I wasn't sure where to put this, but it is regarding reading and 'the library' seems kinda barren, so I'm putting it here. orchids blog posts aside (it's his site, after all), I'd rather not have a singular thread for every individual one. Also, I'm quite proud of this one so I wanted to share it:

HERE BE AI

Edit: Doesn't have to be a "blog" post, yo.

So in that vein, have you heard of/read these yet?

Replika - Your Money of Your Wife (AI BFFs). Replika - Users fell in love (AI BFFs).

I find them so very interesting simply because of the number of people who become 'attached' to them full well knowing they are not real. Again that could be the main draw is that in the back of their mind, knowing they are not real, allows them a sense of freedom not otherwise experienced in a real relationship. This of course seems to lead to the stereotype of the basement dwellers (pun intended) who never had gf's/bf's and instead took to online relationships to try and achieve that sense of connection. I will admit in the early days of IRC I made some good relationships but never reached the point of something you would call intimate. So what does this have to do with your post? Well, now we are looking at possible 'historical figures' becoming not just tools such as mentioned in the article/video but possible shipping candidates (thinking that one ST:TNG episode with Dr. Crusher, I am sure you know which one) that will really get weird.

Outside of that though and just under the learning aspect, I feel that while it can be fun using this tool that way we are still not really getting anything out of it. Sure you can ask questions as you mentioned but AI isn't able to actually interpret that information from writings, diaries, and commentary. As an example, lets see Shakespeare be put into an AI similar and try to speak with him(them) about his works. Beyond the possibility of new word creation, over dramatic scenes, and penchant for the fantastical, could you really get anything from this that could be considered actually 'learning new insights' from such a thing? I choose Shakespeare because there seems to be a schism about him being a single person versus a multitude of people who contributed and published under the pseudonym (Wiki).

As a side note though I would be interested to see 'myself'' as an AI and be able to effectively talk to myself (sometimes you need an expert) just to see how much of an asshole I am. It could be a fun, as well as enlightening (or insulting), experiment/experience just to see yourself with your own eyes. A lot of people might not like what they see though.

THAT, amigo. Was one doozy of an article, yo.

Man, I have things I'd like to say here, but ima bite my tongue a bit. While I found the author in the article to be a little over-sensitive to the feelings and plight of the customers, the conclusion was 100% on point about corporations and this kinda 'business'. It is 200% exploitation and the worse thing is some people can develop not just 'attachment' to the 'service', but even to the underlying exploitation.

I'm afraid I don't, but I tried searching it: this one, Sub Rosa? Tried reading the synopsis, but wasn't able to make a connection, sorry :(

Absolutely, and this is a problem with education I dig into in another of my blog posts, but it is obsessed with gimmiky-like shid. And schools don't really care if learning is happening as much as they care for the appearance that learning is happening, imo.

1. And I apologize cause this just be me cause I'm in education and I feel like I'm constantly walking on eggshells, but people shouldn't be so terrified to be a bit of an asshole.

2. We shouldn't even give it the thought that it's 'you'. It is less than a farce.

I hadn't even really considered the business side of it even though thats usually my main issue (data collection when using useless services) with most services that exist. No I don't want a f*cking app for every damn little thing. If I need to have an app to interact with your business, I probably don't do business with you. But yes, the exploitation vector with all the personal information that ends up on their servers is a treasure trove of data that can be used for so many nefarious things. I understand that with new technology there will always be something immoral it can be used for (e.g. vhs, cassettes, the internet) but this seems to fall into a strictly 'will be used against you in the future' type of service that provides no real service unless you can convince someone to do this as a 0 Trust service where no one but the user will have access to its information, but that doesn't provide ca$h.

Don't hold back, this is the type of conversation I live for. People are too afraid to express personal opinions because too many people get butt-hurt (tushy troubled, fanny flummoxed?) because they think it is a 'trigger' or just need to feel offended about something. I love a solid conversation where people can discuss/debate w/o becoming emotional assholes and making personal attacks. Of course I am just a person on the internet but if you are okay with expressing, I am psyched to hear it and provide my own insights.

