They’ve been fantasizing about that ever since “computers” started growing in accessibility - in the 1960s…

Fantasizing wasn’t the best choice of words - I often understate what I mean to communicate at an attempt at humor. I should have said "everyone started fantasizing becoming so obsessed with intelligent “AI” that they’re willing to dump a significant portion of the world’s resources just because… "

The current crop is just the first time such things have been delivered with something resembling “average” human responses.

That’s more or less what I meant by “patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input”. I was attempting to understate this in order to exaggerate the villainous eagerness and stupidity of greedy, rich fucks.

The LLM craze is a natural maturation point of the AI field

I don’t see why that is. Using ML to generate models that accurately perform specific tasks is orders of magnitude away from attempting to feed the entirety of human text into ML and expecting superhuman intelligence to emerge.

now it’s expanded into foundational models (FM) which you would still probably just call LLMs because most people don’t know the differences.

While ML and “AI” is not my field, I’m fairly certain that what I was attempting to describe in layman’s terms in my literal first sentence were these foundational models you are referring to.

FMs are getting close to that point of a magical universal computer that you can tell it to do anything about anything and it just works.

I have no direct experience outside of LLMs and I don’t really take issue with what I understand FMs to be, so long as they keep their scope narrow and focus on accurating completing specific tasks to assist humans. As soon as we hand off control and trust it blindly without extensive trials ensuring it’s reliability and failsafes in place to ensure inaccuracies are caught I start raising concerns.

My only experience is with LLMs - a few, minor attempts to “test the waters” of the major, publicly available LLM models. I’ve been frustrated with my search results and glanced at the AI results. Work gave us Gemini licenses and I used it in similar, desperate situatiuons for coding help and help with Google products foolishly thinking that if any LLM designed to help with such tasks would be passably useful it would be the LLM of the company that owns the products I seek help with. Unless something has changed drastically in the last month or so, every interaction has been a roll of the dice to such an extent that my occasional “testing the waters” caused me to jump out and avoid it as much as possible. I simply can’t trust it to not halucinate and gaslight me.

What I see as the problem is moving way, way, way too quickly in trusting language models to do anything even remotely important. Human communication is extremely nuanced, complicated, fluid, and imperfect. Humans misunderstand each other during communication even when we have the context of in-person visual/audible cues and interpersonal history.

Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever had at most a comfortable income but I truly don’t understand the mentality of needing so much money.

I don’t get paid as much as my peers but I make enough to be comfortable. I am my own department and, aside from emergencies and other high priority situations, I manage myself and choose what to work on when. I have a decent work life balance. Because I make enough to be comfortable (in large part because my landlord promised not to raise our rent - early in the COVID lockdown - if we were “good tenants” and has managed to keep true to her word) I don’t feel the need for more. That balance is worth not making the 20% more a year I might get somewhere else because I can’t guarantee I won’t have a shitty boss that doesn’t let me have that work/life balance.

I was excited about the idea of purpose-built systems trained on specific datasets to be help find complex patterns to diagnose diseases or suggest potential molecules for specific purposes.

Then the LLM shit started and everyone started fantasizing about intelligent “AI” just because it was able to reproduce patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input. Some of those funding it kept chasing that dream and are convinced that, if they just throw more compute at the problem, they can evolve the renaissance AGI that can do anything. Then they can fire every worker and be bazillionaires with robot slaves and never have to work another day of their lives… and fuck everyone and everything else.

It’s amazing what we can ruin when we let greed and selfishness drive our society.

This is something I’m really struggling with. I’m finally at a point where I have sufficient income to start putting it away. I have over 20+ years until I’m of retirement age and I’ve got a state pension but no matching contributions so I’ve never started any personal retirement account. I’ve always felt like it was just another scam for the wealthy to profit off of the working class.

Of course, they get to charge me a fee - take their cut. However, can I be sure that they have my best interests in mind? If they can leverage all of the investors an index fund, or whatever the fuck I’m invested in, and throw us under the bus to benefit themselves or a high-value client that’s actually paying attention and throwing around orders of magnitude more money… will they?

