US Political Discussion: Biden/Harris Edition (Rules in OP)

[Jinn]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree. You can't really get into "is AI creative" etc without getting into semantic games about "what is creative in the first place?" etc etc. Like to get the fedex logo from your example, you'd have to have already known what you wanted and gone through three prompts and then still sort through the results afterwards, and then still likely need a human designer to finalize it. All of the creative elements of that process were done by a person who knew what they wanted and prompted for it. The AI didn't go "hey wouldn't it be cool if we hid a little arrow in the logo? Cause we move stuff? It symbolizes motion or something".

But anyway, I think the only sure-thing is that it's disruptive. How much so is yet to be seen.

I agree with what you said about getting into "what is creative in the first place" because i feel like creativity is defined as what somethings ability to create things on its own. So in one sense AI is creative but in the other its not creative in a human way.

 

[Jinn]

And of course, this all depends on your definition of creative 😂

I agree with what you said about getting into "what is creative in the first place" because i feel like creativity is defined as what somethings ability to create things on its own. So in one sense AI is creative but in the other its not creative in a human way.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

In my completely uninformed, subjective opinion, "creativity" is a two part process.

You have the idea, and then the execution of that idea.

I think I almost get what @narad has been saying, in that there isn't one magic AI that does all (yet), but you can separate what we perceive as creativity into individual parts and then you have AI that tackles those in parallel and the results as a whole feel more "human."

Maybe someone more knowledgeable about AI will say I'm completely off.

 

[lost_horizon]

In my completely uninformed, subjective opinion, "creativity" is a two part process.

You have the idea, and then the execution of that idea.

I think I almost get what @narad has been saying, in that there isn't one magic AI that does all (yet), but you can separate what we perceive as creativity into individual parts and then you have AI that tackles those in parallel and the results as a whole feel more "human."

Maybe someone more knowledgeable about AI will say I'm completely off.

ChatGPT isn't a special program, you can make your own version yourself using OpenAI.

It simply scans everything on the internet and then shoots it back to you according to a set of rules programmed by (you guessed it) a person. This varies by who has created it. ChatGPT is one version. It only uses everything it knows. It doesn't know, or reason, or guess what it doesn't know accurately. It guesses things according to existing patterns and concepts with data it has been told is in a similar group.

People are employed to test it and trick it. This is to change the rules. The system isn't 'learning' people are changing it to produce an answer they want or value.

It is basically Google search with more oomph.

Is it creative? Yes, in the fact it is making things that have not been created using the input of art from all time inferring a subject and style from your wording. If you don't put anything in, it does nothing.
It's not even learning from it's existing art.

It's told how to talk, how to reason and how to write.

Whatever human creation will be a product from this process. Told what to do and not do, how to react, when to talk, by humans.

 

[lost_horizon]

Man. This.

@lost_horizon, the gist of your argument is that, while we knew CFCs were depleting the ozone layer, we didn't have the model explaining how it was happening exactly right, so the relationship and direction of the impact was sound but the magnitude might not have been exactly what our first pass thought it was. And, therefore, you're concluding, the whole thing is bunk, and not worth solving.

No, I said it was a massive over reach and over spend without knowing all the facts. I don't support that. Was the money wisely spent then when we only achieved a %of the return and what change we saw we're not even sure what our part of that was?

That's a perfect analog for the arguments that "climate change science is wrong because we haven't exactly modeled how climates will respond to increases in greenhouse gasses, and while we know warming is occuring in aggregate, we haven't nailed down exactly how much on a macro level, and are still working out how best to model localized change at the micro level. Therefore, throw the baby out with the bathwater because we don't have it modeled 100% perfectly yet."

That's not what I'm saying, I'm saying it is not a sure thing. There is uncertainty, just like CFC's the IPCC has changed over time and gotten closer and closer to the true value. Apocalyptic turning points and events have not come to pass. As we get closer the risk and the impacts have gotten smaller and more defined.

That's insane. If my house is on fire, I'm not going to sit tight because I don't know exactly how long I have before the stairs are aflame, or can't say with prefect confidence what temperature the exact seat I'm in in my living room will reach. I'm going to take stock of the situation, and decide that perfect modeling precision isn't required to know I want to be outside of my house, ASAP.

Well you don't need a model to know your house is on fire, you can look at the NOAA chart which shows no statistically significant warming in the continental US for the last 15 years. So your house is fine, will be fine and has been many degrees hotter in the past and also fine.

