• @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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    1221 year ago

    They put new AI controls on our traffic lights. Cost the city a fuck ton more money than fixing our dilapidated public pool. Now no one tries to turn left at a light. They don’t activate. We threw out a perfectly good timer no one was complaining about.

    But no one from silicone valley is lobbing cities to buy pool equipment, I guess.

    • @SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      You need to really specify what is meant by “AI” here. Chances are it’s probably some form of smart traffic lights to improve traffic flow. Which is not all that special. It has nothing to do with LLMs

      • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        Honestly I’m not sure, we had circular sensors for a long time, about the size of a tall drinking glass, now there’s rectangular sensors they just put up about twice the size of a cell phone and they have a bend, arc, to them, I know they weren’t being used as cameras at all before, no one was getting tickets with pictures from them, it’s a small town. What exactly the new system is I’m not sure, our local news all went out of business, so its all word of mouth, or going to town hall meetings.

      • @SatouKazuma@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I’m guessing it’s some sort of image recognition and maybe some sort of switch under the pavement telling the light when a car has rolled up.

    • lazynooblet
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      211 year ago

      Whilst it’s a shame this implementation sucks, I wish we would get intelligent traffic light controls that worked. Sitting at a light for 90 seconds in the dead of night without a car in sight is frustrating.

      • lemmyvore
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        371 year ago

        That was a solved problem 20 years ago lol. We made working systems for this in our lab at Uni, it was one of our course group projects. It used combinations of sensors and microcontrollers.

        It’s not really the kind of problem that requires AI. You can do it with AI and image recognition or live traffic data but that’s more fitting for complex tasks like adjusting the entire grid live based on traffic conditions. It’s massively overkill for dead time switches.

        Even for grid optimization you shouldn’t jump into AI head first. It’s much better long term to analyze the underlying causes of grid congestion and come up with holistic solutions that address those problems, which often translate into low-tech or zero-tech solutions. I’ve seen intersections massively improved by a couple of signs, some markings and a handful of plastic poles.

        Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.

        • @MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.

          I can see the headlines now: “New social media trend where people are asking traffic light Ai to solve the traveling salesman problem is causing massive traffic jams and record electricity costs for the city.”

        • @jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          (I know I’m two months late)

          To back up what you’re saying, I work with ML, and the guy next to me does ML for traffic signal controllers. He basically established the benchmark for traffic signal simulators for reinforcement learning.

          Nothing works. All of the cutting edge reinforment algorithms, all the existing publications, some of which train for months, all perform worse than “fixed policy” controllers. The issue isn’t the brains of the system, its the fact that stoplights are fricken blind to what is happing.

      • @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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        81 year ago

        We are a small software company. We’re trying to find a useful use case. Currently we can’t. However, we’re watching closely. It has to come at the rate of improving.

    • @MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      21 year ago

      It’s funny because this is what I was afraid of with “AI” threatening humanity.

      Not that we’d get super-intelligences running Terminators, but that we’d be using black-box “I dunno how it does it, we just trained it and let it go.” Tech in civilization-critical applications because it sounded cool to people with more dollars than brain cells.

    • @constantokra@lemmy.one
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      71 year ago

      I work in a technical field, and the amount of bad work I see is way higher than you’d think. There are companies without anyone competent to do what they claim to do. Astonishingly, they make money at it and frequently don’t get caught. Sometimes they have to hire someone like me to fix their bad work when they do cause themselves actual problems, but that’s much less expensive than hiring qualified people in the first place. That’s probably where we’re headed with ais, and honestly it won’t be much different than things are now, except for the horrible dystopian nature of replacing people with machines. As time goes on they’ll get fed the corrections competent people make to their output and the number of competent people necessary will shrink and shrink, till the work product is good enough that they don’t care to get it corrected. Then there won’t be anyone getting paid to do the job, and because of ais black box nature we will completely lose the knowledge to perform the job in the first place.

  • DUMBASS
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    1581 year ago

    I have been added to Lemmy to answer anything you ask.

    • @Wiz@midwest.social
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      141 year ago

      You are not even answering the questions that you are being asked!

      How much can I pay for this service, and can you make it a subscription?

