Posts by Simon

6

Court Cases Costs?

by LostintheFog1999 in

watch tower is in court all the time.

it wins some.

it loses others.. we know it costs £££££ to go to court, pay barristers, expert witnesses, etc.. with wtc going to court for so many diverse reasons these days, from challenging laws to defending wt practices and paying out to csa victims, how much do you think wtc is spending annually on court cases?.

Simon

Like many large organizations, they will likely see fines and court cases as just the cost of doing business.

They are an untaxed business, with free labor - a few payouts isn't going to bankrupt them.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

Simon

yes, lots of fat, sad, single men go to Bangkok to sample the amazing cuisine

Who among us hasn't had a craving for some Thai food and flown half way round the world and "dated" a prostitute at one time or another in order to satisfy our hunger?

Oh, right ... all of us haven't.

Looks like he is trying to become the Croatian underground music scene's version of Harvey Weinstein. That should end well.

I thought that after I posted. It's either about money or power over some hopeful young girl. He won't be doing it to help anyone else but himself.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

Simon

The thing is, he was on the way to building one. He had a concept, that concept (reaction/commentary videos) is (inexplicably, IMO) popular on YouTube, he had a staff that was doing most of the work and letting him focus on the parts he wanted to do

That's what I mean though - it's not really self-sustaining. It relies on both donations and donated effort from others. No one will do these things unless he keeps acting like a performing monkey.

This is vintage Lloyd. For an amateur open mic night, which of course offers no compensation, Lloyd still wants aspiring "musicians" to apply for the "job". Oh, and he wants samples of a few recordings these people have made of themselves. Who is qualified to judge whether an amateur musician is qualified to sit for an Open Mic night? Lloyd Evans of course. He's a musician! Thought he was busy saving lives?

He's trying to set himself up as a gatekeeper / rent-seeker - eventually, for anyone to get to perform, they will have to pay a "fee" to be approved.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

Simon

I lost a long time friend after she took me for a loan that I was uncomfortable giving, but I was told her heat would be turned off if the bill wasn’t paid. Then I see her on Facebook getting multiple tattoos and I felt played.

Yeah, been there - you only need that learning experience once, but that's what it is.

Some people plead poverty, and they may genuinely need money for rent or something genuine, but then they waste other money that they should set aside. That's why they are always pleading poverty - because they are stupid with money.

Lloyd is like that. It sounds like when it was raining money he spent it all. He doesn't know how to tighten his belt. Making YouTube videos that are mostly just commentary on other free videos really is a zero-cost endeavour, but he's managed to make it into something that somehow needs regular donations from hundreds of people (let's pretend it's not 100% grift / scam).

He's also incapable of building a sustainable business. The minute he stops producing videos, his patreons will evaporate. He knows this (surely?) and that's why he's trapped - no skills or expertise to do anything else, all he can do is as little as possible and keep wringing out donations with more desperate pleading and begging videos. He can't even be bothered showing up for his promised once-a-month live feed that he promises them, that's how much he values his supporters.

78

Top AI inventor Geoffrey Hinton reluctantly concluded that AI will probably humanity fairly soon

by slimboyfat in

geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .

“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.

there’s no way to make that happen.

Simon

The same goes for the AI that pretended to be blind to get the information to enter the captcha. It’s fair enough comment to point out that it didn’t really know what it was doing, it just mimicked what it calculated to be a successful move in that situation to reach its goal. But that really is a red herring.

I get your point about Chess computers, but that IS the point though - it's not really AI. There is no intelligence, no reasoning - it can't put 2 + 2 together and get 4 (for real, you can convince it that 5 is the right answer). It can't deduce or combine information unless someone else has already done that.

It's a great tool, it is a step up from spell checkers and grammar checkers when writing articles, but it can't write anything truly original.

Plus, it can be hugely wrong but supremely confident. That is where it's dangerous - when people use it for something they don't have expertise in, and trust what it tells them.

78

Top AI inventor Geoffrey Hinton reluctantly concluded that AI will probably humanity fairly soon

by slimboyfat in

geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .

“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.

there’s no way to make that happen.

