Lvxferre

The video isn’t trying to imitate a German speaker with poor English; it’s simply German syntax with English vocabulary.

It’s kind of funny how extremely similar English and German are, but you notice it only when you neither natively speak. Because of that doesn’t the video even off to me sound.

(And yes, I’m doing it on purpose. Why not?)

You could, but even then you need to put some thought on how to prompt and review/edit the output.

I’ve noticed from usage that LLMs are extremely prone to repeat verbatim words and expressions from the prompt. So if you ask something like “explain why civilisation is bad from the point of view of a cool-headed logician”, you’re likely outing yourself already.

A lot of the times the output will have “good enough” synonyms. That you could replace with more accurate words… and then you’re outing yourself already. Or simply how you fix it so it sounds like a person instead of a chatbot, we all have writing quirks and you might end leaking them into the review.

And more importantly you need to aware that it is an issue, and that you can be tracked based on how and what you write.

You can’t eat your cake and have it too.

And I can’t “magically” know what you’re referring to, either - given that you’re replying to a rather long comment but providing exactly zero context on what specifically you’re replying to.

Quotes, use them.

If you genuinely believe that the current LLMs are intelligent, odds are that you have nothing meaningful to talk about LLMs, and thus I won’t waste my time with you.

deleted by creator

I did simplify the whole thing, as you noticed; but note that his SIL and brother identifying him is another example of the same process, David knew that expressions that Ted used like “cool-headed logicians” were highly unusual, not too unlike what the socio- and forensic linguists did there.

But if the author does not have a large body of writing that is known to come from that individual

Such as a Lemmy or Facebook account? Or any other online account associated with your writing, really; we produce far more text in the internet than ourselves realise.

And while a priori, your different accounts through different websites might look completely disconnected, as you connect two of them as coming from the same person, connecting a third one is easier. And a fourth. So goes on.

A small caveat is that while the corpus is bigger, so is the noise introduced by people from the other side of the world that happen to use the same patterns as the person whom you want to identify. Even then, I believe that the ability to bulk process text to find authorship grew considerably faster than the number of potential matches.

Got it - that’s a fair view then.

I don’t rule out the possibility of future intelligent text generators, but I don’t think that large language models will do it.

I don’t know enough about the evolution of cognition in human beings to believe that your second statement is wrong or right.

Factorio oil processing is a pain in the butt. Surprisingly accurate.

It has been a long time since I played the game, but if I recall correctly my approach is to research coal liquefaction ASAP, and then have enough chem plants to crack all heavy into light, and all light into gas. Then use the pumps to set preferential consumption targets:

• gas - sulphur and plastic, in whatever order
• light - rocket fuel, then solid fuel, then cracking into gas
• heavy - coal liquefaction (backfeeding), then lubricant, then cracking into light

With a large enough supply of coal and water, this means that the oil processing will never stop due to a backlog of light or heavy. Only if there’s a backlog of gas, but my factories typically eat gas like there’s no tomorrow.

Before seeing the video, let me guess - the oil that it produces is too light or too heavy for its own consumption.

After seeing the video, here’s a summary:

• Local oil deposits required different techniques to retrieve than the conventional techniques back then.
• There used to be a ban on oil exportation, nowadays lifted
• The oil being currently extracted is light oil, but the refineries were built for heavy oil
• It’s overall cheaper to exchange the light oil for heavy oil than to adapt the local refineries to use light oil.
• No new refineries are going to be built for environmental and political concerns.

So my guess was somewhat correct, but it’s more complicated.

I’m not too interested on what happens in those countries like USA, but I like the underlying chemistry, so here’s some further explanation:

Petroleum is mostly composed of a messy mixture of hydrocarbons. Some of them are light molecules, like butane (4 carbons); some reach, like 40 carbons, so they’re big molecules with high melting and boiling points. And plenty fall within that range.

Depending on the size of the molecule, it might be suited for one or another application, so it’s convenient to coarsely separate them. That’s done by fractional distillation; the name might sound fancy, but it boils down to “extract separately what boils at different temperatures”. The output of that separation is called a “fraction”, and it’s typically like this:

• 1~4 carbons: gas
• 5~10 carbons: petrol
• 11~13 carbons: kerosene
• 14~18 carbons: diesel
• 19~25 carbons: heavy oil
• 26~40 carbons: lubricating oil
• 41+: residuum

It’s actually messier than that; that number of carbons is for typical molecules in that fraction, not all of them. (For example, petrol has some molecules with 4, 11, or 12 carbons.) But look at the pattern: in general, lighter fractions are for stuff that has heavier consumption. In other words, lighter fractions are commercially more desirable.

And of course nature isn’t so convenient to give you just the right ratios as you want, you’ll typically get far more of the heavier fractions than you want, for any given barrel of petroleum. That’s industrially solved by a bunch of processes called “cracking”, that boil down to “see that big arse molecule? Crack it into smaller ones”.

What I said until now is a good chunk of what petroleum refineries do: first they separate the fractions of petroleum fractions, then they crack the heavier ones.

There’s a catch though: petroleum composition varies wildly. Some sources output lighter petroleum, with proportionally more light fractions; while some output a heavier petroleum, full of those useful-but-less-so fractions. And refineries are usually built for one or another type of petroleum, and it’s damn bloody expensive to convert a refinery for heavy petroleum into one for light petroleum or vice versa.

The video is about the consequences of that problem.

It’s actually worse.

The video focuses on how you’re leaking personal info all the time through the software that you use and the connections that you make, and ways to mitigate it.

However, have you guys heard about forensic linguistics? That’s how the Unabomber was caught. The way that you use your language(s) is pretty unique to yourself, and can be used to uncover your identity. This was done manually by two guys, Fitzgerald and Shuy; they were basically identifying patterns in how Unabomber wrote to narrow down the suspects further and further, until they hit the right guy.

