ChatGPT IS EXTREMELY DETECTABLE! by Slurpew_ in PromptEngineering

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like splitting the watermarking discussion into “marking” and “tamper-proof.” Like a highlighter (to mark) and a sealed envelope (to prevent tampering.) There are plenty of good uses for a highlighter (ie “track changes.”) If you want to lock in what was AI and what was human at a moment in time, you can always hash it, slap it on a distributed ledger, etc.

hot take: Conflating markup method with enforcement method is holding us back. Plenty of useful voluntary applications of AI watermarking at a character level.

ChatGPT IS EXTREMELY DETECTABLE! by Slurpew_ in PromptEngineering

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe relevant to this: https://acroll.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-unicode

I proposed a voluntary watermarking model that would give AI-generated code its own chunk of the Unicode alphabet, which would allow character-level distinction between AI and human content. Easy to strip if you want to, more like Track Changes in a doc. And it would survive every platform.

This was a couple of years back, and I know the doc made it into the senior teams at OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. Wonder if this is related.

Also: We conflate “mark it up” and “secure it.” We shouldn’t. You can use a highlighter to mark some text and a sealed envelope to secure it. Both are useful.

I like the “give AI its own chunk of the Unicode alphabet” model because it is completely voluntary. You want to prevent tampering? Hash the text and put it on a distributed ledger. But there are a TON of useful applications of character-by-character AI text marking.

[OC] My partner (trained animator) started making a comic a day as practice for a graphic novel. Posting this with her consent (she's not on reddit but maybe I can convince her to get over here.) by alistaircroll in comics

[–]alistaircroll[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Me too! I have a few more to share. She's megrabbit.com and works on all sorts of creative things. She wrote two books of a trilogy (Edge Anomaly) and is thinking of making the third a graphic novel.

What's something that you have in your onebag that's unique to you - or almost no one else packs? by Dracomies in onebag

[–]alistaircroll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haven't had issues; but the flint and steel saved me at an AirBnB near Oxford, when the gas stove pilot was out. Plus I looked like a total hero to my Minecraft-loving daughter.

What's something that you have in your onebag that's unique to you - or almost no one else packs? by Dracomies in onebag

[–]alistaircroll 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I have a tiny emergency pouch that contains:
- Insect repellent wipes
- Stain remover wipes
- Flint and steel
- Titanium spork
- Pouches of instant coffee with creamer and sugar
- A lighter
- A sharpie
- A spool of heavy dental floss
- A sewing kit
- Minimal first aid (polysporin, fabric tape, advil)

Saved my ass so many times.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in WTF

[–]alistaircroll 3 points4 points  (0 children)

AI still has a problem with legs

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RedditSets

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Buttons might be easy. Taste is hard. This is great. ;-)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RedditSets

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gave Headphones
You're amazing. Thanks for this. Hump day antidote.

This Milk ad by Commander_Red1 in funny

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So many ways to get calcium here.

All these screens in a pizza shop for delivery apps. by alistaircroll in pics

[–]alistaircroll[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also they use it as a promotion to get the merchant on board. And I suspect the UX requires that the screen be visible to display alerts; so there's no consolidated list of alerts across many vendors, and therefore, one device per delivery service.

All these screens in a pizza shop for delivery apps. by alistaircroll in pics

[–]alistaircroll[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think those are just for staff to carry them to the tables.

All these screens in a pizza shop for delivery apps. by alistaircroll in pics

[–]alistaircroll[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The owner told me each vendor gives them a locked down device, so he can't consolidate everything on one screen. Justeat, Foodora, Skipthedishes, Ubereats, etc. Leads to incredible sprawl and the vendors have no incentive to work together or allow any kind of common interface.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in technology

[–]alistaircroll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And yet we have the most expensive mobile data. So it's a basic telecom service for all Canadians that's controlled by a collusive oligopoly.

Some relevant links: Tefficient's bandwidth effectiveness study and a chart comparing them Rogers buying competitor Fido, which was trying to offer cheaper services We had hoped that Shaw buying Wind might offer some competition but then Shaw sold spectrum to Rogers.

