Spring
By Olha Darchuk

#nature #landscape #trees #painting #mastoart #mountains

@EPluribusPlus My question to you would be, why are we bringing in animals into the discussion? 🙂

The original question was whether what people call AI is actually intelligent. You seemed to think so. I don’t think so and mentioned that AI will just conjure information wholesale for you.

You countered with humans hallucinate too. (Though to be honest, these ML systems are not hallucinating — that’s just what some people have decided to call it — they are just generating information).

You also mentioned animals at this point. Now you mention “if we consider all animals to be intelligent that lowers the bar”. But my question is why do we need to bring animals into this at all?

Are current ML systems capable of reasoning? That probably would be what would qualify them to be called “intelligent” would be my guess. As far as I can tell, they are not capable of reasoning at this point. All they are capable of is looking at patterns and making decisions based on statistics.

This would probably be the same difference as a human who has learnt things by rote and is able to parrot back that information but cannot tell you the implications of that information beyond what they memorised. If they can’t draw inferences between two pieces of the information they’ve acquired and can only parrot it back at you, or worse, will invent stuff because they don’t know something, then that’s not intelligence 🙂

@EPluribusPlus And why would we want animals to be just like us? Also, do we know for a fact that they lack language, capacity to plan etc.? There are various counter-examples I can provide for each of those 🙂

Why does another species have to do things exactly the way we do or in a way we understand? Why are we so human-centric? 😛

A little bit more on the Edge browser and all the interesting activities it has built-in …

It has this little page of activities that you can try. One of them was to solve a tile puzzle — an image split into tiles and mixed up that you have to arrange corectly.

Once you complete the image, you get more information about the image and hotspots on the image you can click to get more information. If you click on a hotspot, you are taken to a Bing page with photos, relevant links, and a sidebar with additional links that you can explore.

As somebody who loves learning esoteric things, this just feels like the first time I discovered an encyclopaedia, but a lot more fun 🙂

#Edge #Browser #Gamification #Bing
An image of a tile/card which s…
A beautiful image of a bay with…
A Bing page with information ab…

@EPluribusPlus And that’s another thing I hate about how people approach machine learning systems — saying that they hallucinate. They do not hallucinate. They just give you fake information because they are just generators which put text together and are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is fake since they have no intelligence.

We really need to stop anthropomorphizing these systems 🙂 They are not people. Just systems which have been taught to recognise patterns but do not have the capability to reason about these patterns.

As for the animal kingdom, would you care to give some examples? I can’t comment on your point without knowing what you consider to be systemic failure in logic …

@EPluribusPlus Just getting the answers right doesn’t make something intelligent — you have to be able to critically evaluate facts and to be able to distinguish between things. These systems are not capable of that. Try coding with the help of a large language model for long enough and you’ll find that it gives you inventented answers.

If the system were truly ingelligent, it would know the difference between fact and fiction. So, while I respect your right to have your own opinion, I don’t believe it’s correct to say something is intelligent just because it can regurgitate facts, especially when it invents “facts” if it doesn’t have them.

I’ve been peripherally aware of the existence of the Edge browser, but I’ve not really used it till now. (Or, if I tried it originally, I just used it once and then uninstalled — that’s always possible since I try out a lot of stuff …)

I just installed the Edge browser (yes, it’s available on macOS) and was rather pleasantly surprised. It integrates a lot of tools I use all the time, has a better search interface, and has a bunch of game/activities which gives you that little endorphin rush while also helping you learn a lot more …

Showed it to my wife today and she seems to be really taken with it too. I think we’ll be playing around with this for a few more days at least!

And this kind of brings me to what I originally wanted to say. It’s rather interesting that Microsoft these days is going the “embrace all” route. Their stuff is not available just on Windows but is available on macOS too, while Apple generally sticks to their “we support (mostly) macOS” stance.

