Spyke

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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient

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The argument in the paper is a bit more nuanced - it's mostly arguing that we over-anthropomorphise AI, and this taints out results on AI sentience by pre-biasing towards some human like qualities already. Part of this comes from the AI attempting to emulated a human notion of identity.

Using a contrived goat powered AoE II AI would likely yield less assumed human-like quality bias. It would also be hilarious.

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Do you think that Edward Snowden is a hero?

There are a lot of comments here saying "it's tragic because no-one cared", but that is misleading as there is now a strong privacy movement.

I think, without Snowden blowing the whistle, anti-privacy laws would not face such stiff competition.

Yes we're all fighting a rearguard retreat, but without Snowden's sacrifice there would be no rearguard and there would be abject surrender rather than retreat, and we'd all live under eastern-style surveillance states without ever knowing.

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Itch.io games site taken down

I mean, it sounds like a lawsuit to me.

  1. A takedown request was issued on false grounds.

  2. This takedown was then actioned without any due process.

  3. The issue has caused tangible, and measurable, loss (calculable from prior sales records).

Honestly, there needs to be a fixed penalty fine for bad takedowns...

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YouTube puts third-party clients on notice: Show ads or get blocked

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let's pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The "bad" year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they've more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they "need" the money.

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UK: Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces

I'm not entirely sure how that's panning out in Aus (a quick search suggests it's a flop, but the sources aren't great). I think the general consensus is that it's not as enforceable as they hoped.

We are moving towards an era of a more locked down web in the UK. The main flag here is "robust age verification" - i.e. we're moving from "you must provide ID to view adult material on social media" to "you must provide ID to use social media".

One can quickly see "your id must be retained and linked to your account to reduce crime" and "any officer of the law may view this ID to better support crime reduction" slipping in over the next 20 years or so.

Overall, this feels like another Trojan horse to move towards a China-style de-anonymised web. Bad move all around really.

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*Permanently Deleted*

Well we all saw that coming.

The parental and elderly voting bloc is very hard to ignore, and those groups tend to be less privacy conscious (as well as pro-anything "protect the children").

The only way it's getting repealed is if enough labour voters raise a fuss. Given Reform's messaging (i.e. repeal it) and how worried Labour are over Reform's polling, that is likely the only lever that'll work. However, that's a long game - one that will take years to play out.

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College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT

Prof here - take a look at it from our side.

Our job is to evaluate YOUR ability; and AI is a great way to mask poor ability. We have no way to determine if you did the work, or if an AI did, and if called into a court to certify your expertise we could not do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

I am not arguing exams are perfect mind, but I'd rather doubt a few student's inability (maybe it was just a bad exam for them) than always doubt their ability (is any of this their own work).

Case in point, ALL students on my course with low (<60%) attendance this year scored 70s and 80s on the coursework and 10s and 20s in the OPEN BOOK exam. I doubt those 70s and 80s are real reflections of the ability of the students, but do suggest they can obfuscate AI work well.

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Microsoft finally officially confirms it's killing Windows Control Panel sometime soon

Control panel largely accrued content - it is generally navigated via left and right click which works great and is stable. Things don't vanish.

Settings, on the other hand, is left click only navigation mostly. It also changed constantly (usually for the worst) - tutorials written 2 years ago are no longer valid because access to that setting was removed. This makes using settings to fix things a real nightmare.