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It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.
What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.
Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.
You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.
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Yes definitely. Many of my fellow NLP researchers would disagree with those researchers and philosophers (not sure why we should care about the latter’s opinions on LLMs).
I’m not sure what you’re saying here - do you mean you do or don’t think LLMs are “stochastic parrot”s?
In any case, the reason I would care about philosophers opinions on LLMs is mostly because LLMs are already making “the masses” think they’re potentially sentient, and or would deserve personhood. What’s more concerning is that the academics that sort of define what thinking even is seem confused by LLMs if you take the “stochastic parrot” POV. This eventually has real world affects - it might take a decade or two, but these things spread.
I think this is a crazy idea right now, but I also think that going into the future eventually we’ll need to have something like a TNG “Measure of a Man” trial about some AI, and I’d want to get that sort of thing right.
Yea, that was a bad way to phrase it - I just meant that from what I’ve heard tokens are very much not word by word. And sometimes it’s a couple words, but maybe that was misinformation. And I was trying (and failing) to make an analogy for a human - a concept is a compression of what otherwise would be a bunch of words, though I kind of meant more like a reference I guess.
I think it’s very clear that this “stochastic parrot” idea is less and less accepted by researchers and philosophers, maybe only in the podcasts I listen to…
It’s not capable of knowledge in the sense that humans are. All it does is probabilistically predict which sequence of words might best respond to a prompt
I think we need to be careful thinking we understand what human knowledge is and our understanding of the connotations if the word “sense” there. If you mean GPT4 doesn’t have knowledge like humans have like a car doesn’t have motion like a human does then I think we agree. But if you mean that GPT4 cannot reason and access and present information - that’s just false on the face of just using the tool IMO.
It’s also untrue that it’s predicting words, it’s using tokens, which are more like concepts than words, so I’d argue already closer to humans. To the extent it is just predicting stuff, it really calls into question the value of most of the school essays it writes so well now…
Well, LLMs can and do provide feedback about confidence intervals in colloquial terms. I would think one thing we could do is have some idea of how good the training data is in a given situation - LLMs already seem to know they aren’t up to date and only know stuff to a certain date. I don’t see why this could not be expanded so they’d say something much like many humans would - i.e. I think bla bla but I only know very little about this topic. Or I haven’t actually heard about this topic, my hunch would be bla bla.
Presumably like it was said, other models with different data might have a stronger sense of certainty if their data covers the topic better, and the multi cycle would be useful there.
Well, what you could do is run a DNS server so you don’t need to deal with IPs. You could likely adjust ports for whatever server to be 443 or 80 depending on if you’re internal only or need SSL. Also, something like zerotier won’t route your whole connection through your home internet if you set it up correctly, consider split tunneling. With something like zerotier it’ll only route the zerotier network you create for your devices.
My only interaction with Substack is that one podcast moved there for premium content. I thought it was mostly for written newsletters, which I always wondered how much of a market there actually is for paying for one newsletter, but then again I guess it’s just the written version of podcasts so I guess there is a market. Though promoting Nazi content gives me a lot of pause.
Honestly I never had a problem with MicroUSB and haven’t really seen a benefit to USB-C for basic charging of devices. I guess some might charge faster, but USB-C is so screwed up that you need a magic mix of cable, charger and device to get more than baseline anyway, it works the same as MicroUSB for me.
I will have to see that. I would be concerned about pushing cat5e that fast. I am not sure about cat6, but again that speed is not fast enough to buy new cards for the computers and if we were buying cards I guess the 10G fiber cards are likely cost competitive now that servers are dumping them as obsolete.
Yea, I think 2.5G is really searching for a market, that may not exist. For home use, 1Gbit is in general plenty fast enough, and maxes out most US customers Internet too. For enterprise use 10G is common and cheap. The cards to get an SFP+ port into any tower or server is just really small. Enterprise is considering how to do 100G core cheaply enough, and looking for at least 25G on performance servers, if not also 100G in some cases. If you’ve got the budget you can roll 400G core right now in “not insane pricing”.
2.5G to the generic office (that might well be remote) is likely re-wiring and unnecessary. And that’s if you don’t find ac WiFi sufficient, i.e. sub 1G.
Ok but marketing teams and micro transactions teams to get rich have fuck all to do with k8s or clusters to run lots of data quickly over the network.
Maybe you know some magic way to provide high availability for petabytes of data pushed at hundreds of Gigabits per second to millions of simultaneous connections. But I don’t. And I work with large data volumes for research that still are a fraction of Netflix data and throughput and we’ve hit the limit of single high performance storage devices necessitating a ceph cluster for storage and availability.
I can’t speak to k8s but there are reasons you need clusters to handle absurd amounts of data with high uptime and high networking performance.
The reason the streamers are creating their own content is licensing breakdowns and copyright law. I don’t know why everyone thinks they can out Netflix the Netflix streaming service, but they also think they’ll make more money trying to do it. It’s like Amazon deciding to somehow make their delivery system better than UPS. Or cheaper.
I think it either calls into question the supposed economies of scale and core business competency theories or they’re not doing it to save money / make money at all.
