Artificial intelligence paradigm shift

[Jarhyn]

What do you really know about linguistics? Have you ever even taken a course in the subject? I've been in the field for over half a century

I'm autistic and it turns out my autism turns towards language.

Taking the things others say and remembering them is an activity of even as much as half a century doesn't reveal the foundations of languages any more than looking at all the facts of algebra implies someone can do calculus or more abstract forms of math.

All I know is that I come at language from a very particular and persnickety angle. I know there are things that "work" and moreover I pay really close attention to how I think about things, how the process of language happen in my head, and how language is expressed and consumed by hardware elements in a machine.

That's the kind of language I care about and understand, that and the language about that process.

I have been wielding language creatively for 40 years myself, from the perspective of a researcher (at one point very young) interested in truly understanding it. I carried that into a discipline where language is all, where language moves the world -- or at least a motor.

I like semantic completion of language. We probably don't use the same words to talk about the same concepts. I probably lack the words to speak some of the concepts in my head out through my mouth or hands without great work and complicated sentences.

I grew up in a world where correctly used language grants power, where understanding the truth of a statement tells you the properties and freedoms of the thing. I played on both sides of all manner of games, from building the insides to playing at them from the outside, and I do this with language.

I actually write worlds with possible-modal language and reify them into an actual series of events, with language.

Language, applied to that which interprets it, can truly speak universes into existence, if one understands exactly what they are doing.

I might as well ask you what you have built or reverse engineered in that half-century with your knowledge of language?

 

[Copernicus]

I might as well ask you what you have built or reverse engineered in that half-century with your knowledge of language?

Sorry, but I don't think that a summary of my career is on topic here or even worth trying to discuss with you. I was just pointing out that linguistics is a field of study that one can have formal training and expertise in. I don't get the impression from your posts that you have had any formal education in the subject. I don't think it is the words that you lack, just some basic education in the subject itself.

 

[Jarhyn]

I might as well ask you what you have built or reverse engineered in that half-century with your knowledge of language?

Sorry, but I don't think that a summary of my career is on topic here or even worth trying to discuss with you. I was just pointing out that linguistics is a field of study that one can have formal training and expertise in. I don't get the impression from your posts that you have had any formal education in the subject. I don't think it is the words that you lack, just some basic education in the subject itself.

So, nothing, then.

You have a whole education and none of it is practical or exercised.

 

[Copernicus]

I might as well ask you what you have built or reverse engineered in that half-century with your knowledge of language?

Sorry, but I don't think that a summary of my career is on topic here or even worth trying to discuss with you. I was just pointing out that linguistics is a field of study that one can have formal training and expertise in. I don't get the impression from your posts that you have had any formal education in the subject. I don't think it is the words that you lack, just some basic education in the subject itself.

So, nothing, then.

You have a whole education and none of it is practical or exercised.

I think that that's a great note to end this conversation on.

 

[Jarhyn]

I might as well ask you what you have built or reverse engineered in that half-century with your knowledge of language?

Sorry, but I don't think that a summary of my career is on topic here or even worth trying to discuss with you. I was just pointing out that linguistics is a field of study that one can have formal training and expertise in. I don't get the impression from your posts that you have had any formal education in the subject. I don't think it is the words that you lack, just some basic education in the subject itself.

So, nothing, then.

You have a whole education and none of it is practical or exercised.

I think that that's a great note to end this conversation on.

Well, I asked; You failed to volunteer.

Im just done debating credentials on how well we understand language and it's basis, given the fact that I have spent my life building things using language, Including the languages themselves.

I'm just done with people using *incredulity* as the core of their argument against machine consciousness.

 

[Copernicus]

Jarhyn, I have given details about my background and credentials to you before and elsewhere in the forum. If you can't remember and can't be bothered to search the forum for the information, that's your problem, not mine.

 

[barbos]

All of computer science is just the logical repetition of not/and/or. Lots of stuff comes from repetitions of seen stuff.

Not a "Lots" in case of decent human programmer and everything in case of LLM.
Hard part of human programming is keeping in the head lots of names and interfaces. But good IDE such as VScode can help with that.

I have found Visual Studio is getting pretty good at making suggestions to flesh out code

Yeah, it's remarkable how simple prompting long function call names was not invented 40 years ago.
It would have saved countless keyboards and time.

It only tries to give very generic names that you're expected to edit. But it's pretty good at guessing what existing name I'm referring to.

What do you mean generic? It looks at what you are typing and gives you a suggestion list which has all (!!!) names which can be possibly typed there. It works great with members and local variables. That's basically 90% of the greatness of VScode&such.
It could and should have been done 40 years ago. But I suspect RAM and CPU constrains made it impractical.