Ignoring the scam angle… what the fuck can I invest in, without putting significant time and energy into, that isn’t diametrically opposed to my ideals? Tech, power, pharma, banking? For lack of a better term, anything making money these days is either Evilcorp or likely to be put out of business by or acquired by Evilcorp. Do I want to profit off of that shit, or even help raise their stock price?

I could always put it in a CD or something at a credit union and know that I making substantially less for my retirement than virtually every other option. Yay.

Allegedly an incorrect rumor.

Windows Central

Fucking LOL. https://www.idmerit.com/blog/idmerits-data-breach-fail-safe-architecture-game-changer/

Sorry, the best I can do is install a camera and microphone on our next model, to spy on you and force interaction with advertisements.

I mean video conferencing from your living room. How neat is that?

They use a different kind of RAM.

It’s the capacity to make RAM and the materials required to make RAM that is going to datacenters.

Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.

If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.

At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.

Not an expert but… typical computers do what they do by transmitting (primarily) electrical signals between components. Is there electricity or isn’t there. It’s the “bit” with two states - on or off, 1 or 0. Electricity is the flow of electrons between atoms. Basically, we take atoms that aren’t very attached to some of their electrons and manipulate them so that they pass the electrons along when we want them to. I don’t know if there is a way to conduct and process electrical signals without using an atom’s relationship with its electrons.

Quantum computing is the suspected new way to get to “better” computing. I don’t know much about the technical side of that, beyond that they use quantum physics to expand the bit to something like a qubit, which exploits superposition (quantum particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until measured, like the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor) and entanglement (if two quantum particles’ states are related to or dependent on each other, determining the state of one particle also determines the state of the other) to transmit/process more than just a simple 1 or 0 per qubit. A lot more information can be transmitted and processed simultaneously with a more complex bit. As I understand it, quantum computing has been very slow going.

That’s my shitty explanation. I’m sure someone will come along and correct my inaccurate simplification of how it all works and list all that I missed, like fiberoptic transmission of signals.

I’m afraid the best I can give you is a proprietary, always online, underpowered, half-assed piece of spyware that will probably end up costing you a yearly subscription fee if you don’t want advertisements and get a mandatory, irreversible AI integration over-the-air upgrade 1 month after you buy it.

The few times I’ve used LLMs for coding help, usually because I’m curious if they’ve gotten better, they let me down. Last time it was insistent that its solution would work as expected. When I gave it an example that wouldn’t work, it even broke down each step of the function giving me the value of its variables at each step to demonstrate that it worked… but at the step where it had fucked up, it swapped the value in the variable to one that would make the final answer correct. It made me wonder how much water and energy it cost me to be gaslit into a bad solution.

How do people vibe code with this shit?

And that will be a headline Zionists can point to claiming he’s antisemitic.

If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.

Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts

Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision?

…no? I’m not really protesting so much as offering what I think the other person is trying to say. I think they are saying that Google crossed a line, and walking it back doesn’t change that fact.

In my opinion, Google has crossed countless lines over the last 5-10 years. I’m looking for alternatives that meet my own needs. That search has accelerated over the last few years, when the things Google has done have been most egregious. This isn’t a protest. This is disillusionment. I’m abandoning ship.

I think it was fairly obvious that the move was going to piss people off, they just misjudged to what extent. Modern business strategy is to claim to listen to customer feedback and just quietly plan to implement it anyway, just do it more subtly, more quietly, and more slowly.

It is very hard to make a device that is affordable, compact, efficiently cooled, and modular. Offering complete support is also infinitely more difficult when hardware is not controlled for. GPU and CPU are both customized AMD chips and the power supply is designed for their anticipated power draw.

If you want to swap your GPU, build your own SFF. Hopefully they’ll have SteamOS available for general use soon.

Had an issue with Comcast today. They forced me to use their Xfinity app, but what I needed to do wasn’t an apparent option within the app. The only option I saw was a support chatbot. The chatbot listed a link to the option I was looking for. The link opened a webview within the Xfinity app, in which there was a link to download the Xfinity app.

Unnecessary Apps and chat bots. Two of my least favorite things referring me back and forth, forever, in an endless loop.