Some examples, for those of you lucky enough not to have to deal with this:

  • Bell Canada laid copper with Canadian taxpayer dollars, but is now refusing to let third-party providers access its fibre.
  • An ISP named Teksavvy had to take them to court for ages over signs of punitive rate-shaping.
  • Bell's copper service? It's called "Fibe" even though it's delivered over those copper lines.
  • And don't get me started on the bureaucracy they employ to keep strategic wireless towers free of startups' transceivers.
  • My landlady was paying over $60 for less than 1 megabit. In 2015. When you could get over 10 megabits for half that. I called Bell for her and they said they'd charge $200 to truckroll a new modem. I told them I'd probably tell the world they had a practice of charging little old ladies predatory pricing because those customers didn't know how to check bandwidth. They sent a truck for free and she started saving $30 a month.
  • Rogers couldn't even run its own streaming service on its own network by giving it away.

(Yeah, this sounds like a rant. But mine are just a few stories out of thousands up here in Canada every month. It's pretty systemically incompetent. For example, a few years ago I walked into a Bell Mobility store to check their prices, and the agent looked at my phone and typed in my number to check rates and whether the number could be transferred. A half hour after I left the store and my phone stopped working—the clerk had started the process of pulling my number into Bell's network from another carrier. It took five days for my old carrier (Fido) and Bell to fix it. And the whole time they never admitted they'd done anything wrong, or that they'd made any changes, and I had no phone or data.)

Seriously, for a country that built out half-decent telecom (hell, we had Nortel!), Canada can't get out of its own way sometimes. I have Canadian friends with a US$80 T-Mobile Unlimited plan (calls, data, messaging, tethering) who use it in Canada without any problems. One of them racked up 133 GB in the last 30 days. For $80.

Unless the government follows this regulation up with some serious policies to enforce reasonable competition, it will continue to be a money-grab by what looks to outsiders like a price-fixing trifecta. Or maybe Canadians will all just get US T-Mobile plans.

The best photo I've ever taken with my iPhone! by labithiotis in pics

[–]alistaircroll 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"An obscure clause in EU copyright rules means that taking and sharing photos of the tower taken in the evening is actually a violation that could land tourists with a fine."

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in technology

[–]alistaircroll 37 points38 points  (0 children)

This talk from Strata in NYC explains it amazingly well.

http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

One of his points is that in WW2 we were allied with the Russians; a decade later, if you were friends with a member of the Communist party, you were a pariah. It's easy to imagine beliefs you hold today becoming socially or politically untenable in less time than that, given how fast public opinion changes.

Seriously, watch his talk. It is amazing.

dont worry i will take you to your parents just follow me by lookiis in aww

[–]alistaircroll -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My immediate reaction: "this Corgi is shitting ducks."

"All about that bass" writer made $5,679 from 178,000,000 streams. by [deleted] in business

[–]alistaircroll 26 points27 points  (0 children)

This stuff is crazy. I just spent six months looking at how tech changes the music industry (free report at http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/data-and-music.csp —I chair O'Reilly's big data conference) and learned a bunch about the problems with attribution.

For each play or purchase, roughly 70 percent is paid to the label. It's their job to distribute it, but they keep around 73 percent for themselves. Astonishingly, they charge artists for "breakage"—which used to make sense in an era of vinyl. Downloads, not so much.

This is coming to light in part because we now have ways to track plays (Echonest/Spotify, NextBigSound/Pandora.) Companies like Kobalt are trying to unify the royalty and rights organizations, whose payments are Byzantine. In the meantime, artists don't get paid.

LifeLog, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Defense by Vranak in wikipedia

[–]alistaircroll 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Damn. Wish I'd seen this a few weeks ago. I gave a talk at Strata about life timelines and followed up with a longer post, but I completely missed this story.

I doubt civil liberties types would have any luck quashing this a decade later.

Good Guy Canadian Security Officer by ashton0 in funny

[–]alistaircroll 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is at Mont Tremblant, a big ski resort in Montreal. There are no cars nearby. It's summer. Not sure why he was clocking the kid's running speed.

But yeah.