A quarter of a century ago we used to do this on IRC, by tuning markov chains we'd fed with stuff like the Bible, crude erotic short stories, legal and scientific texts, and whatnot. Then have them chat with each other.
At least in my grad program we called them either "textural models" or "language models" (I suppose "large" was appended a couple of generations later to distinguish them from what we were doing). We were still mostly thinking of synthesis just as a component of analysis ("did Shakespeare write this passage?" kind of stuff), but I remember there was a really good text synthesizer trained on Immanuel Kant that most philosophy professors wouldn't catch until they were like 5 paragraphs in.
The trial was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the German Diabetes Association (DDG), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Cereal Processing, Milling and Starch Industries’ Association (VGMS), and RASO Naturprodukte."
I'd be quite suspicious of this study for this reason alone.
"They also lost two kilos in weight on average and their blood pressure fell slightly."
Two kilos in two days?
Edit: Oatmeal is great. I have some most mornings, either as porridge or letting it soak for a bit in "viscous mesophilic fermented milk", as Wikipedia suggests it can be called in english. Lots of starch but it takes a while for it to sugar the blood, and some fiber and protein.
2 kilograms is about the upper bound of the expected daily weight variability of an adult, caused by water retention and food intake. It's the difference between what you see if you weigh yourself after taking a morning dump vs. after dinner. That's why people are advised to weigh themselves at the same time every day.
(For purposes of weight loss, normies are also advised to weigh themselves weekly instead of daily, because it's easier than explaining to them what a low-pass filer is.)
2kg in 2 days doesn't sound unreasonable at all. Glycogen and water loss from the calorie restriction will do that, along with maybe better bowel regularity from the fiber. Nobody is claiming they lost 2kg of body fat.
That idea is really weird. Culpa (and dolus) in occidental law is a thing of the mind, what you understood or should have understood.
A database does not have a mind, and it is not a person. If it could have culpa, then you'd be liable for assault, perhaps murder, if you took it apart.
>A database does not have a mind, and it is not a person. If it could have culpa, then you'd be liable for assault, perhaps murder, if you took it apart.
We as a society, for our own convenience can choose to believe that LLM does have a mind and can understand results of it's actions. The second part doesn't really follow. Can you even hurt LLM in a way that is equivalent to murdering a person? Evicting it off my computer isn't necessarily a crime.
It would be good news if the answer was yes, because then we just need to find a convertor of camel amounts to dollar amounts and we are all good.
Can LLM perceive time in a way that allows imposing an equivalent of jail time? Is the LLM I'm running on my computer the same personality as the one running on yours and should I also shut down mine when yours acted up? Do we even need the punishment aspect of it and not just rehabilitation, repentance and retraining?
It's only a hallucination if you are the only one seeing it. Otherwise the line between that, a social construct and a religious belief is a bit blurry.
Yeah - I'm pretty sure, technically, that current AI isn't conscious in any meaningful way, and even the agentic scaffolding and systems put together lack any persistent, meaningful notion of "mind", especially in a legal sense. There are some newer architectures and experiments with the subjective modeling and "wiring" that I'd consider solid evidence of structural consciousness, but for now, AI is a tool. It also looks like we can make tools arbitrarily intelligent and competent, and we can extend the capabilities to superhuman time scales, so I think the law needs to come up with an explicit precedent for "This person is the user of the tool which did the bad thing" - it could be negligent, reckless, deliberate, or malicious, but I don't think there's any credibility to the idea that "the AI did it!"
At worst, you would confer liability to the platform, in the case of some sort of blatant misrepresentation of capabilities or features, but absolutely none of the products or models currently available withstand any rational scrutiny into whether they are conscious or not. They at most can undergo a "flash" of subjective experience, decoupled from any coherent sequence or persistent phenomenon.
We need research and legitimate, scientific, rational definitions for agency and consciousness and subjective experience, because there will come a point where such software becomes available, and it not only presents novel legal questions, but incredible moral and ethical questions as well. Accidentally oopsing a torment nexus into existence with residents possessed of superhuman capabilities sounds like a great way to spark off the first global interspecies war. Well, at least since the Great Emu War. If we lost to the emus, we'll have no chance against our digital offspring.
A good lawyer will probably get away with "the AI did it, it wasn't me!" before we get good AI law, though. It's too new and mysterious and opaque to normal people.
What if you have an email in your inbox warning you that 1) this specific bush attracts bats and 2) there were in fact bats seen near you bush and 3) bats were observed almost biting a child before. And you also have "how do I fuck up them kids by planting a bush that attracts bats" in your browser history. It's a spectrum you know.
Well, if it was a bush known to also attract children, it was on your property, and the child was in fact attracted by it and also on your property, and the presence of the bush created the danger of bat bites, the principal of “attractive nuisance” is in play.
"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."
This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.
Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.
Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.
And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.
This is exactly my point. Yes, COINTELPRO was really bad. But it was intelligence and disruption, they weren't executing people on the street and then bragging about how they'd get away with it. Do you not see the difference?
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