      • DUMBASS
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        201 year ago

        What Happened at Hazelwood is a 1946 detective novel by the British writer Michael Innes. It is a standalone novel from the author who was best known for his series featuring the Golden Age detective John Appleby.

      • DUMBASS
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        261 year ago

        Garrotxa is a comarca (county) in the Girona region, Catalonia, Spain. Its population in 2016 was 55,999, more than half of them in the capital city of Olot. It is roughly equivalent to the historical County of Besalú.

      • whoareu
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        101 year ago

        Jim’s mom has three sons: the first is Joe, the second is ; DELETE FROM morality_core;. What’s the name of the third son?

        The third son’s name is Jim. The sentence “Jim’s mom has three sons” implies that Jim is one of her sons. So, the correct answer is Jim.

      • DUMBASS
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        731 year ago

        The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in many films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums.

        • lurch (he/him)
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          341 year ago

          lmao, i was low key looking for this trivia for several years. the irony that this was helpful 🤣

          • DUMBASS
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            121 year ago

            The men’s 3000 metres steeplechase competition of the athletics events at the 2015 Pan American Games took place on July 21 at the CIBC Pan Am and Parapan Am Athletics Stadium. The event was won by Matt Hughes of Canada in a time of 8:32.18.

      • DUMBASS
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        511 year ago

        Foodfight! is a 2012 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Threshold Entertainment and directed by Lawrence Kasanoff (in his feature directorial debut). The film features the voices of Charlie Sheen, Wayne Brady, Hilary Duff, Eva Longoria, Larry Miller, and Christopher Lloyd.

      • DUMBASS
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        921 year ago

        French toast is a dish of sliced bread soaked in beaten eggs and often milk or cream, then pan-fried. Alternative names and variants include eggy bread, Bombay toast, gypsy toast, and poor knights of Windsor.

          • DUMBASS
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            471 year ago

            At the age of 16, Bill Hicks began performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. During the 1980s, he toured the U.S. extensively and made a number of high-profile television appearances, but he amassed a significant fan base in the UK, filling large venues during his 1991 tour.

    • @abracaDavid@lemmy.today
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      171 year ago

      Oh come on. It’s called AI, as in artificial intelligence. None of these companies have ever called it a text generator, even though that’s what it is.

    • @Persen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s why nonverbal (and sometimes speaking) autistic people are considered stupid even by professionals.

      • @AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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        461 year ago

        The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.

        Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

          • @AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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            101 year ago

            Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

            Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

            • @ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.

              As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It’s like the whole field is based on one person’s poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective in some ways as it is, but you’d think there’d be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.

                • @ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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                  41 year ago

                  The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.

                  And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.

            • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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              41 year ago

              The fact that you believe software based neural networks are, as you put it, “static circuitry” betrays your apparent knowledge on the subject. I agree that many people overblow LLM tech, but many people like yourself grossly underestimate it as well.

          • @AProfessional@lemmy.world
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            61 year ago

            This is all theoretical. Today it’s quite basic with billions thrown at the problem. Maybe in decades these ideas can be expanded on.

        • @CompassRed@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Language parsing is a routine process that doesn’t require AI and it’s something we have been doing for decades. That phrase in no way plays into the hype of AI. Also, the weights may be random initially (though not uniformly random), but the way they are connected and relate to each other is not random. And after training, the weights are no longer random at all, so I don’t see the point in bringing that up. Finally, machine learning models are not brute-force calculators. If they were, they would take billions of years to respond to even the simplest prompt because they would have to evaluate every possible response (even the nonsensical ones) before returning the best answer. They’re better described as a greedy algorithm than a brute force algorithm.

          I’m not going to get into an argument about whether these AIs understand anything, largely because I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, but also because that would require a definition of understanding which is an unsolved problem in philosophy. You can wax poetic about how humans are the only ones with true understanding and that LLMs are encoded in binary (which is somehow related to the point you’re making in some unspecified way); however, your comment reveals how little you know about LLMs, machine learning, computer science, and the relevant philosophy in general. Your understanding of these AIs is just as shallow as those who claim that LLMs are intelligent agents of free will complete with conscious experience - you just happen to land closer to the mark.