220 of them voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its name nominally referencing inflation, was the single biggest environmental bill in the history of this country.

(Missed these earlier, until one of my earlier comments got liked and I saw I missed an entire tangent)

Cool now post the environmental outcomes. I'll go with jobs created plus tonnes of CO2 saved per year. Whilst your looking for that data, tell me how much the IRA was meant to cut emissions as a target? Otherwise it was just for the feels.

 

[lost_horizon]

*McCarthy and Biden have agreed to take a backseat on negotiations; they have four negotiators they have mutually agreed on to handle negotiations. Two things can be gleaned from this - first, their public posturing is red meat for their base, not active negotiation, and can be tuned out. Second, if you look at the slate of negotiators, three have ties to the White House, and one is a relatively bipartisan Republican representative. McCarthy knows he can't win this fight, or he wouldn't have agreed to this slate.

Looks like he is staying in Washington, others are going home. McCarthy has already passed a bill in Congress, Biden refused to negotiate for weeks.

McCarthy is at a disadvantage now (razor thin grasp on his coalition), he loses leverage once we breach X date (short version - if the Dems are usually at a disadvantage because they have to convince America government can be a solution,

Once again he already passed something. He has got concessions:

"Biden has offered compromises, the Democratic official told NBC News, including freezing spending, rescinding unspent Covid funds and putting a two-year cap on spending."

If COVID spending is unspent, how can America be already reaching it's debt ceiling? Haven't they then spent money not approved by Congress?

 

[narad]

ChatGPT isn't a special program, you can make your own version yourself using OpenAI.

It simply scans everything on the internet and then shoots it back to you according to a set of rules programmed by (you guessed it) a person. This varies by who has created it. ChatGPT is one version. It only uses everything it knows. It doesn't know, or reason, or guess what it doesn't know accurately. It guesses things according to existing patterns and concepts with data it has been told is in a similar group.

People are employed to test it and trick it. This is to change the rules. The system isn't 'learning' people are changing it to produce an answer they want or value.

It is basically Google search with more oomph.

Is it creative? Yes, in the fact it is making things that have not been created using the input of art from all time inferring a subject and style from your wording. If you don't put anything in, it does nothing.
It's not even learning from it's existing art.

It's told how to talk, how to reason and how to write.

Whatever human creation will be a product from this process. Told what to do and not do, how to react, when to talk, by humans.

Really wish we could stop getting 35% accurate descriptions of how LLMs work in here lol

 

[StevenC]

Really wish we could stop getting 35% accurate descriptions of how LLMs work in here lol

ChatGPT doesn't need an 8k photo to tell the difference between an RG7620 and a 7420

 

[narad]

ChatGPT doesn't need an 8k photo to tell the difference between an RG7620 and a 7420

Damn I just wanted to clarify that there are clear misunderstandings regarding how ChatGPT is trained, how it works, what the rules are, etc. He didn't deserve death.

 

[TedEH]

Really wish we could stop getting 35% accurate descriptions of how LLMs work in here lol

This is exactly why I keep saying that I don't think the general public understands AI at all.

I mean, I know just enough to know that a lot of it goes over my head - but I think I understand enough to know what it isn't - and it's not some kind of supercharged search engine, even though it seems search companies would like to use it that way. And it's certainly not literally alive. Even the people I know who work with / on AI more directly have huge gaps in how parts of it work, admitting that it's (maybe by design?) in large part a black box that we understand in a general way but the internal processes of it are hard to predict or understand completely. I don't understand how to have a meaningful conversation about a thing when even those in the know don't really know how to talk about. Or maybe I'm misjudging the whole thing, who knows. But if I know this little about it - how is anyone with less knowledge of it suppose to wrap their minds around that is it or what it can or can't do?

I feel like the equivalent of the old man who just figured out that the big E icon downloads the internet for me, trying to impart the wonders of the internet to someone who doesn't know what a computer is to start with.

 

[Drew]

No, I said it was a massive over reach and over spend without knowing all the facts. I don't support that. Was the money wisely spent then when we only achieved a %of the return and what change we saw we're not even sure what our part of that was?

That's not what I'm saying, I'm saying it is not a sure thing. There is uncertainty, just like CFC's the IPCC has changed over time and gotten closer and closer to the true value. Apocalyptic turning points and events have not come to pass. As we get closer the risk and the impacts have gotten smaller and more defined.

