astronaut_sloth

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it's beyond uncomfortable.

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."

Depends on your skills. Documentation is always useful. If you have language skills, translation of documentation or helping create language packs/translations.

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I thought about it, I could come up with more.

Yes! "AI" defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

See, this is part of his long con. Clarence knows his wife is crazy, so instead of divorcing her, he's just going to make their marriage illegal. /s

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.

Young men may be drawn to Trump because he pushes against societal pressure that men need to be apologetic for being themselves.

"Not being apologetic for being [myself]" is why I'm voting for Harris. I swear that conservatives want everyone to fit into confining, pre-defined boxes for everything. I found that among conservatives, I've always had to "apologize" for not being hyper-masculine and interested in "softer" and "feminine" things.

If someone is very masculine, that's cool, too. No one is saying that you can't be hyper-masculine if that's what you're into. BUT if you constantly are apologizing for "being yourself," maybe you're just an asshole trying to hide behind masculinity.

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.

Or class

I think that's exactly what the Republicans want.

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.

I think what they're getting at is that we're uncertain the extent age will affect his duties. Will his cabinet and other advisors be really "in control," or will Biden insist on his way forcing others to kowtow. It is certain that the dude is old as hell and if it were he alone, he would be incapable of the job. Since there's a staff and a ton of advisors, the degree of control they have is, well, uncertain.

I think this is an interesting idea. If they're able to pull it off, I think it will cement the usefulness of LLMs. I have my doubts, but it's worth trying. I'd imagine that the LLM is specially tuned to be more adept at this task. Your bog-standard GPT-4 or Claude will probably be unreliable.

I noticed that, too, but I just chalk that up to people freezing (fight, flight, freeze).

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.

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.

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.

Honestly, that 180 day window thing is nominal. The execution of all of that will take way longer with all of the litigation that would happen, and it'll take a couple of years to get it all enacted (slow at first then accelerating as more gets enacted).

Personally, I'd prefer if it were fast. The sudden change would wake people up, and cause way more civil unrest. If it's slow, we end up as frogs slowly boiling. Fewer people will protest or cause issues if things unfold slowly. It's the idea of the frog in the boiling water. If the changes are swift, there's a higher chance of ordinary people taking notice and fighting to reverse them.

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.

I tend to agree and give a ton of leeway to stupid, offensive stuff from years past that people have evolved from. We all said and did stupid stuff that we regret. However, this isn't offensive, and that's to highlight that Vance either A. regressed in his values from being normal to being weirdly pro-hyper-traditional gender roles or B. has no true beliefs and is just saying what he says because he thinks it wins him votes.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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've found this to be the case a lot, too. I also spoof my OS because a lot of government sites will refuse to work unless it says Windows. It's stupid, but here we are.

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.