As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

Oh yeah, I watched the whole series at one point around 5 years ago. I could do with a refresh, love Adam Curtis!

Emily has the facial structure of Zbignew Brezinski.

Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

While the official mechanisms of government existed… people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

Overtime… yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin’s tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco’s tenets of fascism.

One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

But now, is it a dictatorship?

Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man… or if the entire economy/society collapses.

Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco’s tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator ‘if only for a day’. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.

No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.

Don’t Be Evil.

Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.

Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.

This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.

Hooray! Sorry it had so many edits, been about a decade since I last watched any GiTS beyond the scarjo movie lol, had to go look everything up again.

Yes. Its all over Insta as well, though far more common on TikTok.

Its astonishingly popular, and just barely altered, but promoted via extremely effective and enthusiastic social media influencers.

Wait wait.

Its… an incredibly powerful tool, but people don’t know how it works.

But also it works by triggering the placebo effect.

Ok so can you show me maybe something like a scientific study that shows that manifesting practitioners have a ‘powerful’, measurable, meaningfully different … any kind of outcome whatsoever, compared to non manifesters?

Is there evidence that manifesting actually triggers the placebo effect, as you claim it does?

You dont manifest a new car. You either make a plan to figure out how to acquire one, and it either works or it doesnt, or maybe you get lucky and you get gifted one by a friend, or you randomly encounter a scenario where you stumble across a great deal.

Compare the number of people who are manifesting that they want a car and end up with a car and the number of people who are manifesting a car and do not end up with a car vs non manifesters who do and do not end up with a car, in a given timeframe.

Im not aware of any studies on something like this because the notion is dubious on its face, not even having a proposed causal mechanism as you say.

But I would be very strongly inclined to believe that if a such a study were done, what you’d end up with is that manifesting has no statistically significant relationship to acquiring a car, and probably something like overall income or wealth and maybe number of fairly wealthy friends/family do actually have observable effects.

Look I totally am for a reasonable amount of positive self affirmation and self confidence.

But manifesting takes it to literally absurd lengths.

Myself never, but there probably … millions? tens of millions? of tiktok brained Americans that believe in ‘manifesting’, so being irrationally delusional is pretty trendy right now I guess.

Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.

Saw a TR 3B hovering above a Boeing hangar (?) outside of Boeing Field in south Seattle.

Edit: Specifically, the building labelled Boeing 9-101 on google maps, which is apparently technically in Tukwila.

Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.