From Newsgroup: alt.privacy

harley@yazzy.com writes:

As for this AI stuff, what the hell is it? I can find on the Web how
to do Python, C++ and other languages. Where is the page showing what
in the hell this AI stuff is? I'm rather inclined to believe the
whole AI thing is a hoax. I'll be 90 in a few months, and from what I
observe of this country, and the world in general, the entire human
race has gone insanely demented. "Progress" sucks.

You'll be 90? Wow! That's amazing! You've whitnessed things first hand
and I haven't because I'm just a kid. For example you've whitnessed the joy
at the end of WWII, but also the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Human Rights Movement. The Cuba missile crisis. How man step by step
became more familiar with getting into space and the first man on the moon.
The Vietnam war and the protests against it. And the birth of the personal computer. I'm forgetting many of them, but there is the Commodore 64, the
Apple II, the Macintosh. How it started as a hobby for a few nerds totally unknown to the greater public to reach the point where almost everyone
had a personal computer. All these things, I only know them from tales.
You also remember what your grandparents told you about their lives.
I think you have something very valuable here
and I hope you stick around on usenet.

I just want to respond to your view of the world. You know in the era
of globalization it's tough to survive as an economy. Globalization is described in the 1996 Samuel P. Huntington's book "The Clash of
Civilizations". So not really new, but still relatively new. In
the present era of globalization I see three types of economies.
Those of countries like North Korea. North Korea wants to cut itself
off from the rest of the world both as a country and as an econony.
And to be fair to North Korea I must say the world has chosen to cut
off North Korea too. The Country is unable to buy anything from any
other country in the world and has to rely solely on what it is able to
produce itself. Then there are countries like the US and the countries
of the global north. UK, European Union, Australia, Japan and so on.
These countries are not barricading themselves from the outside world
like North Korea does. A company in Japan or China can invest in something
that is located on the US soil and open a company there.
For countries like the
US it makes less and less sense to talk about the US economy. It's a global economy encompassing the whole world. Same for Japan and so on.
So for example goods sold in the US are produced elsehwhere, where labor
is cheaper. Clothes in Bangladesh. Sneakers in China. Consumer electronics again are assembled in China. And the third type of country would be
countries like Brazil, Russia, the countries of South America,
Africa, basically any country that doesn't cut itself off from the
rest of the
world like North Korea does. Well these countries participate in the
global economy but are struggling as soon as they need to supply
themselves on the world market because they don't produce something
inside the country or the thing isn't avilable locally for whatever
reason.
They struggle because as soon as they have to buy foreign goods, the
prices are high and their economies are not very strong. Ending here
what I see as the three types of economies or countries in the world.
So what should the US or any other country in the global north
do if it wants to keep the high level living standard of its citizens relatively unchanged?
Well it's the same as trying to remain
a country of the second category. In other words to try to remain
a country with a strong economy so it doesn't have to struggle
when it has to buy foreign goods as countries from the third
category mentioned above are.
But if you compare the rate at which China's economy grows versus
the US, you can see that China is going to catch and beat the US
economy quite soon. And there is no way to stop China.
On the other side cutting itself off from the world as a country
is not really a solution. I don't see any real plans of the US
cutting itself off from the rest of the world so I'm not
talking about that any longer.
--- Synchronet 3.21e-Win32 NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.privacy


gaussianblue <gaussianblue@asymptote.invalid> writes:

harley@yazzy.com writes:

As for this AI stuff, what the hell is it? I can find on the Web
how to do Python, C++ and other languages. Where is the page
showing what in the hell this AI stuff is? I'm rather inclined to
believe the whole AI thing is a hoax.

To get a clear picture of how the underlying computations work, have a
look at the "Parallel Distributed Processing" books (Rumelhart,
McClelland et al, MIT Press, 1986).

For even further background, look at the "expanded edition" of
"Perceptrons", (Minsky & Papert, MIT Press, 1988) wherein the authors
confess to having gotten the future wrong in the 1969 1st edition.

Doing this stuff in 1986 was hard because the inherent notions far
exceeded couputing power of the era. We/They have come a long way.
Now they're building the vast computation into dedicated hardware, so
vast that they're finding energy and heat nore critical than RAM
capacity and CPU speed.

That said, I understand the basic stuff from the 80s & 90s but I don't inderstand at the same level how the current generation of
"generative" AI works, on top of that underlying tech/theory to
produce what spuriously appears to be creative, thoughtfull text,
audio & video and well-constructed natural language. I don't know of
a similarly accessible book that explains this most recent advance.

But the lesson to take away is that the current, putaive AI is no more "intelligent", in any meaningful sense, than the models found in
Rumelhart & McClelland 40 years ago. It's the same pattern
recognition (a great success) overlain with a humongusly deceptive
trick to produce convincing, natural-sounding language.

I'll be 90 in a few months, and from what I observe of this
country, and the world in general, the entire human race has gone
insanely demented. "Progress" sucks.