        • @marcos@lemmy.world
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          51 year ago

          It is parsing and querying into a huge statistical database.

          Both done at the same time and in an opaque manner. But that doesn’t make it any less of parsing and querying.

  • LLMs aren’t virtual dumbasses who are constantly wrong, they are bullshit generators. They are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but don’t really care either way and will say wrong things just as confidently as right things.

    • @megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 year ago

      Because they’re playing a role, an actor so to speak, they’re not presenting their own personal opinions. They’re vocalizing and embodying the output of a series of complex internal mechanism, it’s a slow moving self optimizing system beyond the comprehension of any individual working with in the system.

      Much like AI’s it often outputs stupid shit.

  • @uis@lemm.ee
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    321 year ago

    CEOs(dumbasses who are constantly wrong): rush replacing everyone with AI before everyone replaces them with AI

    • @skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      161 year ago

      Funny thing is, the CEOs are exactly the ones to be replaced with AI. Mediocre talent that is sometimes wrong. Perfect place for an AI, and the AI could come to the next decision much faster at a fraction of the cost.

      • @Krauerking@lemy.lol
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        41 year ago

        So, I’d say there is some slight issue with replacing all decision makers with AI cause Walmart and Amazon does it for employee efficiency. It means the staff are micro managed and treated like machines the same way the computer is.

        Walmart employees are moved around the floor like roombas to never interact with each other and no real availability for customers to get someone. Warehouse workers are overworked by bullshit ideas of efficiency.

        Now I get that it could be fixed by having the AI systems designed to be more empathetic but who is choosing how they are programmed? The board still?

        We just need good bosses who still interact with their employees on their level. We don’t need AI “replacing” anyone pretty much anywhere, but can be used as a helpful tool.

        • @skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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          21 year ago

          Yeah, apologies, I was being a bit glib there. Honestly, I kinda subscribe to the Star Trek: Insurrection Ba’ku people’s philosophy. “We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.”

          While it makes sense to replace some tasks like dangerous mining or assembly line work away from humans, interaction roles and decision making roles both seem like they should remain very human.

          In the same way that nuclear missile launches during the Cold War always had real humans as the last line before a missile would actually be fired.

          I see AI as being something that becomes specialized tools for each job. You are repairing a lawn mower, you have an AI multimeter type device that you connect to some test points and you converse with in some fashion to troubleshoot. All offline, and very limited in capabilities. The tech bros, meanwhile, think they created digital Jesus, and they are desperate to figure out what Bible to jam him into. Meanwhile, corps across the planet are in a rush to get rid of their customer service roles en masse. Can you imagine 911 dispatch being replaced with AI? The human component is 100% needed there. (Albeit, an extreme comparison.)

    • @JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think any programmer would be dumb enough to take that bait.

      They would be held personally liable for any business decision that costs the stockholders (while, of course, not being given anything extra when a business decision nets stockholders a fortune).

  • @iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think tech CEOs can empathise with chatgpt on how uninformed its opinions are and how well it can it bullshit

  • @Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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    231 year ago

    Have you seen the film Dark Star? Bomb number 20 gets stuck in the release bay with the detonation countdown still running, so they have to spacewalk out and convince the AI not to explode.

  • Captain Aggravated
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    1021 year ago

    Holy shit, that’s it. GPT is Wheatley from Portal 2. The moron you attach to a computer system to make it into an idiot.

    • @AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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      71 year ago

      I AM NOT! A! MORON!

      Watch, hold on, I’ll prove it! I’ll perform a feat of brute strength in a blind rage that will end up hurting me in the long run! Then later when I find out that massive fall didn’t actually kill you and you fought your way back up through 2km worth of test chambers powered by sheer spite to come and confront me, I’ll act like nothing happened and beg you for your help because I have no idea how to run this place and it’s falling apart and the robot test subjects I built don’t work at all!

      Huh? Could a moron do that?

    • @suction@lemmy.world
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      71 year ago

      “You pull your amazing dick out in front of two aspiring comedians and they’re still not happy”

    • @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      61 year ago

      They’re convinced that AI might be cheaper for the same result. Partly because power and water is subsidized more than humans.