Spyke

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How does this scam work?

That “company” is the key part of the scam here. Your father will be asked to invest money in it for various reasons. Whether they’ll go for the “it’s a great deal” or “help me Obi Wan” angle is dependent on the mark.

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The secret to how Liberals con progressive voters

I wouldn’t call it a con. NDP just hasn’t offered a good enough federal leadership since Jack Layton. And I wouldn’t say the liberals rule entirely on the right, they have made plenty of good progressive strides. I think this type of rhetoric is conservatives trying to weasel their way into an “I told you our ideas were good” territory. The real issue is that corporatism is very embedded in politics and the economy is highly dependent on their success.

canada

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Gun violence soars in Canada as illegal weapons from the US flow in • FRANCE 24 English

It’s always funny seeing how stories like this get the gun nuts out of the woodwork to start complaining about local gun control. The problem will always be twofold. Local guns need to be controlled, and the traffic of contraband needs to be controlled. The end result we want is to avoid becoming a gun infested shithole like the US. NRA talking points can go take a hike off a cliff.

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Do LLMs "have" the "abillity" to be told they are wrong or incorrect and be able to contest that?

A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

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Study says AI in schools may be doing more harm than good

The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.

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Do LLMs "have" the "abillity" to be told they are wrong or incorrect and be able to contest that?

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Intentionality is the key difference. You can eventually tell a Chinese room’s nature by giving it new variables that it hasn’t encountered before. New problems lead to algorithmic breakdown.

That said, there’s deeper conversations you can have about what consciousness truly is, of course. My personal view is that it requires a level of complexity that we are still very far away from architecturally, and a level of scalability that we may not even be able to support ecologically. This thought experiment is mainly to show you what the inner workings of a computerized process can look like, and works to provide a demystified perspective.

canada

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FIFA no longer letting fans bring refillable water bottles into World Cup stadiums

Dunno how it is everywhere else but in Toronto the FIFA preparations have also fenced off certain public parks around the stadium which were heavily used for through-traffic, forcing pedestrians and cyclists to have to take massive detours around them. It’s particularly annoying because they’ve just been fenced off for weeks now with barely anyone inside except for some half asleep volunteer guards on their phones. How this is legal, I don’t know, but I’m assuming it came with the bribes. Just stinks of classism and corruption and it makes me like this World Cup even less (among all the other reasons).

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Trump is paying Iran with taxpayer money

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More like threw rocks at the bully’s little sister while she was at a concert and had nothing to do with the bully’s actions. Nothing wrong with resistance, but targets matter and in this case Hamas chose poorly and lost the optics advantage they could’ve had on the international stage. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

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Desensitization to guns

All part of the weapons industry plan. The myth that you need guns to be free, that you need guns to revolt, that the world is full of criminals waiting to launch an attack on your home, that global supply chains and regulations that disseminate the food you buy are not to be trusted and you need to drive 4 hours out of your suburbia to go hunting for meat - all an advertising scheme to sell you metal fireworks toys. Not negating their real utility in niche applications but those applications remain just that - niche. Civilized nations don’t need to kowtow to this predatory industry.