I never left, I just started using both.

Probably the "final straw" would be shutting down old.Reddit. Unless they do something else unexpectedly awful that I haven't thought of.

In our case the lanes were in for quite a few years. As I mentioned, we cycled through a couple of city councils before enough of the politicians that had spearheaded the initiative were gone and the new ones could do a study without feeling like their reputations were on the line.

And I should note, for those who are downvoting me, that I'm simply describing what happened. I ride my bike, I like bike lanes, but if bike lanes get put in bad places then popular support for bike lanes in general is harmed. If you like bike lanes too then you should be advocating for them to be placed where it's optimal for bike lanes to exist, not to place them in every possible location regardless of utility.

Not necessarily. In my home city a few years back there was a big initiative to install bike lanes, city council was proudly declaring "X kilometers of bike lanes installed." Turns out that was literally the only metric they cared about, the number of kilometers they could announce, and as a result the lanes were added wherever it was easiest and cheapest to turn an existing road lane into a bike lane. Most of them weren't being used, they were just wasting space. An election or two later a major study was done and many of the bike lanes were turned back into car lanes again.

They should be clear about the criteria, but if a similar situation has happened it makes sense to roll some of it back.

If it's not communicating anything, what's the point?

My point is that if we turn up our gibberish dial now then at least our llms will be learning the wrong thing & we have some control.

We'd be covering ourselves in poop to prevent people from sitting next to us on the train. Sure, people will avoid sitting next to us, but in the meantime we'll be covered in poop.

And then other people will learn the trick, cover themselves in poop too, and now everyone's poopy and the trick stops working.

There is still a lot of understanding that we do automatically that an llm will never do.

Are you willing to bet the convenience of comprehensible online discourse on that? "Automatically understanding stuff" is basically the one job of LLMs.

LLMs model language, and coming up with some kind of "gibberish" filter is simply inventing a new language. If there's semantic meaning in it the LLMs will figure it out just like any other language, and if there isn't semantic meaning then we've lost the ability to communicate entirely. I see no upside.

In my experience the vast majority of posts about Elon Musk are from people who hate him and are tired of hearing about him.

I'm not talking about a summarizer, I'm talking about a classifier. It just needs to identify which parts of the page are advertising and which are not.

The point of such a tool is that it would read the web page in exactly the same way that a human would, so using trickery like pre-rendered images of text or funky unicode wouldn't really change anything. If a human can read it then so can the AI.

Well, the "at least for now" part is my point - if people start using "gibberish" to communicate or to hide their communication, that provides training material for LLMs to let them figure out how to use it too.

LLMs learn how to communicate based on existing examples of communication. As long as humans are communicating with each other somehow then LLMs will be able to train how to do that too. They have the same communication capabilities that we do at this point, so there's not really any way we can make a secret clubhouse that they can't figure out how to infiltrate.

Personally, I think there's two main routes we can go to deal with this. Either we can simply accept that there's no way to be 100% sure we're talking to a human any more and evaluate the value of our conversation based on the content of the words spoken rather than the composition of the entity generating them, or we could come up with some kind of "proof of personhood" system to allow people to label the text the write as coming from them.

The latter is extremely hard to do, of course, both from a technical and cultural perspective. And such a system would likely still allow someone's "person token" to be sneakily used by AI, either by voluntarily delegating it (I could very well be retyping all of this out of a ChatGPT window) or through hackery.

So I'm inclined toward the former. If I'm chatting with someone and I'm having a good time doing it, and then later I find out it was a bot, why should that change how much fun I had?

I don't see how that would be practical. People who aren't "in on the joke", as it were, will call out the gibberish and downvote it. If enough people are "in on the joke" then the whole forum becomes useless and some other forum will be created to fill the role of the original. The AI will train off of that one.

Basically, if you don't want an AI training on your content, then don't post your content in public where an AI will see it. The Fediverse is the last place you should be posting since its very nature is about openly broadcasting your content to whoever wants to see it.

Adblockers aren't made by "corporate overlords." This wouldn't be either.

Someday soon my "adblocker" might be a personal AI that reads the spam-ridden website on a virtual display in memory, identifies the actual content while pretending to look at whatever ads the site demands, and then passes the information I'm actually looking for along to me. Good luck captchaing that.

You realize that this is only going to train LLMs how to recognize "gibberish?"

"Good intentions", I presume.

My position has always been "if there are people who are disadvantaged then pass laws to help disadvantaged people rather than making the assumption that everyone with a particular set of genetics need help." I guess it's just easier to take that shortcut though.

Knowing whether I have First Nations blood on my mother's side would have real legal benefits for me (my mom is estranged from her family and so has never told me much about them, but there's some possibility there given their historical context). I know a friend who had to prove he was 1/8 Metis in order to get a job as a web designer with a particular company.

I think it's ridiculous and flat out racist, frankly, but there are indeed benefits in this day and age from having particular ancestry.

Yeah, when I saw this headline my first thought is "aww, my dog loved it when I got an Amazon package because she got to destroy all those balloon things for me."

That would be ideal, sure, but simply getting rid of the extra space that would allow the item to bounce around inside the box is very useful too.

It's unfortunate that there's such a powerful knee-jerk prejudice against blockchain technology these days that perfectly good solutions are sitting right there in front of us but can't be used because they have an association with the dreaded scarlet letters "NFT."

Not only can AI do that, it probably does it far better than a human would.

I like XKCD's solution. Aside from the fact that it would heavily reinforce whatever bubble each community lived in, of course.

There is a certain amount of irony when people respond to a comment that mentions AI with a reflexive "AI is just a fancy autocomplete!" Without any relevance to the larger context.

Yeah. A lot of people loudly declaring that they're switching to Linux, followed by them staying with Windows anyway.