What I think it's interesting is that with the total lack of common sense the AI just goes on random tangents to achieve the target in a "monkey paw" way. Can you imagine if this happened:
User: what is the shortest route from my home to the super market?
AI: the user wants to know the shortest route to the super market. I should use a worm hole.
User: what is the shortest route from my home to the supermarket?
Modern soldier: *proceeds to make a hole through the wall* go straight like this until you reach it.
Anyway, the more comments I read here, the more I realize that the AI actually did succeed in achieving it's goal. This doesn't look like "monkey paw", but rather like recognizing and then beating the Kobayashi Maru.
It's bad for TikTok to be controlled by a Chinese company because Americans access it. The solution is to make it US-controlled. The rest of the world? Who cares.
I don't trust anyone who is against "relevant ads," because I always think what they want isn't "irrelevant ads," they want "no ads." But no ads isn't an option.
Yet somehow print/TV worked for decades just fine without spying on their users.
I do not want the gas station, or the airplane I'm on, spying on me to build relevant advertising. That is the end game of "relevant ads": my gas pump already serves me ads, the airplane I'm on serves me ads, my own car now (via a software update that occurred after purchase) serves me ads. Monitors now serve ads. TVs are abusing people's Internet connections, which isn't ads, but it's basically the same problem: if I can abuse the customer without consequence, why shouldn't I?
Just no. The problem is, I as a consumer cannot vote with my wallet: companies can and will go "I could take your money, and earn $X, or I could do that and ads and earn $X + $Y."; there is not reason for them to choose the former, and most markets are so concentrated (e.g., airlines) that there is not ample competition for the market to provide ample "vote with wallet" choices. Further, in the car example, it's just bait and switch: even when I think I can vote with my wallet, the company can just alter the terms of the deal, knowing full well the switching price of a car makes me subservient to them.
Why? Plenty of websites operate just fine with no or near-zero ads. Just look at the one you are currently on!
And what's with confusing "relevant ads" with "privacy-invading targeted ads"? There's still plenty of ads in print media, on television, and on billboards: none of them are invading my privacy, yet they still manage to be relevant by choosing a medium with a certain target demographic. Websites used to do the same, there's no technical reason we can't return to this.
Exactly. Nobody wants to go to a news website/entertainment website/informational website that relies on ad revenue because they will get bombarded by banners and then by a huge number of ads that were increased because those banners slashed their ad revenue.
So instead everyone stays on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, which ALSO operate on ads and have far more information on their users than any third-party ad tracker could ever have.
None of this has gotten rid of the privacy problems. It just consolidated them into the worst offenders while jeopardizing the plurality of the web. Now instead of people being tracked by Facebook on a website with a third-party cookie in a like button, they are tracked by Facebook on Facebook in a Facebook page because they never leave Facebook.
Most of things that are impenetrable in programming aren't about... programming. They are about some actually complex field like math being applied to programming.
For example, a library that does stuff with geometry. You need to know geometry to understand the program, but the program itself will never be complicated. It's the geometry that is complicated.
In cryptography, it's not the program that is complicated, it's the field of cryptography. In AI, it's statistics.
In graphics programming, math is the most impenetrable part, not programming anything. You can be a very good programmer in the sense that you know how to architect information systems and still fail to write a shader because shader programming requires you to know what a "dot" product is and you haven't heard about that since high school.
I'd slightly disagree. Here's an example of a programming task that is incredibly complicated:
Your job is to maintain and modernize a system while delivering a constant stream of new features. Your system is several million lines of code, with some multi-thousand line classes, a rulesengine that can trigger nearly unlimited effects at any time, a persistence system that's weirder than anything any of your friends have ever worked with, and hundreds of customers delivering tens of millions in revenue who use the system in incredibly varied ways.
You can't stop to rewrite the thing, you can't just throw features out there and pray, because you'll cause regressions and your existing customers will hate you. You have to fix the thing as you're building on top of it.
But where I agree is that there's no single deep concept that unlocks it all, it's not like you'll fix it by reading a textbook about it. It's complicated, and it's going to stay complicated, no matter how long you work on it.
str is a duck.