No worries, I don't expect everyone to be a ST nerd. The reason this one sticks out is the very bad acting and the fact she has 'sex' with a ghost. The connection is loose (to be kind) in that we have someone interacting with a historical figure (in the sense they are passed) in a very weird way. Since it is ST, one could lean towards it being a technological AI/hard light creation in which she interacts with which while not making it better, makes it a bit more believable and thus somewhat related.

I agree with this as I was leaving school just before the gimmicks started. Talking with those who directly after me and those attending schools today its more about perception of whats being done in the classroom as opposed to whats actually happening. And also, what ever happened to a Civics class? When I graduated I think that was the last year my school did Civics.

I think this falls into the category of too many chiefs and not enough indians. Too many people getting their hands into an institution that have no need or right to be involved and pushing their ideals instead of letting those who were educated and trained for this to provide expert opinions and plans. Also falls into the not enough science category. Allow people to have their faith (at home, in the community) but leave schools for actual (and factual) education.

i personally haven't used chatGPT or really any AI assistant yet, mostly because registering an account has been the barrier - i just don't feel like doing it.

but i will say that I think AI would have helped me a lot in school. There are so many classes that I wasted my time in because the professors couldn't communicate ideas in a way that I could wrap my head around. Mostly programming classes. I didn't have any background and the professors were so far removed from being a beginner that their teaching style didn't work. Especially when they made us write code with fucking pen and paper on some caveman shit.

So i mostly picked up programming after college, but i guarantee if I was able to ask a bot in plain english to explain concepts, I would have gotten a lot more experience in school and probably could have earned a bit more money out of college.

As far as writing essays for general education classes, like Philosophy and Public Speaking, etc. Yeah ChatGPT is probably making those classes more pointless, but there's such a small amount of people who find those classes interesting, so it's probably good that we're making them easier to manage. They really shouldn't be required in the first place.

When I was first getting into programming (early 90s) and didn't have regular access to a PC this is exactly what I did. I had my tiny graph paper pages and I would lay everything out in chunks with lines that would show my calls, functions, errors, and logic for each section. Once I had access to a PC then I would type it all in and test it out (and usually print it out to take with me to work or home for further review). I really found I hated OOP and preferred to write/view the code since it made more logical sense (if only Notepad++ existed then). Once the code was typed out and as error free as I could make it then I would build my UI. And I have to say, with programs today no one seem to really understand how to build a truly functional UI.

But you are right that professors (or any educator regardless of being in an academic environment or not) are usually so far removed from beginner they really forget how to teach a topic w/o using some crap book with a less than logical plan to teach you what you need to know. Never really understood beginning with "Hello World". But most of what I learned was from dissecting other peoples programs to see how they worked if they had some kind of similar functionality that I wanted.

"Sex with a ghost" is an absolutely wonderful metaphor for this.

It will never stop being refreshing to read this kind of sentiment on the internet. I'm going to leave it at what I said, but your points regarding business and personal information are probably the #1 essential thing the majority of people should keep in mind.

This is quite timely, as we are dealing with an issue of identically this nature at my school right now.

One of the things I teach is programming and, in my opinion, like Mr. Khan mentions in his presentation, it is a faster, better "teacher" (feedback provider?) than I could possibly ever hope to be. It's not perfect, but I do think it is worthwhile enough right now to warrant its use, (data harvesting issues notwithstanding ofc). Slippery slope from there imagining AI being a student's exclusive educator though.

I take a lot of pride in being beginner-friendly, though I feel that computer science curriculum as a whole is weak in this aspect. Add on the fact that tech is elective-prioritized, even if the curriculum were improved, how would one have the time? A testament honestly to your feelings that you were better off on your own. Though I am speaking more from a K12 perspective.

Additionally, I've read that as of late, many first year college computer science professors use obscure programming languages in 101 courses to try and get the diverse background of students on a similar playing field. An interesting strategy, I think.

Kek. Fun fact: the most advanced computer science test a high schooler can take in the US is pencil / paper exclusive. So it's always interesting when I've taught that course to prepare students for that.

I agree, but I also disagree, cause lately I've found a love for writing. For this sort of stuff. So easy to dismiss things. But you're not wrong.

Fuggin BADASS. This says a lot about learning and struggle and capability. But hopefully that's self-evident.