I'm only 82 but I read the 1986 books, as well as a lot of other
background stuff (Minsky & Papert, Warren McCulloch) in the late 80s
when my brain worked better & faster than it does now. I'd have a go
any readable book purported to fill in the gap between basic neural
nets and "generative AI" anyway if I could find one.

You'll be 90? Wow! That's amazing! You've whitnessed things first hand
and I haven't because I'm just a kid. For example you've whitnessed the joy at the end of WWII, but also the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yeah, I was born right after Pearl Harbor and I only knew WW II from
some left-over rationing tokens and similar. And the inexplicable (to
a little kid) appearance of Atomic This and Atomic That in marketing
and pop culture.

[ Remainder of Harley's excellent post left for the record.]

The Human Rights Movement. The Cuba missile crisis. How man step by step became more familiar with getting into space and the first man on the moon. The Vietnam war and the protests against it. And the birth of the personal computer. I'm forgetting many of them, but there is the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the Macintosh. How it started as a hobby for a few nerds totally unknown to the greater public to reach the point where almost everyone
had a personal computer. All these things, I only know them from tales.
You also remember what your grandparents told you about their lives.
I think you have something very valuable here
and I hope you stick around on usenet.

I just want to respond to your view of the world. You know in the era
of globalization it's tough to survive as an economy. Globalization is described in the 1996 Samuel P. Huntington's book "The Clash of Civilizations". So not really new, but still relatively new. In
the present era of globalization I see three types of economies.
Those of countries like North Korea. North Korea wants to cut itself
off from the rest of the world both as a country and as an econony.
And to be fair to North Korea I must say the world has chosen to cut
off North Korea too. The Country is unable to buy anything from any
other country in the world and has to rely solely on what it is able to produce itself. Then there are countries like the US and the countries
of the global north. UK, European Union, Australia, Japan and so on.
These countries are not barricading themselves from the outside world
like North Korea does. A company in Japan or China can invest in something that is located on the US soil and open a company there.
For countries like the
US it makes less and less sense to talk about the US economy. It's a global economy encompassing the whole world. Same for Japan and so on.
So for example goods sold in the US are produced elsehwhere, where labor
is cheaper. Clothes in Bangladesh. Sneakers in China. Consumer electronics again are assembled in China. And the third type of country would be countries like Brazil, Russia, the countries of South America,
Africa, basically any country that doesn't cut itself off from the
rest of the
world like North Korea does. Well these countries participate in the
global economy but are struggling as soon as they need to supply
themselves on the world market because they don't produce something
inside the country or the thing isn't avilable locally for whatever
reason.
They struggle because as soon as they have to buy foreign goods, the
prices are high and their economies are not very strong. Ending here
what I see as the three types of economies or countries in the world.
So what should the US or any other country in the global north
do if it wants to keep the high level living standard of its citizens relatively unchanged?
Well it's the same as trying to remain
a country of the second category. In other words to try to remain
a country with a strong economy so it doesn't have to struggle
when it has to buy foreign goods as countries from the third
category mentioned above are.
But if you compare the rate at which China's economy grows versus
the US, you can see that China is going to catch and beat the US
economy quite soon. And there is no way to stop China.
On the other side cutting itself off from the world as a country
is not really a solution. I don't see any real plans of the US
cutting itself off from the rest of the world so I'm not
talking about that any longer.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
--- Synchronet 3.21e-Win32 NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.privacy

In <87a5iyi4n3.fsf@enoch.nodomain.nowhere> Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

gaussianblue <gaussianblue@asymptote.invalid> writes:

harley@yazzy.com writes:

As for this AI stuff, what the hell is it? I can find on the Web
how to do Python, C++ and other languages. Where is the page
showing what in the hell this AI stuff is? I'm rather inclined to
believe the whole AI thing is a hoax.

To get a clear picture of how the underlying computations work, have a
look at the "Parallel Distributed Processing" books (Rumelhart,
McClelland et al, MIT Press, 1986).

For even further background, look at the "expanded edition" of
"Perceptrons", (Minsky & Papert, MIT Press, 1988) wherein the authors
confess to having gotten the future wrong in the 1969 1st edition.

Doing this stuff in 1986 was hard because the inherent notions far
exceeded couputing power of the era. We/They have come a long way.
Now they're building the vast computation into dedicated hardware, so
vast that they're finding energy and heat nore critical than RAM
capacity and CPU speed.

That said, I understand the basic stuff from the 80s & 90s but I don't >inderstand at the same level how the current generation of
"generative" AI works, on top of that underlying tech/theory to
produce what spuriously appears to be creative, thoughtfull text,
audio & video and well-constructed natural language. I don't know of
a similarly accessible book that explains this most recent advance.

But the lesson to take away is that the current, putaive AI is no more >"intelligent", in any meaningful sense, than the models found in
Rumelhart & McClelland 40 years ago. It's the same pattern
recognition (a great success) overlain with a humongusly deceptive
trick to produce convincing, natural-sounding language.

