sure, but I don't even know how to differentiate between copying my brain and being in a coma, or just falling asleep really deeply. waking up sometimes feels like enough of a discontinuity
Making this work is limited by the availability by reliable transcription models. Which, in turn, are limited the availability of large training corpora. Those don't exist for rare languages.
Also, if people choose to listen to a Nepali speaker through an AI translator, that does give speakers of this language "a voice" - but it doesn't really preserve that language. You might argue, on the contrary, that it may remove any remaining incentives to learn that language.
They show the input. I would not consider that to be usable for a human reader. Add in that you’re relying on visual cues to connect the numbers to the legend and it’s even less useful to the human reader.
Consider the simple case of a two-item pie chart which would be, say, <font color="red">40</font>+<font color="blue">60</blue> followed by somewhere else <font color="red">lemurs</font> and <font color="blue">cows</font>.
That doesn’t seem very accessible compared to an alt text on an image that reads “pie chart showing fraction of lemurs (40) and cows (60).”
Yes, but what should be in the alt text for the image? Your pie chart example makes sense (“pie chart showing fraction of lemurs (40) and cows (60)”) because there are only two data points, but what should it say for a line chart showing the GDP yearly since 1900? A huge list of numbers? An overall interpretation of some sort?
It would be context dependent. For automatically-generated alt-text you’d likely see some human-understandable representation of the text which would likely be something like, “… 1919 GDP up to 4 million, 1920 GDP down to 3.9 million, …” On my own personal site when I’ve presented charts, I usually give an overall interpretation of the data, see, e.g., https://www.dahosek.com/2023-in-rejections-and-acceptances/ or https://www.dahosek.com/writerly-resolutions-november-status... (I just realized, looking at these pages that I need to do some fiddling with WP templates to get rid of the big ugly display of the featured image at the top of the page which doesn’t include any alt text at all). But the point is that just throwing unlabeled numbers at the user is not an acceptable presentation for accessibility.
(since I posted this, I’ve done some clean-up, although I also noticed that MarsEdit likes to put meaningless stuff into the “title” param of the img tag)
There's also a decrease in abusive and propaganda output. I understand that is an issue for a user whose objective for LLMs is abuse and propaganda.
But if that's what someone wants, they can find an LLM vendor who provides that (or create their own). There will probably even be state actors in the near future who will supply such LLMs.
They can't expect any given private company to cater to their objective in that regard though.
In my experience, lots of stuff needs to scale massively, but (outside of the better tech companies I guess?) mainstream tools/stacks/approaches are hangovers from n-tier arch days and not really right for it, so the majority of distributed systems are tyre fires.
Quite likely that someone on your wifi, or someone with whom you share videos, is clicking on those. The algo gives you recommendations from other people.
IMO Android UX is pretty great, for a personal computing device. YouTube's UX is also pretty great, for an ad delivery network. It succeeds at showing you ads.
YouTube doesn't really care if the search function gives you the right or wrong search result. Totally irrelevant as long as you click something, anything and your eyeballs are on the next ad. YouTube is optimised for keeping you watching ... literally anything... as long as they can play you some ads, preferably expensive ads.
That's also why Google doesn't leverage YouTube to its true potential. YouTube has the lowest revenue per user of all the video platforms and this is the reason why.
And trying to increase its usability and profitability outside of ads would affect negatively Google's overall business.
Sounds about right. I did read a study or something where people figured that consciousness gives us a believable illusion of free will, but in fact it's more like an observer of whatever I/O the brain performs and stitches everything together post-hoc.
Hey, the question they posed is still somewhat valid, or at least I can gleam an interpretation that would still be valid.
I think what they're asking is if there is some separate process of consciousness that is capable of generating brand new thoughts to act on, or if the experience of conscious thought is purely composed of actions that the brain is taking anyway.
I think it's a valid question, because I have personal experience suggesting that my brain has the capability to do at least some actions that normally would require conscious thought but without actually involving my consciousness at all.
That would imply my conscious thought is not actually necessary for those actions, and therefore would raise the question of why I think that my conscious thoughts can control my actions.
After all, my brain could simply be doing that all the time, and selectively exposing some of it to my consciousness.
However, deriving protection mechanisms after trauma is different than living everyday life; it's fairly well known that trauma can cause some pretty severe and extremely subconscious psychological damage, while it's not yet known whether consciousness can ever be reduced or eliminated while allowing one to continue to even tend to basic survival needs.
So the question is then whether things like everyday actions, problem solving, internal thought and introspection, and so on, originate from consciousness, or whether consciousness originates from the need to maintain some kind of chronological experience of it all, and only exists to integrate information rather than directing the rest of the brain.
I hope that makes some amount of sense.
---
My personal experience is that I can identify a consciousness by its ability to think for itself and generate its own outputs (like the thought-forms themselves, interaction with the inner world, and possibly control over the real body). I do not know if consciousness is the sole originator of those outputs but I know that is how I identify one.
And as I alluded to above, sometimes there are multiple of them simultaneously, which is what "polyconscious" means. I don't feel entirely cut off from others; I can technically access their thoughts and experiences, but don't out of some sort of respect or inhibition.
That means that either my brain has divided itself into multiple self-aware entities, in the case that free will is trivially available, or my brain has developed multiple independent sets of pathways for signals to follow, all of which get a say over the final output, but each identifying as their own individual selves and maintaining their own individual experiences of consciousness.
During periods of activity perhaps those pathways can activate or deactivate depending on who is supposed to be currently present. Thus, there is the impression of multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the same brain, coming and going as they please.
As always, the answer could very well be both. I experience both polyconsciousness and monoconsciousness, which means that sometimes other people will have their own consciousnesses but sometimes my consciousness will simply change which person it is. That probably means they are something slightly more abstract than a structural division of consciousness into multiple independent ones, since they are not limited to polyconsciousness.
Also, sorry for bringing plurality/DID into this so much. It just has a lot to do with my personal experience of self and consciousness, and trying to understand it is one of the primary reasons why I've studied myself so much.