Now, let’s talk about large “language” models, like Gemini or ChatGPT. Frankly, I believe that people who think that LLMs are “intelligent” or “comprehend language” themselves lack intelligence and language comprehension. But they were made to find and match patterns in written text, and rather good at it.

Are you getting the picture? What Fitzgerald and Shuy did manually 30 years ago can be automated now. And it gets worse, note how those LLMs “happen” to be developed by companies that you can’t trust to die properly (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and its vassal OpenAI).

So, while the video offers some solid advice regarding privacy, sadly it is not enough. If you’re in some deep shit, and privacy is a life-or-death matter for you, I strongly advise you be always mindful of what and how you write.

And, for the rest of us: fighting individually for our right to privacy is not enough. We need to assemble and organise ourselves, to fight on legal grounds against those who are trying to kill it. You either fight for your rights or you lose them.

Just my two cents. I apologise as this is just side-related to the video, but I couldn’t help it.

Those concerns mostly apply to artificial general intelligence, or “AGI”. What’s being developed is another can of worms entirely, it’s a bunch of generative models. They’re far from intelligent; the concerns associated with them is 1) energy use and 2) human misuse, not that they’re going to go rogue.

Interesting video. At the core it can be summed up as:

• “AI is existential threat” is a lie of big tech trying to use regulatory capture against competitors
• the main competition for that big tech would be open source generative models
• we should fight against big tech in this

Huey’s 4D chess: “The bowl is empty now, but it fills itself! It’ll get more nuts! Better to bring it home than leaving it near those giant monkeys with a weird fur pattern!”

It’s… kind of obvious that I only watched the first half of the video, when I commented, right? My bad. (I did watch the rest afterwards.)

Summary: “overengineered”.

I’ve been looking for further info on the new capital, and something that caught my attention was how often it’s compared with a trainwreck project from the government that I pay taxes to: the construction of Brasília.

The fact that the military junta started a few years after Brasília’s construction is not a coincidence, this sort of project puts a huge burden on the public coffers, and thus on the general population of a country.

Furthermore, I encourage anyone here to look at satellite views of Brasília… or rather around it, its “satellite cities” within the Federal District. Even today, the class segregation there is egregious - while some parts of the Federal District have living standards comparable to Europe, some are better compared with those North American countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Egypt’s new capital will likely develop exactly the same way - with a ruling “caste” living in the city strictu sensu, then the lower “castes” (who can’t afford living in the overengineered city) building shanty towns around it.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the pressures prompting the Egyptian government to throw their capital into the middle of nowhere was similar to Brazil in the 1950s-60s: “the government lives too close to the population, what if it rebels against our Rightful Rule®?”. Now if you want to protest against your government, you need to cross the desert. And yeah the government will totally not find a thousand ways to prevent you from doing so.

If they were actually concerned about excessive relative demographic density, or the development of the desert, they would be creating cities (plural) for people. Not for a government.

/rant

A lot of writers (Borges, Umberto Eco, Lewis Carroll, and others) talk about this problem through an analogy, of a map that is so big and detailed that it represents its territory 1:1. Thus being useless.

Those calls for additional nuance are a lot like asking for more details in a map. Eventually you need to prioritise, considering the scope and the purpose of the theory.

Regarding aesthetics, mentioned around 5:00 - cue to the concept of elegance often involving things like “trying to do the most with the least”.

Nota bene: the author of the article is not proposing turning everything into spherical cows, and ditching necessary complexity. The youtuber neither, nor me. 50 is still 50, even if “it’s either 0 or 100 lol lmao” would be simpler.

I think that we have a limited ability to process (absorb, analyse, retrieve what’s meaningful, discard what’s meaningless) information as a whole, that is used to process both general and narrow info. And, when we go considerably past our limits to process info, our brains start taking “shortcuts” to process the info that we’re exposed to, such as:

• simplifying meta-info, such as the truth value of the info
• some types of fallacious thinking
• disregarding bits of info that are highly visible, because they are not central or expected
• using the “default” way to obtain new, relevant info (asking it), even when other means would be desirable

And that some things demand quite a bit of that “processing info” ability; for example

• Discarding meaningless info, specially when associated with a stronger and/or repetitive stimulus
• Look for missing bits of info on what’s said, as the unspoken consequences of what you’re being told to do.

That’s advertisement in a nutshell - people telling you what you should do, without telling you all things that you need to know, in a flashy and repetitive way. And it applies specially well to online advertisement.

It wouldn’t be just advertisement doing it, mind you; but I do think that advertisement plays a huge role.

If the reasoning above is correct, this should be affecting all of us, not just GenZ and GenΑ. And we could even hypothesise if it’s affecting them more than GenX and GenY, as well as why:

• perhaps GenZ+Α are more exposed to advertisement than GenX+Y?
• perhaps it affects them the most because the way that you process info depends mostly on childhood+adolescence, so GenX+Y never had the chance to ingrain those “shortcuts” to begin with?

Just my two cents, mind you. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the above was false; I still felt that it was worth sharing. [Sorry for the long reply.]

This is just a hypothesis, but I believe that one of the roots of the problem is a lower ability to retrieve information, caused by increased exposure to advertisement.

Regardless of the above, the problem is actually a big deal, once you consider things like meta-information (such as truth value and reliability of a claim) being also information; so if people don’t get info on their own, it’s easy to misinform them. So it isn’t the muppet failing to see “this is a Lebbit story” and screeching at the “actress” of that video, it’s also a similar muppet saying shit like “ivermectin cures covid” or “jet fuel is making the frogs gay”.