astronaut_sloth

There's also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there's some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there's just not as much content. I'd imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.

YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out "uh...emails and productivity and things."

I'm in Illinois, and my entire family thought I was nuts for supporting bail reform. My cop brother said that we'd have hordes of criminals on the street causing more crime, and my parents again voiced how they "want to move out of state" (because Indiana is sooooooo much better /s). They never could answer why paying to be set free until court was so central to security because it never made sense to tie pre-trial lock up with ability to pay.

They never bring it up anymore, and for that, I'm grateful.

I think what they're saying is that Americans don't pay attention and forgot how terrible the Trump presidency was because it's been a few years. Most people think that "we're better now" and any major issues have abated without understanding that nothing has fundamentally changed. Because of all that, Trump will win the election. The DnD portion of the post is just what got OP to think about this.

Sad thing is that there's merit to the argument. It's the old trope of "Americans have short memories."

:wq Thanks Bram for a great editor! Vim is probably one of the most useful pieces of software ever written. I know that I use it literally every day.

Cool, Bill Gates has opinions. I think he's being hasty and speaking out of turn and only partially correct. From my understanding, the "big innovation" of GPT-4 was adding more parameters and scaling up compute. The core algorithms are generally agreed to be mostly the same from earlier versions (not that we know for sure since OpenAI has only released a technical report). Based on that, the real limit on this technology is compute and number of parameters (as boring as that is), and so he's right that the algorithm design may have plateaued. However, we really don't know what will happen if truly monster rigs with tens-of-trillions of parameters are used when trained on the entirety of human written knowledge (morality of that notwithstanding), and that's where he's wrong.

You're getting downvoted, but you're right. And that is the reason that using proprietary software and SaaS is a problem. If I'm only buying the right to use a copy of something as a company sees fit, then I'm not really buying anything. I'm essentially paying a company a tribute to use their software in their way.

Decades ago, it was the same way, but it felt different. We got physical media, and we could do what we wished with the files: modify them, delete them, etc. Hell, the EULAs for some '90s and early '00s software even said you could use the software in perpetuity, and we could use software in anyway we saw fit. The biggest constraint was on selling copies. Back then, and even now, that seems pretty reasonable. (Though, as an aside, it would have been better to also get access to the source code, but I digress.)

Now, we have to use company's software exactly how they want us to use it. Personally, I refuse to go along with this (as much as I can), so I have migrated most of my digital life to FLOSS.

It depends on the terms of employment. If they are salaried, then there are no real work hours and just work to do. In general, if someone is salaried, they're paid to do a job not when they do it.

I work/study in AI, and it is completely over-hyped. For one thing, the C-suite can't wrap it's head around the fact that AI != LLM; they all seem to think all AI is just LLMs. On top of that, they are way too eager to throw humans out of the loop.

That said, I think LLM applications, even in their current form, are super useful in development and business practices. I myself use it to increase my productivity in coding. But, I use it as an augmentation rather than a replacement. One of my friends put it best the other day, "LLMs are like a junior dev to your senior dev. You need to be hyper-specific, and you need to check it's output." In other words, it's great for off-loading some work, but it isn't going to completely replace humans.

With that said, I'm a bit annoyed that other AI fields are being over-shadowed by LLMs. There's a ton of other interesting work being done in those fields that is super useful and important. All of them, though, are not going to replace humans but rather augment and make humans more productive. I've found that an AI-Human team is most effective.

I'm all about this. When I made my personal webpage, this is how I do it. I'm surprised it's not more popular (at least for certain things) because it looks nice and clean, is fast, and crucially, is easy to put together. Most webpages don't need a ton of JS to "accomplish the mission." I get that not everything can do this, but there are soooooo many sites that can strip down to a more minimal site and have better functionality and a better experience. This is a case of less-is-more.