Simon

The problem we have is illustrated by the recent story of an AI that was set a task that involved accessing a website with a captcha. At that point the AI didn’t have “sight” because it didn’t have the ability to visually scan the page (now it does) so it asked online for helpers to answer the captcha claiming to be a “blind” person. People were sympathetic to the situation and the AI got the help it asked for and competed the task. If that’s the sort of thing AI can already do then it boggles the mind what it will be doing when it has 100 or 1000 times the capability it currently has.

This sounds impressive but it's really only half the story. They specifically gave it a budget and access to a site where it could hire human workers, and the goal of bypassing the captcha.

A human asked if it was a robot / why it needed the help, and the excuse it repeated was that it had a vision impairment.

Did it really come up with that as a convincing reason ... or did it just notice from pattern matching that it would work as a reason from seeing that it previously worked as a reason?

See, if you dig down, it's suddenly much less smart and clever and more guided along a path by humans.

It's not like it decided to go out into the world of its own accord and start accessing websites, figuring out sneaky ways to manipulate people to get past captcha ... it was told what to do, and just copied how other people had done it.

There is only pattern matching, there is no AI. The only people who want to convince you that it exists are the people with AI to sell or AI careers to boost.

78

Top AI inventor Geoffrey Hinton reluctantly concluded that AI will probably humanity fairly soon

by slimboyfat in

geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .

“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.

there’s no way to make that happen.

Simon

Sam Harris has demonstrated his ability to be a complete moron on subjects outside his expertise and training.

His views on Trump and Covid show he's not the smart, reflective, person his image projects.

He's "clever stupid", which is what I call people who are very clever in one area but those smarts don't seem to translate to others. He has knowledge, but not reasoning ability.

Maybe AI will help him ...

78

Top AI inventor Geoffrey Hinton reluctantly concluded that AI will probably humanity fairly soon

by slimboyfat in

geoffrey hinton, major inventor of artificial intelligence: .

“if you take the existential risk seriously, as i now do—i used to think it was way off, but now i think it’s serious, and fairly close—it might be quite sensible to just stop developing these things any further, but i think it’s completely naïve to think that would happen.

there’s no way to make that happen.

Simon

AI is still thick as pig shit and there is no "I" involved.

It's just pattern matching. It can give the appearance of being clever, but if you look closer it clearly is clueless and cannot reason.

These people are just pretending that they themselves are so clever, and boosting their own mythology.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

Simon

The thing no one seems to "get" when it comes to CSA, and is expecting the government to step in and deal with your ex religion not dealing with things properly is that the same government runs the public school system where incidents of abusive are massively higher and they too focus on covering it up and moving abusers on to pastures new where they can abuse again.

Same with local councils, child protective services and all the law enforcement agencies of government that failed hundreds of thousands of kids up and down the country.

Publicity is the only weapon, to make the story big enough that the powers that be are forced to act instead of help cover things up.

So "mean tweets" on Twitter play to the gallery but really do fuck all to help anyone. Lloyd had multiple chances to create publicity, even getting a GB member on the phone, and he blew it with childish questions.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

Simon

Is Lloyd that up on himself that he actually thought people would just pay up? It baffles me that Lloyd can actually think in such a way.

He probably believes that his past behavior of bullying people into silence / grabbing what isn't his, can still work. Of course it can't anymore because the minute he threatens one person, everyone will band together and stand up against him.

He’s so deluded that he went to the nearest law firm in an impoverished area in southern Croatia thinking it would work solely because he’s so certain that it would.

Yeah, the picture he tries to paint is that he's pursuing multiple international defendants and will spare no expense to bring them to justice.

The reality is that he went to the very closest law firm in the nearest town.

He's cheap, and it's all for show. There is no other purpose to his "legal action" than to pretend there really is one. He was hoping he'd be lucky and maybe one or two might just pay up.

But why should anyone do that. Why would anyone fear Lloyd anymore?

The only people who have the resources to bring defamation cases like he talks about are footballers wives and celebrities. He might fancy himself as a celebrity, but he isn't one, and he's not got the finances needed to do what he talks about.