Reminds me a bit about the good (bad?) old days of Apple vs. Microsoft. Who will win this time around? (Not that I care about the winning or the losing of one over the other, but I do find these different strategies interesting …)

#Edge #Browser #Microsoft #Apple

"Defending against Adversarial Audio via Diffusion Model" — Using diffusion models to purify/remove adversarial audio which can cause abnormal behaviour in acoustic systems.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01507
Code: https://github.com/cychomatica/AudioPure

#AI #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning #Sound #Security #Audio #Cryptograpy

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
The architecture of the whole a…

"Word-As-Image for Semantic Typography. (arXiv:2303.01818v1 [cs.CV])" — Automatically visualizing words by modifying the typography to depict the meaning/representation of the word.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01818
Note: No code or demo available (yet) at the linked locations.

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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A few examples of our word-as-i…

"Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception. (arXiv:2303.02153v1 [cs.CV])" — Using the pre-trained autoencoder in a diffusion model for visual perception tasks such as segmentation or depth estimation.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02153
Code: https://github.com/wl-zhao/VPD

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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The main idea of the proposed V…

I did some more work on my JavaScript Fedi client over the weekend:

https://github.com/FahimF/FediJS

I’m not progressing as fast as I had done with other Masto/Fedi clients in the past in terms of adding features, and yet, it’s so much easier (at least so far) to add new features for the JavaScript client 🙂

Now, I’m by no means a JavaScript guru. Sure, I’ve been using JavaScript since the early days of the web, but only as needed. It has never been one of my main programming languages. So I find it interesting that I can do a lot more with a lot less code in this particular instance.

I added the ability to boost, favourite, and bookmark posts in the timeline with relatively little effort.

I’m thinking of adding hashtag and lists support next weekend possibly. I guess we’ll see how it goes …

#FediClient #MastodonClient #JavaScript #Programming

@joekjr Absolutely 🙂 What worries/annoys me is the fact that the more we use the term AI for these systems (however loosely it’s meant) people are going to believe that that is what it is and come to rely on totally unreliably misinformation generators.

We’re seeing this already where people think LLMs are going to replace search engines because they are attributing intelligence to these systems …

I often come back to the movie “Idiocracy” these days because it often feels as if we are there already 😛

#GalaxyQuest forever.

God dang it's so good.

Non fascists outnumber the fascists 5-1 so let’s act like it. Stop being cowed into believing the fascist Propaganda that is trying to project inevitability and despair. We can and must push these genocidal lies back.

I’ve been guilty of throwing the words “AI” around myself, but the more I hear the term nowadays, the more annoyed I get because there is no “AI” in these systems. Sure, they might be “Artificial”, but they certainly aren’t “Intelligent”! Not by any stretch of the word ….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/

The actual story is worth reading to understand what kind of new scams and threats you can expect with these developing technologies, but I really do wish people would stop calling everything AI ….

#NotAI #Scams #TechHorrors

“Diablo IV” is coming … soon 😛

We (my wife and I) are avid “Diablo III” players and we were sure we’d get the game, but what we weren’t sure about was whether we could play couch co-op on “Diablo IV” or not. The game listing on the PlayStation store does not mention couch co-op and that was what was keeping us from pre-ordering since if there was no couch co-op, we won’t enjoy the game as much since we want to play together 🙂

Since the first beta release will happen in a few weeks time, I decided to do some checking online yesterday. Found this Reddit post which seems to indicate that couch co-op is indeed there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/zh2yho/will_diablo_iv_on_console_have_couch_coop/

Of course, a post online by an unknown source is no guarantee that couch co-op will indeed be there, but we were hopeful enough to go ahead and pre-order. Now we wait and see if it is indeed as promised or we’re going to end up being disappointed 😛

#DiabloIV #CoopGaming #Gaming #PlayStation

@davemark Ah, now you’ve made me hungry and it’s 5:00am 😛

In the 18th and 19th centuries, some British smugglers left tubs of brandy on the beach for others to collect. One method of hiding the tubs was to cover them with plaster of Paris so that they looked like pieces of fallen cliff.