Well you don't need a model to know your house is on fire, you can look at the NOAA chart which shows no statistically significant warming in the continental US for the last 15 years. So your house is fine, will be fine and has been many degrees hotter in the past and also fine.

Cool now post the environmental outcomes. I'll go with jobs created plus tonnes of CO2 saved per year. Whilst your looking for that data, tell me how much the IRA was meant to cut emissions as a target? Otherwise it was just for the feels.

"without knowing ALL the facts." Again, even your article allegedly refuting the hole in the ozone layer, still estimated 60% of the damage was from how we knew CFCs were impacting it, and the remaining 40% of damage appeared to be CFC related but we didn't have the exact mechanism down yet.

We know enough to act on. Your opposition to taking action to stop climate change is pure selfishness under a veneer of pseudoscience.

 

[Randy]

For the record, I think @lost_horizon skepticism about some climate change initiatives (especially the price and the pain to the individual) is healthy and I'm glad to hear it. For myself, I think we share the same concerns over some of the same things, it's just that he defaults to a "no" and I'm inclined to default to a "yes... but update/verify".

 

[TedEH]

Skepticism is healthy when the goal is to learn or to reconcile differences in understanding. All the back-and-forth "no, MY cherry picked graph is better than yours" doesn't strike me as very constructive.

 

[Drew]

For the record, I think @lost_horizon skepticism about some climate change initiatives (especially the price and the pain to the individual) is healthy and I'm glad to hear it. For myself, I think we share the same concerns over some of the same things, it's just that he defaults to a "no" and I'm inclined to default to a "yes... but update/verify".

Yeah, I'm with @TedEH here. Skepticism is awesome, when it's motivated by a healthy desire to trust but verify, and interest in improving our understanding in a topic. God knows we can always find something new in our world.

My problem is when skepticism becomes a reason to say "fuck it, I'm going to ignore the body of knowledge we already have and the current scientific consensus, because taking it seriously would be personally inconvenient."

Science is a process, not a destination. That means that we should treat our current understanding with skepticism, because it will evolve with time... but because that evolution will never entirely stop, we also need to be comfortable learning to act with an incomplete picture, rather than waiting until we can model something with 100% precision, because that will never happen.

 

[Mathemagician]

No no, but they want to be right. And if that involves ignoring reality then so be it.


I think you’re missing how badly they want:

1) For this discussion to be a “fight”
2) How badly they want to “win” regardless of facts
3) To “own those annoying libs”

Math and research are like not even in the top 10 things certain people care about when they argue against “fixing the outdoors so we can keep going outside”.

 

[lost_horizon]

"without knowing ALL the facts." Again, even your article allegedly refuting the hole in the ozone layer, still estimated 60% of the damage was from how we knew CFCs were impacting it, and the remaining 40% of damage appeared to be CFC related but we didn't have the exact mechanism down yet.

We know enough to act on. Your opposition to taking action to stop climate change is pure selfishness under a veneer of pseudoscience.

Laughable analysis and at no point have i said no to action on climate change. Just that the money has been spent in the wrong solutions.

By your logic you support the EU spending $254 Billion in an ETS that exempts the majority of heavy industries cutting a moderate amount of CO2 vs the US where they used direct action replacing coal with gas and saved far more Co2 with far less disruption and solidified their grid.

How does a business reduce their Co2 without changing their supply? Who controls supply? Government. The tail can't wag the dog. The american approach was right.

Is Solar right for Germany? No, they spent 4x more to get the same amount of solar power produced than America. That solution is not good.

Germany burns wood for fuel, which they get from the united states instead of clean nuclear. Is that right?

Europe Rethinks Its Reliance on Burning Wood for Electricity (Published 2022)

A new proposal would significantly rewrite E.U. rules on renewable energy, ending subsidies for biomass like wood pellets.

www.nytimes.com

It's a rich tapestry.

 

[TedEH]

Being the general moron that I am, what I take from that is that we care more about finances than clean energy.

 

[eaeolian]

Being the general moron that I am, what I take from that is that we care more about finances than clean energy.

No, that's the right takeaway. We only care about "being green" when it makes some corporate grifter money.

 

[zappatton2]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/oath-keepers-rhodes-sentencing-1.6854081

At least this douchebag is going away for a bit, but yeah, terrorism is a hard thing to counter when these people are so committed to their victim mentality that facing consequences only hardens their resolve.

 

[philkilla]

I'll be glad when Chevron Deference is gone and dead.