John's Covid-19, politics and futurism blog

  It's like I say about Picasso. Most people if asked to be honest think his later work sucks. BUT if you look at his earlier work you can see he had talent to do realism. This means as a coder, first learn to program and develop something independently so you can go through the work and know what it takes, and ACTUALLY understand what the GPT is providing you. My observation is that ChatGPT for example provides good code but often does things like delete sections of code or use variables or methods that just do not exist. If you don't actually know what you are doing and don't actually understand coding, you will basically make something that is inherently buggy and full of security holes. The damage that AI is doing to coding skills. Can confirm. #coding #developers #ai #artificialintelligence https://futurism.com/young-coders-ai-cant-program

Update: They now call themselves NetherExPro instead of PrimeAurora.  So there's this new scam which claims to be a trading platform that delivers like 10% per day or so. It appears in many languages but the basic format of the article is always the same. I won't post the link/s to the article/s because I do not want you to fall for it, as it seems quite convincing. In order to make sure SEO finds this page and alerts you to its being a scam, I have pasted the wording of the South African edition here in white ink so that you can't read it but it is here. The South African one has a few huge giveaways that it is fake: 1. The news article is from News24, one of our major outlets, but the URL is not news24.com or news24.co.za. 2. NewzRoomAfrika does not contain the relevant interview. This is the only one, clearly different: 3. The bank balance statement comes allegedly from SARB rather than say, ABSA, Standard, Nedbank, Capitec, etc. SARB is the RESERVE BANK it NEVER deals w...

Someone please pass this information on to Trump: National Murder Rate: In 2022/23, South Africa had 21,325- 27,494 murders with a population of about 60 million, resulting in a murder rate of ~45 per 100,000 people. In 2017/18, the national murder rate was 35.8 per 100,000 people. Farm Murders as a Proportion of National Murders: In 2017/18, there were 62 farm murders, which constituted ~0.3% of the 20,336 total murders in South Africa. According to the Institute for Security Studies, about 13% of police precincts in South Africa had lower murder rates than the global average of 6.9 per 100,000 people. These precincts include affluent areas such as Brooklyn (Pretoria), Garsfontein (Pretoria), Camps Bay, Claremont, and Rondebosch (Cape Town). Suburbs like Sandton and Parkview in Johannesburg, Durban North, Table View, and Woodstock in Cape Town had murder rates of just under 10 per 100,000 people.  In contrast, certain precincts have reported higher murder rates. For instance, the ...

 Having fiddled with ChatGPT for a while now, I have identified the following two risks. 1. Hallucination . It sometimes just makes stuff up. This is particularly annoying when you give it the information and it goes on a tangent and makes stuff up that was not in the source information. For example, when I gave it some meeting notes, it went on a tangent about N-P completeness in computer science. OK?!? 2. Memory errors . The memory feature that they have added messes up a lot. I have noticed that it performs two mistakes: Recites what it gave you previously , even if the topic was utterly different . For example I gave it some meeting notes to summarise and it spat out some Python code that I had asked for last year. Totally irrelevant! Recites what it gave you previously, because the content was similar , in its opinion. I created a new chat, gave it the meeting notes, and it gave me the PREVIOUS summary of the previous set of meeting notes. In one case it was even worse! It g...

Had an interesting discussion and took the following notes.  Differentiating epistemic positions and beliefs What is the difference between fake news and a conspiracy theory? First, let me define my understanding of a conspiracy theory. I understand it to mean: a) There is a theory (belief, proposition, hypothesis) that b) There exists a conspiracy (secret plan amongst a group of two or more people) c) To do something malevolent (harmful) to society. So for example, if we know Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth worked with others, then they were conspirators. At the time they were planning to perform their malevolent acts (assassination), they were effectively, conspiring (Latin: Con- together; -spirare: to breathe or hope; compare e.g. to be inspired). So, if someone at the time suspected them of plotting murder, then, that person would have a theory that there was a conspiracy afoot. A person believing in that theory would, in fact, on my definition, have a conspiracy theory....

Author note. I wrote this article below after seeing the "Sassy Justice" deepfake online in 2021. Since then the matter has become much more serious since the proliferation of online AI tools in the last year. Update : The proposal has been updated to include copyright of one's own voice in the wake of the Stephen Fry incident and another example of cyberstalking with facial recognition.  Update 2: The USA is considering legislation like this.  https://petapixel.com/2023/10/16/no-fakes-act-seeks-to-ban-unauthorized-ai-generated-likenesses   Proposal to United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Pre-empting the problem of Deepfake videos Background We presently stand on the edge of an abyss in which social media threatens to uproot our world order and cast us into chaos, as we see with the recent attacks (6 January 2021) on the American Capitol by conspiracy theorists incentivised on social media. Deepfake videos are motion pictures that are created to look like they depict ...