Notices by Steve Hayes (stevehayes@mastodon.green)

@christineburns Hinkley C is a French reactor design. The French have only recently managed to get the prototype at Flamanville operating. There are some in China that are operating but with troubles and there's the one in Finland. Over and above the problems afflicting all nuclear energy (which in my opinion make it a very bad idea) , this seems to be an overambitious and uninspired design and there was more politics than sense in choosing it for Hinkley.

@gimulnautti Rather than preventing WW3, I'd say this is WW3 and the West has completely misjudged. Russia and China have the Bomb so a proper war is out of the question. The US prodded the bear thinking it could be destabilised with sanctions once it reacted but China isn't about to let that happen. Then it thought it could be defeated with Wonder Weapons but they are turning out to be a paper tiger. This IS the war and it's being lost.

@resuna @gerrymcgovern It's the failings of AI that are the most interesting aspect. Especially when we look around and see humans doing much the same things. I'm sure that 90% of the columns in The Guardian could be written by AI and nobody would notice. Maybe they already are. They're just a churning mass of memes and tropes.

@resuna @gerrymcgovern Occasional human mistakes? Think of the millions of MAGA followers. The point is that we don't really know what's going on in that AI simulation of an animal brain's neural network. Maybe we can never know - we'll let philosophers work on that one. But we can observe. The first one I remember reading about was an AI having a tantrum if it was asked the same question 15 times.

@krnlg @resuna @gerrymcgovern My point is that we don't really know what's going on in there. It's not like a traditional program where we can point to lines of code. At the same time there's nothing we can point to in an animal's brain and say that's where the magic happens and that AI doesn't have and can never have that thing.

@resuna @krnlg @gerrymcgovern Yes indeed. Whole university courses are based on identifying which painters or whatever influenced which other painters or whatever.

@resuna @krnlg @gerrymcgovern I'm sure there were people looked at those shuddering, juddering, noisy, smelly things and said they'll never go as fast as a good horse. Do you believe there's some holy spirit that can infuse a lump of protoplasm but not a lump of silicon? I'm not saying more and more powerful AI is something we want or should have but unless we decide to do something to stop it or unless it turns out to not be what it rather looks like being, it's on the way.

@resuna @krnlg @gerrymcgovern Of course neural networks are being applied to things other than LLMs too. For example image recognition. Not always successfully, for example when Teslas drive straight into fire engines with all their lights flashing. That at least is something that humans generally avoid doing.