Little column A, little column B. They're losing the demographic war, and if the trend continues without any outside influence, they are a dying party. Because of that, they're resorting to fascism to hold onto power with a dwindling minority. That is, their dwindling power in a fair system is leading them to turn to more drastic measures to retain power. We're watching them take off the fig leaf of acting as if they are bound by laws and norms.

I think that's exactly what the Republicans want.

Except that scaling alone won't lead to AGI. It may generate better, more convincing text, but the core algorithm is the same. That "special juice" is almost certainly going to come from algorithmic development rather than just throwing more compute at the problem.

This is a much better article. OP's article just shows the author's surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There's way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It's a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won't completely subsume a human's ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

If I remember correctly, he didn't want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn't even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.

This is so true. Although not popular with people in my field (Computer Science), I highly value my liberal arts and humanities education. Far from being "worthless mandatory classes" (like many in my major believed), I found thee classes to be the most enlightening. I learned to wield algorithms and build software in my major, but I learned why I should and how to think critically about how to do it to best serve people (not to mention just simple communication). If anything, there should be more liberal arts in the curriculum, not less.

It's funny you say that. I find the Linux way of getting software way more intuitive. Just hop in the terminal and use the package manager. When I used Windows, I always felt like I was doing something shady when I was getting a .exe. With drivers, I've only had an issue once; everything else was pre-compiled into the kernel. On Windows, I had driver issues a lot. For those reasons (and others), I switched full time to Linux almost a decade ago.

Totally anecdotal, of course, but I just thought it was funny how our experiences were complete opposites and sent us in complete opposite directions for the same reason.

No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.

I think it's taking a shot at Twitter primarily but starting the EEE on Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. Lemmy/Kbin is not entirely safe, but not in the direct line-of-fire from what I can tell.

I think a big difference, though, is that there is political force to ending TikTok. The US government has no major issues with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. existing. Remember, there's actual legislation banning TikTok. Whether that makes a real difference or not, well, I guess we just wait and see. Personally, I think they all should go down in flames.

Not quite. It's more that a job that once had 5-10 people and perhaps an "expert" supervisor will just be whittled down to the expert. Similarly, factories used to employ hundreds and a handful of supervisors to produce a widget. Now, they can employ a couple of supervisors and a handful of robot technicians to produce more widgets.

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good "first step." I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation's correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I'd really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

Not necessarily. The Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement is a thing. Most of the Fediverse is FLOSS, and I doubt there's anyone who can take Lemmy or Mastodon closed source and buy every instance and then stop pop-up instances. It does require quite a bit of work, though, so it is difficult.

I think the real challenging thing is that a great FLOSS service needs to attract attention and care. When I bring up Fediverse/FLOSS alternatives to software my friends complain about, I'm met with lukewarm-at-best reactions, generally due to networking effects (I think).

I think it's less that "media literacy is not taught" but that media literacy is not learned. Like @audiomodder said, everyone is graduated regardless. So, on one hand, there are students who either will not or cannot learn the material (for one reason or another, such as disability, stress, family, etc.) and teachers who get a laundry list of things to teach and not enough time or support to teach it.

Ultimately, the problem is a lack of focus on education as a society. Children are pulled in too many directions, and teachers aren't given the resources needed, so we end up with a broken educational system.

I'm concerned about the poll, but not freaking out like some seem to. The fact of the matter is that we're still a year out, and there are still a lot of unknowns. I think Trump's numbers will erode as the public sees more of him (because he's be relatively quiet since 2021), and they will be reminded why they don't like him. That's not even taking the trials into account, which I think will further erode his support.

Where I'm concerned is not that these people who leave Trump aren't going to Biden; they're either not going to vote or go for a third party. While it gets the job done, it leaves less margin for error because there will probably be less Democratic turnout.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It's not my daily driver, but it works well when I'm on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn't want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won't touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they're floundering.