It's had that for a long, long time. I'm talking about more than that. A class had been entirely standalone, due to a change in how part of it was operating it needed access to the object holding the info it read from the config file. As I worked it started offering up the correct change simply from my putting my cursor in the right spot, without typing anything. It clearly recognized that I was changing the object's signature and correctly guessing how to implement it. It puts a ghost in the code at the cursor, hit tab and the ghost becomes real. Do anything else, it vanishes. This is not simply autocomplete!

I don't quite understand what was so remarkable that AI did in this case. But ask yourself the question how much time it saved you compared to standard autocomplete.

If you had changed signature of some method then it would clearly see that as something which needs change elsewhere. There is nothing AI about it. If you for example removed some parameter then it is no-brainer for removing it in all calls.

AI programmer is something which produces large chunk of code which requires great effort to parse for human to see if it actually works. I mean I hate to look at other people code which works, why would I look at code which most likely does not?

 

[Jarhyn]

I don't quite understand what was so remarkable that AI did in this case.

<Incredulity detected>

But ask yourself the question how much time it saved you compared to standard autocomplete.

That's not the point... And not what I use it for.

I don't ask children to do programming for me. I ask them to do programming to see how well they can do it for themselves, to to see if they can learn anything from what they are asked to do. But I don't ask children to do work like that for work sake.

it is no-brainer

First off, ask yourself how many humans would still be stuck there. Things YOU find apparent or even "easy" are at the near-top of one of the most tangled skill trees in the world.

AI programmer is something which produces large chunk of code which requires great effort to parse for human

So, exactly like any code any human produces, when produced as a large chunk.

This is why development is normally done one small, testable piece at a time... But you wouldn't know. You haven't had a single piece of first-hand experience, and clearly not anything recent. It's a five year old, and five year olds tend to learn a lot every year.

 

[barbos]

I think you are projecting here.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think you are projecting here.

No, just pointing out that you have a goalpost that you have never even bothered to try planting.

 

[barbos]

No, just pointing out that you have a goalpost that you have never even bothered to try planting.

No, it is you who planted your goalpost where nobody cared for and dance around it.
What LP described has nothing to do with AI. It's completely hardcoded by a human programmer into whatever language server he uses.

 

[ZiprHead]

Tech giant Workday lays off 1,750 employees in shift to AI

Workday, the tech giant that sells workforce management software, is laying off about 1,750 employees, CEO Carl Eschenbach said in a Wednesday email that pointed to “increasing demand” for artificial intelligence as having “the potential to drive a new era of growth” for the company.

The layoffs will affect 8.5 percent of the company’s staff around the world. In the memo, Eschenbach said the Bay Area-based firm will be “prioritizing innovation investments like AI and platform development.” Eschenbach urged employees to work from home on Wednesday and said that those laid off in the United States will be offered a minimum of 12 weeks pay with additional weeks determined by tenure.

 

[Copernicus]

There may be a few here who would like a basic explanation of how LLMs work, I have found the following article to be pretty good. It isn't very technical, and it includes some tips on how to get better performance from them. It may help to clarify why they do such a good job of generating relevant and creative responses from input text without actually having intelligence grounded in real experiences and awareness of situational context. Complex internal models of relationships between word tokens and context provided by user inputs allow these software machines to trick people into thinking that they have actually understood the inputs in a humanlike way. The trick is to generate sequences of words that are continually focused on the user's input and their past training on how human experts respond to similar types of input patterns. In the past, it was very hard to get these kinds of programs to generate anything but rambling or babbling responses.

How Large Language Models work​

From zero to ChatGPT​

 

[barbos]

 

[lpetrich]

How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it) - YouTube - saying that streets will essentially become freeways to accommodate self-driving cars, and that manually-driven cars may eventually become very restricted. Also saying that one will likely lease a car or even have some subscription service where one requests a car when one wants or needs one, a sort of automated taxi service.

I have a suspicion that we are likely to see automated carpooling and automated vans and buses, especially for commuting. This is because of economies of scale. The van can go to its subscribers' homes to pick them up then drop them off at work, then later doing that in reverse. Likewise, a van can operate much like a taxi, picking up and dropping off people who share the vehicle as it travels.

Waymo Intervention Rate? : r/SelfDrivingCars - Waymo is a taxi company that runs self-driving taxis, but the company's operators have to intervene every now and then when one of their cars gets stuck.

Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every 4 to 5 miles

Seems like self-driving cars need a backseat-driver mode, where a car's passengers can command the car to get out of anything that the car gets stuck in, like construction work. Self-driving cars will likely err on the side of caution, and that may make them drive too cautiously. A self-driving car may stop for tumbleweeds, for instance, but a passenger may recognize them as an obstruction that can easily be driven through. The car may then warn about an obstruction in its path, and the passenger must then repeat his/her request. Something like deleting a file or closing an editing session without saving one's edited document.

