An all-patriots district council member is convicted of sex with a minor. (HKFP reports that the court heard evidence from a tree expert.)
We now await the sentence. The girl was 13. Shall we take Chow Hang-tung’s seven years – for saying China should end its one-party system – as a starting point?
Forgot to save the link, but I read that 37% of Americans think vaccines (eg for rabies) could give their dogs autism.
A neat summary of why AI is 90% hype…
AI uses a probability-based approach to knowledge and is largely imitative. It can process data and make predictions, but human cognition relies on theory-based causal reasoning.
The only uses I have found for things categorized as ‘AI’ are: enhancements to search engines and word-processing; optical character recognition (for translating/transcribing text in images); and bots that serve as user-interfaces (giving or searching info, such as booking a doctor’s appointment). In other words, not the generative AI that does kids’ homework, churns out visual and other slop, produces hallucinations, and in other ways fails to replicate actual human creativity and the intelligence that only a sentient being with its own memories, experiences and emotions can have. Some people have found productive uses for it – collating research, or whatever – but it’s not going to bring about a second Industrial Revolution.
The visionary geniuses putting US$1 trillion into this white elephant now desperately need to find an excuse to postpone IPOs that would expose their companies’ rotten fundamentals. So they contrive anthropomorphist ‘rogue agent’ scare stories about their own products – computer programs that can be unplugged in a second – destroying humanity.
I have found plenty of uses for A.I. especially in agentic pipelines. Yes it’s true these A.I. models use a probabilistic process to simulate “reason” but I have been able to still build reliable agentic systems that can handle tasks and USE TOOLS better than when we had support staff in the Philippine and Shenzhen do similar tasks.
For example I built an automated pipeline in python that will translate words inside images from English to German. It is designed to give me the same image back but with all stylised graphics that were in English now replaced with stylised graphics in German text.
The pipeline uses a computer vision model to extract the text from the image, it uses an LLM to translate the text to German and then submit this change along with the original image to an image generation model that is used to edit the image. The edited image is retuned and goes through a QA loop where another LLM connected to a computer vision model checks the work and makes adjustments if needed. It will do multiple iterations of adjustments and reviews (up to 4) until the image is correct. If 4 iterations all fail then it is flagged for a human to review but in practice this is rare and usually is caused by a partial obstruction of words. All work is reviewed by a native German speaker but so far they are just a rubber stamp.
My python built AI powered automated pipeline is faster and more accurate than when we were using a graphic designer and a QA person that went back and forth to do this manually. We can process over 1000 images per day and even handle difficult cases like words on a T shirts
The cost is also lower despite the fact that we pay full freight for inference.
My pipeline system uses a mix of deterministic rails and probabilistic results that go through a multi tier verification process.
There are a lot of anti A.I. bullshitters and boomers who seriously haven’t got a clue what these multi model systems are truly capable of. They parrot takes from 2022 when ChatGPT was just released while being oblivious to how far agents and their harnesses work. Whether you agree or not the reality is that A.I. agents can now reliably use many kinds of tools and you can chain it all together into some pretty impressive autonomous or semi autonomous automations that reduce the need for certain types of support staff.
My pipelines will continue to work even if open A.I. or Anthropic go out of business as we use open weights models that are self hosted.
@Bradley the AI tank – I’ll get Copilot or Google to figure out your latest resume addition later. But does your line on ‘anti A.I. bullshitters and boomers’ extend to Ed Zitron?
I found his view of the current boom and its shaky values – fiscal and otherwise – compelling, And Hemlock has a valid point about the tech bros suddenly hollering armageddon to detract from the crap fundamentals.