I'll be 90 in a few months, and from what I observe of this
country, and the world in general, the entire human race has gone
insanely demented. "Progress" sucks.

I'm only 82 but I read the 1986 books, as well as a lot of other
background stuff (Minsky & Papert, Warren McCulloch) in the late 80s
when my brain worked better & faster than it does now. I'd have a go
any readable book purported to fill in the gap between basic neural
nets and "generative AI" anyway if I could find one.

You'll be 90? Wow! That's amazing! You've whitnessed things first hand
and I haven't because I'm just a kid. For example you've whitnessed the joy >> at the end of WWII, but also the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yeah, I was born right after Pearl Harbor and I only knew WW II from
some left-over rationing tokens and similar. And the inexplicable (to
a little kid) appearance of Atomic This and Atomic That in marketing
and pop culture.

Not much atomic this and atomic that around today as far as I can see.
But just today I've heard the song Radioactive from Imagine Dragons
on the radio. I was listening to 1live. So however quieter
"atomic" is still a thing.

https://genius.com/Imagine-dragons-radioactive-lyrics https://www1.wdr.de/radio/1live/index.html

Leaving "atomic" things aside for a moment. On that same radio
station the topic was the 2006 soccer world cup in Germany
because of the current European soccer championship in Germany
and Garmanys quarter final game today 6p.m. GMT+2. One of the host
was asking a girl on the street how she remembered the 2006
world cup and she answered roughly that she knows it was a huge thing
not because she remembers how it was because she was 2 at the time, but
because of how many stuff with good emotions come up when you search for
the 2006 soccer world cup on social media. What she said
reminded me that there are people who don't know a world without
social media. I'm from the generation that doesn't know a world
without electricity. If I look at the memories of my parents and
grandparents, I look at Soviet Union things. Or a part of the world
that has been rolled over by Soviet tanks in WWII to be more precise.
Believe it or not when I'm saying it, people in the Soviet Union had electricity. Similarly most of us people don't know the world
before the atomic bomb.
But some people around us do. These people
remember times when for example you could start a war without
getting into a spiral of events that would lead to the anihilation
of our planet the human race and all the living things together.
I'm not saying the world was better then, because you could start a war.
Wars are bad. But the world was certainly different back then.

(snip)
--- Synchronet 3.21e-Win32 NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.privacy

In <87a5iyi4n3.fsf@enoch.nodomain.nowhere> Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

gaussianblue <gaussianblue@asymptote.invalid> writes:

harley@yazzy.com writes:

As for this AI stuff, what the hell is it? I can find on the Web
how to do Python, C++ and other languages. Where is the page
showing what in the hell this AI stuff is? I'm rather inclined to
believe the whole AI thing is a hoax.

To get a clear picture of how the underlying computations work, have a
look at the "Parallel Distributed Processing" books (Rumelhart,
McClelland et al, MIT Press, 1986).

For even further background, look at the "expanded edition" of
"Perceptrons", (Minsky & Papert, MIT Press, 1988) wherein the authors
confess to having gotten the future wrong in the 1969 1st edition.

Doing this stuff in 1986 was hard because the inherent notions far
exceeded couputing power of the era. We/They have come a long way.
Now they're building the vast computation into dedicated hardware, so
vast that they're finding energy and heat nore critical than RAM
capacity and CPU speed.

That said, I understand the basic stuff from the 80s & 90s but I don't >inderstand at the same level how the current generation of
"generative" AI works, on top of that underlying tech/theory to
produce what spuriously appears to be creative, thoughtfull text,
audio & video and well-constructed natural language. I don't know of
a similarly accessible book that explains this most recent advance.

Interesting. Have you tried searching for scientific papers on
webofknowledge or scholar.google.com?

But the lesson to take away is that the current, putaive AI is no more >"intelligent", in any meaningful sense, than the models found in
Rumelhart & McClelland 40 years ago. It's the same pattern
recognition (a great success) overlain with a humongusly deceptive
trick to produce convincing, natural-sounding language.

I'm familiar with GNU. The idea that when dealing with software the users must be able to:
- Run the software
- Share it with others (or copy)
- Analyze how it works (or be able to read and analyze the source code)
- Make changes to it (or modify the source code)

AI is still a program because it runs on a computer. I wonder how the
demands we are making to software when advocating for free software look
like when that software is AI. Especially analyzing how the
software works. AI is composed of a program that runs on a computer
and of the training data. AI is becoming more and more popular.
GPT can be accessed for free on the web. Some
of us have access to paid versions as well. Many program parts of AIs
are closed source. Others are free software. An example of an AI I know
where at least the program part is free software is llamar by superkuh:

http://superkuh.com/llamar.html

Still for many AIs the training data is closed source. But even if it
was free, training data is huge. You don't analyze
how AI works by looking at the training data the way you would look
at the source code of a program.

(snip)
--- Synchronet 3.21e-Win32 NewsLink 1.2