The thing I’m heartened by is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs among the MBA/“leadership” group. They actually think these models are intelligent. I’ve heard people say, “Well, just ask the AI,” meaning asking ChatGPT. Anyone who actually does that and thinks they have a leg up are insane and kidding themselves. If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly, but they will then fall behind just as quickly because the quality will be middling at best. They don’t understand how to best use the technology, and they will end up hanging themselves with it.

At the end of the day, all AI is just stupid number tricks. They’re very fancy, impressive number tricks, but it’s just a number trick that just happens to be useful. Solely relying on AI will lead to the downfall of an organization.

Yes-ish. The characters were villains, but the organization wasn’t necessarily. For instance, in Discovery season 2, Leland and his crew were the villains, but Section 31 was portrayed less as an extremist cabal and more as a misguided morally-grey organization. Less a blight upon the Federation and more an uncomfortable, but integral, part of it.

@[email protected] captures it well. Instead of being a cabal of extremists doing illegal and immoral things because they think they’re connected to a higher purpose, they’re a semi-official CIA-like organization.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Section 31 isn’t supposed to be a cool or semi-legitimate organization (with ships, insignia, etc.) but rather shadowy and absolutely beyond the pale of legitimacy where very few can stomach what they do. From an artistic/thematic POV, Section 31 should be there to show us that a good society requires work to maintain and that its undoing can come from within by those claiming to protect it by eschewing that society’s values. In other words, the ends don’t justify the means.

It should be a conspiracy of like-minded individuals that exists parasitically within Starfleet, not an official (or an “unofficial official” agency).

I agree. When 31 was first introduced, and Sloan explained that Section 31 was sanctioned by Starfleet under Article 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter, the implication was that they were people who misinterpreted or construed a (probably minor) part of the Starfleet Charter and used it to justify damn near anything.

Personally, I hate how Section 31 has been changed to be misunderstood, cool good guy/anti-hero types who are doing the wrong things for the right reason. DS9 had it right with portraying them as the villains within who should be snuffed out because the ends don’t justify the means.

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it’s beyond uncomfortable.

Same. SNW has been an interesting pattern for me. The powers that be will make creative decisions that I find dubious when announced (Kirk, musical episode, La’an being related to Khan), but each time, the show pulls it off. I think Paul Wesley has done a really good job, “Subspace Rhapsody” is just so much fun, and La’an is literally my favorite character on SNW.

However, the name “Arthur Grand Technologies” will always be synonymous to racism.

For now. This will be memory-holed in a couple weeks. A couple grand is nothing, maybe just a slightly down quarter. They should have been completely annihilated. Crimes like this shouldn’t be fixed dollar amounts; it should be percentages of average annual gross earnings, and in this case, something like 300% annual gross earnings. Let them sell everything off.

My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.

Not necessarily. The Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement is a thing. Most of the Fediverse is FLOSS, and I doubt there’s anyone who can take Lemmy or Mastodon closed source and buy every instance and then stop pop-up instances. It does require quite a bit of work, though, so it is difficult.

I think the real challenging thing is that a great FLOSS service needs to attract attention and care. When I bring up Fediverse/FLOSS alternatives to software my friends complain about, I’m met with lukewarm-at-best reactions, generally due to networking effects (I think).

Like @[email protected] said, it’s on government phones. The thinking goes that TikTok, which is a Chinese company, is exporting too much data from US government devices. In other words, the government is worried the Chinese are spying. Given the amount of data that the TikTok app actually collects, the fear is probably not unreasonable. All corporate-owned social media collects way too much data, but TikTok really is next level from what I’ve read.

I think a big difference, though, is that there is political force to ending TikTok. The US government has no major issues with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. existing. Remember, there’s actual legislation banning TikTok. Whether that makes a real difference or not, well, I guess we just wait and see. Personally, I think they all should go down in flames.

I work/study in AI, and it is completely over-hyped. For one thing, the C-suite can’t wrap it’s head around the fact that AI != LLM; they all seem to think all AI is just LLMs. On top of that, they are way too eager to throw humans out of the loop.

That said, I think LLM applications, even in their current form, are super useful in development and business practices. I myself use it to increase my productivity in coding. But, I use it as an augmentation rather than a replacement. One of my friends put it best the other day, “LLMs are like a junior dev to your senior dev. You need to be hyper-specific, and you need to check it’s output.” In other words, it’s great for off-loading some work, but it isn’t going to completely replace humans.

With that said, I’m a bit annoyed that other AI fields are being over-shadowed by LLMs. There’s a ton of other interesting work being done in those fields that is super useful and important. All of them, though, are not going to replace humans but rather augment and make humans more productive. I’ve found that an AI-Human team is most effective.

You’re not wrong. I remember how Bush, McCain, Romney, Obama, Clinton, and others were called Nazis at different points. While it was never really taken seriously then (as it shouldn’t have been), the term has become virtually meaningless. Where the term was reserved for the worst-of-the-worst, for years, it was invoked at the slightest disagreement. Now that there’s a literal Nazi-adjacent person running and getting called out for it, it falls flat.

Except that scaling alone won’t lead to AGI. It may generate better, more convincing text, but the core algorithm is the same. That “special juice” is almost certainly going to come from algorithmic development rather than just throwing more compute at the problem.

Cool, Bill Gates has opinions. I think he’s being hasty and speaking out of turn and only partially correct. From my understanding, the “big innovation” of GPT-4 was adding more parameters and scaling up compute. The core algorithms are generally agreed to be mostly the same from earlier versions (not that we know for sure since OpenAI has only released a technical report). Based on that, the real limit on this technology is compute and number of parameters (as boring as that is), and so he’s right that the algorithm design may have plateaued. However, we really don’t know what will happen if truly monster rigs with tens-of-trillions of parameters are used when trained on the entirety of human written knowledge (morality of that notwithstanding), and that’s where he’s wrong.

I found myself nodding along to a lot that was said in this article. I also would trace a lot of recent issues to JJ Abrams’ take. What I said then is still (I think) true today: “They are good movies, but they aren’t good Star Trek movies.” Discovery and Picard suffered for it, but I think that the ills are being corrected. My hope is that Paramount greenlights “Legacy” as the TNG-spiritually-successor as SNW is the TOS-spiritual-successor.

Where I will disagree, though, is that Star Trek isn’t broken. Five-ish years ago, I would have said that, but after SNW, Lower Decks, and Picard season 3, I think the powers that be have a better understanding of what is needed. We were in a bit of a “dark-ages” from 2006-2020, but I think we’re back on the upswing. We may not be quite at 1990s golden age Trek, but we can get close.

No lie, he seems like such a cool dude. If I were in the area, I’d totally go to see him. And while I first knew him as Chekov, I grew to love him as Al Bester on Babylon 5, truly some of his best work!