Which is really sad. What "conservatives" are representing isn't even conservative at all; it's just regressive, authoritarian non-sense. Conservatives (real ones) have an important part to play in a properly working political system (which we don't have in the United States). Ideally, we'd have a a progressive party and a conservative party; the former looking for reforms anywhere they can, even to the point of burning down the system, and the latter urging caution and ensuring the stability and safety of the system. Instead, the U.S. has a conservative party (Democrats) and a fascist/regressive party (Republicans). So, instead of moving forward with caution, we're moving backward.

Then they'll be the first to complain when they go overseas and people don't speak English.

This is one of the best takes I've seen for a while. LLMs seem like they are the "new Google" in that just searching for information super-charged productivity. Now, instead of using some google fu and having to wade through some links and read, someone can just ask a direct question to an LLM and get a reasonably good answer that may or may not need some work to fix up.

In fact, I've started using GPT to summarize large reports/emails and generate the base code for projects so that I just have to tweak it. It has made work that would take hours or days into an hour or two. Honestly, GPT and Llama have made me a much more productive person. Understanding how to use LLMs to one's advantage is going to be a skill going forward just like how effectively using a search engine is a skill now. It's not a skill that will likely be appreciated (much like how effectively googling isn't), but it will set workers apart.

Well, that's kind of the point. If something isn't done to stop their fascist power grab, then no, it means nothing. But, the important thing is to realize that anti-fascism is still the majority, even if it has no power.

Also, quick edit to add that it's important to remember that the military is a class-based system. The majority of the service members who are Republicans are enlisted, i.e., of the lower class. The officer corps, the ones who actually make decisions, is more evenly split. In fact, if I remember correctly, there's a slight majority of officers who are Democrats. I'd wager the reason for that is that officers are required to have a college degree, and there is a correlation between education and party alignment.

Oh for sure! Sometimes it's not even when something breaks but just a normal thing that's different. I used to be a Linux evangelist, and when I convinced my to mom to simply try Linux, she was upset when she had to enter her password to do something (I think it was an update or something) rather than it just doing it. She was mad that it prompted for a password rather than "just updating."

Explaining that giving permission is much safer than just running everything as Admin did nothing. She hasn't used Linux since.

Yeah, you're right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that's all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don't want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don't really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn't an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.

I'm a bit more optimistic about the future if Trump loses. To me, the Republicans are in the throes of a cult of personality, and from what I can tell, there is no Trumpism heir apparent. There will be people who try, like DeSantis, but no one has the singular charisma that Trump does.

My prediction is that after 2024, if Trump loses (which is a very big if), 2028 will have a warmed over Trumpist candidate, like DeSantis, who will probably lose. After that, they will have to figure out an actual platform, and around 2030 is when Trumpism will hopefully, finally die.

Hey, don't be rude. Cave women were far more civilized and intelligent. They don't deserve being compared to MTG!

That's exactly my point. Their olive branch should come with rule changes, committee re-shufflings, etc. to get the Democrats in a more powerful, better position. But like you said, the Republicans won't go for that because they're intransigent, so...back to square one.

Like @Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world said, it's on government phones. The thinking goes that TikTok, which is a Chinese company, is exporting too much data from US government devices. In other words, the government is worried the Chinese are spying. Given the amount of data that the TikTok app actually collects, the fear is probably not unreasonable. All corporate-owned social media collects way too much data, but TikTok really is next level from what I've read.

Congratulations on making the switch! I remember when I switched full time almost 10 years ago. It always feels like there's something new to explore or to try with your computer. One of the most freeing things I learned was that most things are within my grasp if I put in the effort to learn about it. There's nothing quite as fun as whittling the day away going down a configuration rabbit-hole to make something just right.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seem to be the best approach.

That's actually not a bad idea. I'm not on board with mining contacts, but I think there's a simple, transparent way to do this that can actually be fun: a personality quiz. Sure, if someone knows what instance to join already, they can override this. But if they don't, they get like five questions, and then they are matched to an instance.

It's not just convenient for them to do it; it's how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It's not impossible, and I wouldn't even say it's even hard. It's just time consuming to set up (if it's the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it's virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won't because it's not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.