with AI these days is that the term has been made off with by programming and marketing scoundrels who mainly want to increase their pay scale. That's how we end up with articles like Eight Easy Steps To Get Started Learning Artificial Intelligence.

The original conception of AI is still pure science fiction, and will be for some time to come.

I recall reading about neural networks as a young teen, written about in books from the seventies (my library was behind the times...). Even with the heightened enthusiasm for the advancements they believed cognitive and computing sciences combined would bring about (in the past 50 years, not much), they mostly did their best to keep a lid on the idea neural nets were a quick gateway to AI. They were big on the idea of highly distributed, cooperative computative systems providing "intelligent" interactions, but usually avoided calling it the be all to an eventual computerized brain.

I guess the minority who didn't play it safe description-wise won out.

Oh yeah, the technology boot camp industry is full of that kind of stuff. It's obnoxious.

What I hate is when people use machine learning or AI to hand waive away sloppy reasoning. Like this post from the IMF back in December. It seriously proposes using browser history to determine credit ratings. How do they translate browser history into credit ratings? Magic! They use the magic words "machine learning", and "AI", and the machine just spits out reliable credit ratings for them! Maybe they will write those two words into an 'abracadbra' macro or something, LOL. Just like that, no more red lining!

Even if they did know how to do it, I think all of us here are full of ideas on how to manipulate a system like that. I can also imagine some teenager getting in trouble for destroying the family credit rating by browsing porn without tor. "Sorry, kid, I know you got into Stanford, but you're going to community college, because you didn't use proper opsec."

 

[Essence Lumin]

I can also imagine some teenager getting in trouble for destroying the family credit rating by browsing porn without tor. "Sorry, kid, I know you got into Stanford, but you're going to community college, because you didn't use proper opsec."

Or they could be into librarian glasses porn actors and get into Harvard.

 

[Free]

Holy crap.

GM recalls every Chevy Bolt ever made, blames LG for faulty batteries

Two simultaneously occurring defects will cost $1.8 billion to fix.

arstechnica.com

 

[Fionalein]

Even if they did know how to do it, I think all of us here are full of ideas on how to manipulate a system like that. I can also imagine some teenager getting in trouble for destroying the family credit rating by browsing porn without tor. "Sorry, kid, I know you got into Stanford, but you're going to community college, because you didn't use proper opsec."

Nah, porn won't hurt your credit rating - an absence of browser history however might, because that might be considered "odd". However it would open a few weird new jobs: criminals and intelligence agencies will try to fake porn surfing histories.... "Wank for the Motherland" an incel's wet dream of a job LOL.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Nah, porn won't hurt your credit rating

Virtualverse.one on the other hand - bunch of weirdos.

 

[Free]

What the hell is going on at Google these days? Yesterday, I came across this:

Google Pay team reportedly in major upheaval after botched app revamp

Dozens of employees and executives have left" the struggling payments division.

arstechnica.com

Then this morning:

Google dismantles Health unit in favor of tried-and-tested ‘throw everything at the wall’ strategy

Google Health isn’t feeling so good

www.theverge.com

 

[Noodles]

I swear auto-correct is randomly replacing words and is out to get me sometimes.

 

[Essence Lumin]

What the hell is going on at Google these days? Yesterday, I came across this:

Google Pay team reportedly in major upheaval after botched app revamp

Dozens of employees and executives have left" the struggling payments division.

arstechnica.com

I used to use Google Pay regularly to do money transfer between friends. Then they fucked it up and I uninstalled it. For anyone that needs to transfer money free of charge to or from a friend, there is Paypal of course if you and they are set up there. Surprisingly, Facebook is a best option and maybe the only option that is free and only needs to know about debit card numbers, not checking account numbers.

 

[Noodles]

On all of the failed big Tech Health initiatives.

Honestly, the issue is, and always will be trust. Google datamines everything, no one is going to trust that. Personally, the only group that should have any business making a unified health vault/experience should be the government, but enough people distrust that that even it would fail.

That said, god everyone would benefit from one standard source for medical records. Hospitals are so fucking jankey across the board with being able to share data. I have had experiences where one place could only take a CD and the other could only send a fax. Crap like that. Or one that wanted a print out of this gigantic PDF from another doc, so they could scan it to PDF.

 

[Noodles]

On low adoption from Google Pay.

A lot is likely ease of use. I can pull out my phone, maybe it has NFC, maybe it doesn't, maybe the retailer takes Google Pay, open an app, probably use a finger print in, or a PIN, maybe some verification nonsense. All great and secure.

Or I can stick my debit card in the machine and half the time not have to enter a PIN.

It's not Google Pay exactly, but I set up Fitbit pay a few months ago when I got a nicer Fitbit and the number of steps on my silly wrist watch it takes is too much.

 

[Essence Lumin]

On low adoption from Google Pay.

For sending money they required both people to have the app and you can no longer do it from a pc web page. They also added a 1.5% fee for debit cards which were free before. The heck with that.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I think it's a dangerous name. People have expectations from AI, after a lifetime of robots and machine minds and Asmov and Clarke and Multivac and HAL-9000 and Data and C3PO and people think of AI as an actual human-like entity with agency and everything.

These are artificial stupids.

The way I've always liked to describe them is the end result of a brute force search for all possible statistical correlations. A lot of people think they are just magical Oracles. I always stress that they are limited by hard mathematical limits to statistical relevance that mathematicians knew about even in Gauss's day.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The way I've always liked to describe them is the end result of a brute force search for all possible statistical correlations. A lot of people think they are just magical Oracles. I always stress that they are limited by hard mathematical limits to statistical relevance that mathematicians knew about even in Gauss's day.

Exactly. Like if you created a million variants of a Markov Chain bot and cherry-picked the best tables.

 

[Soen Eber]

For sending money they required both people to have the app and you can no longer do it from a pc web page. They also added a 1.5% fee for debit cards which were free before. The heck with that.

Actually that 1.5% fee is the merchant fee credit card companies charge for using their service. A lot of stores "eat the cost". No one is making money passing on that extra cost.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Actually that 1.5% fee is the merchant fee credit card companies charge for using their service. A lot of stores "eat the cost". No one is making money passing on that extra cost.

For whatever reason, Facebook doesn't pass on that charge on friend to friend money transfers. Until a few months ago google didn't either.

 

[bubblesort]

What the hell is going on at Google these days? Yesterday, I came across this:

Google Pay team reportedly in major upheaval after botched app revamp

Dozens of employees and executives have left" the struggling payments division.

arstechnica.com

Then this morning:

Google dismantles Health unit in favor of tried-and-tested ‘throw everything at the wall’ strategy

Google Health isn’t feeling so good

www.theverge.com

Yeah, the lockdown hasn't been kind to Google. Most stories coming out of Google this year have been this or that big wig resigning due to mismanagement, or sexism, or racism, or various other ethical issues, and taking half their teams with them. I mean, I'm definitely no insider, so I don't have any insight into why this is happening, but from an outside perspective, it looks like their management is garbage.

They still have a solid reputation, though. I hang out in some web dev study channels on discord, and those guys are super focused on learning the skills and getting a good dev job at a FAANG company some day. You know the type... full of buzzwords and laggy frameworks. Personally, I'm more driven to focus on being creative, so you know, I don't follow FAANG company reputations like they do. Most of them still think Google is the best FAANG employer. Google and Netflix are probably the two companies with the best reputation among the people I talk to. I don't know how long google's reputation can last if they keep going in this direction, though.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

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