emmowo

joined 3 weeks ago
[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

honestly, depending on how it affects media in the future, it could really have a similar effect on us, even if it doesn't directly poison people. Poorly presented information/misinformation has, and will certainly continue to result in so many preventable tragedies.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

search results have absolutely died ever since last year honestly, and each month it feels even worse somehow.

AI seems to use some weird black-box approach to find sites nowadays? That might be the reason why my stuff is hit with so much random garbage nowadays.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I can understand this viewpoint (and it's similar to the first point), and I do agree that there is a push to defer things to AI. But from my limited experience, it's like a crutch for other issues that force it to be used by very talented people who otherwise want to get things done properly to save headaches later.

My experience was in the kind of place you would really not want AI to screw you over in, but there was also a very tight timeline to get things done, so I think they ended up just trusting AI to a pretty frightening extent with (iirc) some buildroot stuff that got some people a bit vocal. I think even I used an AI overview once because I just really wanted to be done with a demo.

It was over a year ago though so I don't really remember what ultimately came of the AI use, but there are 100% situations where this becomes the only option, although I personally will avoid AI unless I'm realistically out of any other option not to. And for that reason I've fallen more out of favour with CS since I enjoy the journey and all the little judgements you make more than the outcome.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

Computer science, and quite scarily, a bit of medicine?

Pharmacists are gonna have to review even more slop now with this scope creep smh /j

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.

Calculators... are devices designed to produce deterministic results that can be proven (and yes, with a seed AI is technically deterministic, but that doesn't make it easily provable) as accurate very easily. If you removed calculators from a task, either the result would be completely the same, or it would be worse due to error introduced by something unpredictable.

past like really, really early education, I don't really see a point to go without a calculator since it uses up so much time for little gain.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I mean you probably could do a decent range of web apps in a day as a minimum viable product, if you already have a solid plan ready. But that's kind of the thing with AI.

AI... really seems to just make derivative stuff. I tried asking it to replicate one of my terminal text editors (via a description of it), and it ended up making... essentially a 1:1 rip off of different editor but with more comments. I have a feeling that the massive amount of training data is what makes it seem like it can write lots of applicable code, while it's still suffering from quite literally being just a larger version of this half-decade old Google Translate update under the hood.

 

it's getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.

And for clarity I'm not in research or anything, so these people just mean 'LLM/image gen', not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

Some have argued it's just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you're actively hindering your intelligence somehow.

On the first point:

I've tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it's always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other 'public' (but not libre) works, and often isn't the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.

But for the second... isn't this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren't experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.

And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn't you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?

I guess I'm trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be 'falling behind' in that affects them more than those who use AI?

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

well if the bots do implement checks for this software, that also wastes their compute, but at a disproportionately large level just to make sure a few images (compared to actual billions of other images) aren't obfuscated.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

That would increase complexity, but I kind of like the ability to gauge what the image was probably supposed to be. It seems like AI can't identify objects as easily even when the changes aren't really that drastic.

Currently I am experimenting with using a 'phrase' to encrypt the image in chunks as well, which has shown some really promising results!

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Anubis can do an okay job... (at least so the whole site isn't being actively DDos'ed) at the cost of compromising user experience a lot by sending harder challenges more often. It kinda sucks that the average user might not have that fast of a CPU, while motivated scrapers might spend tonnes on compute just out of spite.

(i am a bit biased on this though)

 

I wrote a small test of an idea that I had, and the thumbnail to this is an example of one of the images it produces.

Basically, it scrambles an image into block regions visually, and then optionally XOR's the image data with a secret to create an encrypted image which AI struggles to properly recognize, and makes the image become junk for training. Users with this tool for this can then compute the original image for themselves.

This has the massive benefit of not adding extra information into the image, so it can 'blend in' with real images as well.

This process (with encryption) is reversible in a visually imperceptible way at lower 'magic' sizes (which this image pushes due to vibrancy), while taking time for any motivated scrapers to brute-force.

you can test this yourself with a block size of 128 and magic of 35. The code and some more information is available at https://codeberg.org/emmowo/scrapescramble

In the future, I might implement this as a bit of JS you can add to your websites (or as a browser extension) as a means of making all visitors passively decode the image without needing to use an external app.

This implementation is just a proof-of-concept, so tonnes can be done to increase the complexity of 'cracking' these images later on. This is meant to be more of a deterrence than outright prevention, but it does have some use for it.

Either way, feedback would be nice!

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

you can use it to (sometimes) transplant your personal config and documents onto another OS, but it comes with the tradeoff of losing space in root that might be used for massive libraries (compute libraries suck in this regard).

And sometimes your /home will depend on things that your rootfs doesn't have, which has caused problems for me before. But if you planned for these things beforehand, and your installed software doesn't do something really dumb, it can work out pretty well, although my personal experience with this is limited to effectively embedded Linux where this is usually a non-issue.

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

Even ext4 still has safety measures (BLOAT!11!!1) because of journaling.

This is why i compile my kernels on ext2 with without swap for maximum utilization /j

[–] emmowo@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I wonder if using a hash-based system could work slightly better (on platforms where you can't edit image links) in these cases where a platform decides to stop serving to some users or go defunct. So that way, you can at least have a slight chance of 'fixing' an image after the fact.

It wouldn't work with most image share sites, but at least you could rehost it on a mirror yourself.

 

kinda just figuring out lemmy so here's a dumb meme

reddit jank actually meant I couldn't delete my account when I logged onto it, so... thanks?

on the downside I think I may have lost my

spoilerarchlinux femboy x gentoo gf
stuff as a result, but I can just draw it better ig.

view more: next ›