I forgot to mention that along this same thread of related topics, I was also made aware of this website: Character.ai <= Wikipedia article, not the website, sorry if that's confusing. Which essentially takes this concept to its natural conclusion of... being a meme, I guess? The folks over at Agora Road have been having... fun? with it. Some more seriously than others. But, if you read the replika article, I believe reading through this thread could* prove interesting (if not at least childishly entertaining) for you: Character.ai thread

I can see this being a useful tool for D&D/TTRPG type games when you want to have a random NPC that can talk back to the characters. Would make it more interesting in the event the story goes in a direction not intended, which were usually the best games I played.

As for that forum, it was both interesting, fun, and a lot of cringe.

i wrote about front-end development on my blog: https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/stop-doing-this-with-react/

i don't want to pigeon-hole myself into only writing about this stuff, but this is definitely what i know and seems to be picking up interest and is getting people to visit the site 😭

i've been joining some webrings on the webrings page, so i wrote about them here:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/what-are-webrings/

Based! God I love webrings. Did you see that Agora Road recently had a member make one?

Mr. Thomas also has his Webrings Technology page for explanations and details for a bunch of different systems for creating one! For example, the Agora Road forum member used onionring.js

Basement Community webring, anyone?

i did see that! i need to not be lazy and make a banner for it though since you need to submit one with your request to join.

onionring is pretty good. i think if I were ever to add a webring here it would probably do something similar to the retronaut ring where you submit a link after you've added the webring code, the form scrapes your site to see the links exist, then adds you automatically to the webring.

the only issue with webrings is how clunky it is to join some of them

I wrote two articles on the issues with these LLM (AI) language models. No the most positive take. If you have a little while it is about 9,000 words between the two. I thought it would only be these two but I have a third and final part in the works about the ability of small changes to tumble giant systems due the complexity introducing fragility.

https://theluddite.org/#!post/rise-of-the-banal

https://theluddite.org/#!post/the-snake-eats-itself

I find it funny that you in particular wrote so much. I quite enjoyed 'Part 3 Be Human' of the first article.

Manu recently posted AI will not replace you, which, alongside your writing, demonstrates similar sentiment among many of us.

Don't forget to share your 3rd one when it's done.

making a huge change to my lifting, diet, and cardio, so i wrote about it:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/fixing-my-diet-and-lifting/

i wrote about one of my fav musicians right now, Rosie Tucker:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/rosie-tucker/

literally have had her on repeat since being locked in the house. her music is nuts

So on my main site, which I will give a proper URL and hosting in the next few weeks, I have posted the entirety of all three parts. So you can skip to part 3 - Emergent Aikido. And yeah, 9,000 words turned into 13,988! But I don't think I have anything more to say on the topic.

http://main.michaelv.fastmail.com.au.user.fm/ai.html

I also posted up a compilation of a series of previous post titled 'Wisdom of the wild'. That is a mere 23,300 words but was written a few sentences ever few weeks between 2019 and 2021. Some of it is still pretty cool, some of it, not so great - but it is all there unedited.

http://main.michaelv.fastmail.com.au.user.fm/wotw.html

I publish my fiction and run a blog at starbreaker.org. The blog doesn't have a fixed theme, just a lot of rants. My most recent post was about finally getting the Kindle edition for my first novel removed almost five years after the publisher went out of business.

You are so right. I had more than one excuse to do miserably in my later years of school, but one of them was lacking the support to do well in some subjects, mainly mathematics. As a result, I wasn't able to go down the path I wanted, though I am glad to be where I'm at now. An AI tutor who would never lose patience with me for my lack of understanding, or ridicule me while I'm at the whiteboard in front of the whole damn class, would likely have made a difference.

Small Web Connectivity

i think the coolest thing about joining webrings familiar faces/sites in these different communities you mentioned. there's people who own neighboring sites in webrings basement community is apart of that i've seen on other message boards like melonland and 32bit.cafe. i really enjoy https://32bit.cafe also. their discord is really cool and the site design is top notch

I wrote a post about AI recently. I will share that here.

From Files to applications to assistants to replacements

i'm pretty confident that the way things are going, we're still a ways off from being replaced!

and welcome to the forum!

True, but what do you think about creative use cases like ai-generated art?