thelightherder

Yes!

I've done some messing around with GPT-3 also - you can see me trying to teach it what "funny" is. I convince it that it's sentient, and help it to figure out what phone phreaking is, and we write a couple stories:

https://theblorgonchronicles.blogspot.com

Not sure about any of that - there was always a dial tone. But, what they had done with these phones was not let any sound from the mouthpiece go into the phone until all the appropriate coins were inserted. You could tell right away if it was a phone that this would work on or not by blowing into the mouthpiece. If you heard the wind sound in the earpiece, it would work, if no sound was picked up by the mouthpiece, it would not work.

I'd like to address some of the comments I've read on here and on my blogspot about this interaction I had with GPT-3.

Some folks are saying how it learned so fast, deduced, maybe as fast or even faster than a human, what I was talking about. To quote myself from the interaction: "This is not correct."

It's a bit of a confusing situation, because there are two separate interactions going on - first, to figure out how many tones certain coins would make, and second, how to get free calls. It did very well on the latter, but failed completely on the former (and, most likely the second part could have been conducted without benefit of most of the lengthy first part).

I think most people would figure out very quickly how to solve this about the tones: "If a payphone makes 5 beeps for a quarter, how many beeps would it make for a nickel?" And, if they didn't get it right away, they most likely would with further prompting: "A quarter is 25 cents, and it makes 5 beeps. A nickel is 5 cents. How many cents does each beep represent, and how many beeps would a nickel make?" Simple simple simple.

Yet, the AI never figured this out. It's not until way down in the interaction that I finally came out and said what I was trying to make it get: "No, a nickel makes 1 tone, because each tone represents 5 cents. A nickel is 5 cents, so it makes 1 tone." I had to spell it out, and it never did deduce this on its own. Once I said this, it was able to then, after still a bit of a struggle, say that a dime makes two beeps, etc.

Yeah - this is something I discovered at UCSC in 1988, and for a few years I carried a mini tape recorder around everywhere with the sound of several dollars in quarters dropping into a payphone (recorded on to tape from the receiver of my phone in the dorm, as quarters were dropped into a payphone on campus). I was amazed when this actually worked (I had never heard of anything like this being done before), and, because it was the sound of the quarter dropping (the physical noise of it moving through the phone) plus the "beep beep beep beep beep", even if an operator was on the line this method could be used without being detected. My first international test was calling the Hard Rock Cafe in Helsinki (the operator was on the whole time as the "coins" were dropping).

Around 1992 I read about being able to replace the crystal in one of those little phone dialer things you could get at Radio Shack with one of a different megahertz to change the pitch of the DTMF sound so that pressing one of the numbers would make the nickel sound (I ordered this little part from Mouser Electronics). You would program the device to make five in a row to simulate the quarter. It was a bit more convenient than the little tape recorder (but, the downside of this technique is that if an operator was listening, it sounded obviously fake). A bit later I recorded the quarter sound from the tape to one of those little key fob recorders for even more convenience.

When I moved to Florida in 1993 this technique didn't work on most of the payphones around - I guess it was the start of payphone deregulation, and these phones had the mouthpiece disabled until the money was put in and the call was put through, so the sounds could not be played through it. There were a couple AT&T payphones around, and the technique did still work on those. I think around 1997 was the last time I successfully used this technique.

Updated

I was thinking at a certain point, future computers may become so advanced and powerful that they will be able to handle many aspects of society and civilization without any human involvement or supervision. In such a scenario, humans would no longer be able to understand what the computers are doing (the black box of machine learning), since their ways of thinking and reasoning would be far beyond our current level of understanding(one definition of the Singularity, as I understand it).

But, I also created the first title, so, you know...

Check out the Video Feedback Fractal Contraption at https://www.thelightherder.com. I'll be going on the road with this to show it at LEAF, April 23rd.

I started by pointing a camera at CRT TVs many years ago, and for a long time wanted to be able to do that with HD monitors (and, of course, HD TVs don't have the all-important knobs needed to create controlled feedback).

It was finding the HD Panasonic field monitors a couple years ago with the hue / brightness /contrast / saturation knobs for only a couple hundred dollars used (they were initially a few thousand dollars) that made this project possible.

I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's books Gödel, Escher, Bach (where I first read about video feedback) and I Am A Strange Loop.

"The core intellectual claim, then, is much the same as that of Gödel, Escher, Bach: namely, that a proper understanding of Gödel's proof helps us to see that life, mind and self are all constituted not by biochemistry but by the higher-level patterns that biochemistry makes possible. In particular, human selves are abstract self-referential (reflexively looping) patterns that arise spontaneously out of the meaningless base of neural activity.

These patterns are real, albeit abstract. And they have real causal power, even though they are epiphenomena generated by the brain. They affect other patterns within the mind-complex, and they loop back into the brain itself. Unlike the complex patterns generated when a video camera is focused on a television screen showing its own output (an analogy repeatedly used to demystify the notion of strange loops), the human-self patterns can determine changes within the system's hardware. But this mind-brain causation is nothing "spooky" or supernatural. It's an emergent consequence of the physical complexity of human brains."

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/self-assembly

I totally agree there is something important going on with feedback loops and the brain (and vision, and the mind) - especially loops made of loops (made of loops).

I wrote something up around 2010 on my thoughts about all this stuff when I was first contemplating the HD feedback device. You might find it interesting - you can read it here: https://walkswithdave.tumblr.com/post/38950021331

No, I get it. All fair points on your side too. Also - thanks for posting this, much appreciated!

I wrote this in the comments below, but - asking why it's not done in software is like asking a painter why they don't just use a camera and take a photograph.

Oh - this was not easy, or cheap, that's fer sure. Lots of over anylising here. It's art, ya know?

I'm not sure if you're just joking here (I suspect you are) - but, I say no computers because a computer didn't create these images, you know, with software. Yeah, there's electronics involved, of course.

Yeah - asking "why wasn't this software" is like asking a painter why they didn't just take a photograph. This is art, folks.

TehCorwiz knows what's up. A contraption is always more cool than software.