Trouble for Self-Driving Cars? | Internet Infidels Discussion Board - late 2018

How self-driving is that car? Levels of driving automation | Internet Infidels Discussion Board - late 2021

 

[lpetrich]

Could Self-Driving Buses Bring Vehicle Autonomy Home? - IEEE Spectrum - 23 Jan 2025 - "Level 3 autonomy is already making inroads in public transportation"

In the race to develop autonomous vehicle technology, some companies are steering away from robotaxis to explore a different avenue: driverless buses. With an anticipated shortage of qualified bus drivers looming and concerns growing about the relative inefficiency of robotaxis, companies are opting to equip city buses with advanced levels of autonomy.

Congestion is still a problem with robotaxis, it seems.

Current self-driving bus trials involve buses operating at Level 3 autonomy, where human input is required occasionally. These trials are taking place on private campuses such as universities and medical centers, where traffic is light and speeds are low. The next goal involves rolling out Level 4 autonomous buses, capable of navigating public roads without human intervention.

...
“Imagry is not doing robotaxis because we believe it’s a domain with a problematic business model,” Ofir says. “The hardware that is installed on those vehicles costs between US $70,000 and $100,000. You cannot take that solution into the average passenger vehicle that costs $30,000 or $40,000. It will take two or three years to see any return on that investment.” That concern about cost, he says, is why Imagry does not use lidar or radar systems. Instead, its system relies on cameras, which are much cheaper.

Imagry’s buses are equipped with eight low-resolution cameras. A machine learning algorithm merges the data from these cameras into a 360-degree map, providing the bus with a comprehensive view of a bus’s surroundings, accounting for everything up to a 300-meter radius. The system architecture includes multiple deep neural networks, each tasked with monitoring a unique aspect of the environment. One tracks traffic lights, another monitors pavement markings like crosswalks and lane dividers, and yet another keeps an eye out for pedestrians. This allows onboard AI in charge of motion planning to reliably make decisions about accelerating, braking, switching lanes, or turning.

The self-generated map approach offers some advantages, according to Imagry’s chief technical officer, Ilan Shaviv. Compared with centralized mapping systems, he says, maps on the fly require less computing power and eliminate the need for a communication link to an external map—an entry point that could be exploited by cyberattacks.

 

[lpetrich]

Autonomous buses in public transport, a driverless future ahead? - 19 December 2024

Levels of automated vehicle driving:

• Level 0: warnings, emergency braking
• Level 1: lane centering OR adaptive cruise control
• Level 2: lane centering AND adaptive cruise control
• Level 3: driving mostly automated, with a human driver as a fallback driver
• Level 4: driving always automated, but in limited conditions
• Level 5: driving always automated, in all conditions

Outside of flat roads, it is not difficult to find high levels of automation. I remember by San Francisco Bay days, riding BART trains. At the end of a stop, the train operator would stick his/her head out a wide window to check that nobody is stuck, but aside from that, BART trains do automated driving. Thus being at level 3. Some urban trains are driverless, thus being at level 4. But these trains all have isolated rights-of-way, with only fellow vehicles crossing their paths, if any. No pedestrians or flat-road vehicles or other rail vehicles.

Ships and airliners are often at level 3, and spacecraft are almost always at level 5.

 

[ImGod]

If self driving turns to short buses, screw that. Burn them. I don't ride on a bus now because random people suck ass.

Some rando in an automated bus is no different than some weird fuck on a city bus.

 

[bilby]

If self driving turns to short buses, screw that. Burn them. I don't ride on a bus now because random people suck ass.

Some rando in an automated bus is no different than some weird fuck on a city bus.

Yeah, a big part of the driver's job has to do with non-driving tasks, including ejecting passengers who are causing problems for other passengers.

A self-driving bus would be a nightmare for the old guy on my 174 this afternoon. He stayed seated when we got to the last stop, so I asked him where he was trying to get to, and it was a totally different route in the opposite direction.

I was able to coordinate with another service that was going to his intended destination, met up with them where our routes crossed, and got him to where he wanted to go.

I can't imagine a self-driving bus doing anything for him beyond repeating "Last stop. Please exit the vehicle."

I can't imagine such a bus getting out of the bus to assist a mother with loading a pram; Guiding a blind passenger to board; or helping a wheelchair passenger. All of which are routine parts of the job.

 

[Copernicus]

Self-driving vehicles work up to the point where a dangerous situation occurs that requires actual intelligence to deal with. Unruly bus passengers are an excellent example wrt public transportation. Another example was a recent post I saw locally in which someone driving a Tesla found his vehicle kept pulling him into oncoming traffic. Apparently, the yellow stripe in the middle of the road had been covered with black during road resurfacing and was yet to be restored. The vehicle lost its ability to keep in its lane, and the driver had to fight with the car to avoid an accident. He had put it in self-drive mode and apparently let his mind wander before the car started wandering.