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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • Well, the plan then, if other countries start pulling away from US tech/hegemony as you suggest they will do, and are doing, is to use overwhelming military force with unending waves of AI-powered killer robots capable of combat in land, sea, and air. Use them everywhere, all at once, against everyone in a titanic billionaire temper tantrum the likes of which has never been seen on Earth. Because, if Karp and Thiel and Andreesen and all the other tech oligarchs don’t get their wish, they will absolutely attempt to totally annihilate the planet in a massive temper tantrum.










  • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.worldOPtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Algorithm Finally Works For You
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    8 months ago

    First, I want to ask about these price-tracking websites, do they update in real-time? Do they get their information from confidential data or public data? Do they alert to changes and, in the case of say, applying for an apartment, time the application submission at exactly the right time? Do they collaborate with each other? See, I just learned about algorithmic price fixing and how companies in nearly every industry, every facet of life, give their algorithms access to vast amounts of data, both public and private, and these algorithms share their data with each other, allowing companies to indirectly collude and fix prices without human intervention. What can we common folk do against that?

    I’m just saying, you’re mentioning search engines, and the author says

    You had Google and a spreadsheet if you were organized.

    So, how can I, with my spreadsheets and my search engine, possibly stand up to Big AI? David and Goliath was a nice fable, but now Goliath is back, and has friends, and laws protecting them, and all David has, is a sling and a single rock.



  • What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power.

    Corporate algorithms gave them that power, or at least have been helping them to maintain it for decades. The article uses the very real example of RealPage, whose YieldStar software was helping landlords manage over 3 million rental properties in the US by 2022. Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped. Landlords are still coordinating rent prices across the vast majority of rental properties, and all the common folk has to help is, like the article says, “Zillow and a prayer”.


  • Also, so what if algorithms cost a lot of money? That’s not really an argument for why LLMs level the playing field.

    It’s not just the money. It’s the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all. It’s knowing how to ask the algorithm for the information you want in a way that it can understand, in knowing how to visualize the data points it gives. As you said, there’s an entire field of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization. Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff. I sure don’t, but damn if I am tired of having to rely on “Zillow and a prayer” if I want to get a house or apartment.



  • I don’t really think that’s true, because, again, idk why people here think this is all a bad take. It’s real simple. For decades, corporations and institutions have had the upper hand. They have vast resources to spend on computational power and enterprise software and algorithms to keep things asymmetrically efficient. Algorithms don’t sleep, don’t get tired, they follow one creed ABO, Always Be Optimizing. But that software costs a lot of money, and you have to know all this other stuff to know how to use it correctly. Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you’d talk to another human, and you get what you ask for.