We Avoid Temptation But It Keeps Finding Us

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • This tech isn’t new, exactly, though it’s probably significantly more sophisticated now. I used to work at a company that used similar monitoring a decade ago. Theirs was (allegedly) triggered only by the motion of the vehicle, I believe DriveCam was the brand name. It sucked back then, I’d imagine it sucks worse now.

    My guess with the reality of the situation is Amazon or their insurance company required installation of the cameras and a low-to-mid level manager somewhere noticed that singing was triggering them, so the manager told people to stop and eventually you end up with this news story. Amazon gets at worst plausible deniability and shitty things continue.







  • Maybe it doesn’t need to be.

    I’m not going to say AI is completely useless, because it’s objectively not. I’ve heard it’s incredibly helpful in pharmaceutical development and science and shit like that.

    LLMs are fancy autocomplete. They guess the most likely next word, based on some fancy-ass math I can’t claim to attempt to understand. They don’t understand the code, or anything really. It’s all math and weighted probabilities internally. How can something that doesn’t understand what it’s actually saying write good, usable, actually correct code all of the time? Sometimes it gets lucky and you get a working snippet, or it rips off someone else’s code (possibly verbatim), and sometimes it just generates nonsense.

    I’ve had the last option happen to me personally. I asked it to generate a script in Home Assistant (fantastic software by the way) to dim my lights automatically over half an hour. It worked, sometimes, but the math that actually stepped the light down in brightness wasn’t correct and the script failed intermittently.

    Maybe it can help write boilerplate, but realistically there will be additional errors inserted and it will require an actual living breathing human to fix.

    This is also entirely beside the point that I think you’re mixing up the FSF and GNU project. They’re related but not actually the same. The FSF is fundraisers and lawyers, GNU writes code. That might be why FSF never responded, though to be perfectly honest given what you’ve said, GNU will likely want nothing to do with it if it’s tainted with AI-generated code. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen (literally) for no benefit from their perspective.