Fair enough. Last time I checked, I saw enough people warning against btrfs that I just figured it wasn’t going to catch up to ZFS and kind of forgot about it. Now I realize that may have been awhile ago, and if it’s not in RHEL, I haven’t considered it as enterprise ready - which recently is changing with Red Hat / IBM losing their darn minds, but my “working knowledge” is limited on stuff I don’t watch all the time.
The problem is just we have to use the sites. There’s no real choice ( we have some of this for work too). I’m not losing my job or impacting my medical care for a browser war. If I can fool the site with an extension or something, then if I know that I’ll do it. But this idea that you can just avoid browsers when you need a website is not really true. I will say - I very rarely see these problems compared to back in the day. But I have contacted tech support and they just say use the working browser. I can’t report a bug, they don’t even understand why I’m being a PITA.
Never used Chrome, and strongly suggest to other people not to use Chrome. However, I’ve not had the hate for chromium browsers (so far, the killing of extensions might drive me away) - I’ve really enjoyed Vivaldi for a lot more features and having the engine that works on websites (yes this sucks). My mom OTOH is a Firefox person, and I just had to help her get onto her insurance website - she had tech support on the phone, and Firefox just would not let her set a password and just kept looping and using up the reset link. Finally I tried in Vivaldi (Chromium) and it worked first try. Of course, I’ve had the same experience in the opposite direction. So I have to keep using both.
Also, Vivaldi anyway has a much better UI IMHO for what I want than Firefox does, and is faster. As an IT person, I much prefer semantic versioning which Vivaldi also has.
Anyway, at this point Chromium is like IE was - you can’t not have access to your health insurance website, and they don’t apparently test in Firefox so it doesn’t work. You can’t drop your provider cause you don’t pick it, your work does. The upshot of Chromium is that there are rebuilds and it runs on other platforms than Windows - so… there’s that at least.
Honestly, I’d like to see someone fork Chromium and keep web extensions etc, but no one wants to write a browser engine anymore - even Vivaldi, which was the old Opera team that wrote 2 browser engines over the history of the browser through v12 - can’t afford to make their own engine. What I don’t get is why so many browser makers have chosen chromium vs gecko - almost no one wraps gecko in the last 10 years. (Maybe Firefox is different now? I know it in some ways started getting crappy wrt extensions back in v28? whenever Pale Moon forked.)
Interesting - I never thought of that, mostly because the overhead is kind of insane (and I don’t actually think bitcoin is anonymous, but in this case good enough). I was thinking for your average person, they’re going to pull out a credit card or debit card which is a hard ID. Certainly more than if they browse to startpage.com for instance.
I got work to pay for it. It is pretty good, and I like the lenses function (focus on just forums or other ways to sort). I can’t say that it’s necessarily better in general than startpage.com, which is anonomized google (gets you out of the filter bubble though). I feel like Kagi is very slightly better, maybe 10 percent at most.
I also don’t love the hard ID they have on you for payment. They claim not to track you but they certainly can, and I’d argue better than Google can if you use startpage.com or whatever anonomized version.
The problem in the US is they can’t give moving violations without someone there to testify. Usually that’s the officer. If the officer doesn’t show up, the ticket is tossed. I’m not really sure why they can give redlight tickets (unclear if that held up or not), but some of it had to do with if it was something that affected your license, or was a “violation” instead of a crime like a parking ticket.
The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
I’m not entirely sure this is true. Look at the constant posts and commenting on how people hate to deal with the complication of additional apps / sites. It’s a major negative of the fediverse, it’s one reason I think Signal shot themselves in the foot getting rid of SMS. It’s why people keep using Amazon or Netflix even as they get worse and worse and more expensive. Heck, I’m not even immune - I wish we had one fast and cheap way to transfer money rather than Zelle, Paypal, various bank schemes, venmo and on and on. I wish we had a universal shopping cart thing like Paypal checkout more widely adopted vs making ever more accounts and typing in all my details for a one time order from a different website (and this is one reason why people gravitate to Amazon vs individual sites).
I’m not saying I’d like an all in one app, but I can see it potentially being interesting to people if it simplified their lives. I don’t think Musk and X are likely to be able to do it, but I don’t actually think there’s no interest.
There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn’t as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform. I’m arguing that it’s exactly as straightforward as picking between Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, any website. How did these people who can’t search find reddit? I get that it sucks leaving a company you have a relationship with. I just don’t think it’s hard, and I do think that the last 20ish years (at least) have shown that companies are “take it or leave it”, and rarely if ever respond to requests no matter how you make them. So it’s back to my initial point - you shouldn’t want a “central platform” because eventually it becomes worse and worse. This holds true in theory (monopolies are bad) and practice over recent and longer history.
I guess I also don’t get the concern about picking “the right lemmy instance” - at worst, it’s like picking an e-mail server, or grocery store. Try a random one, find out what doesn’t work for you (if anything) and then use that knowledge to evaluate the next one. Repeat until happy. In reality - that’s also what we’re doing up a level in terms of platforms in general - I was happy on reddit till I wasn’t. Presumably same for everyone. Many people might still be happy on reddit. I don’t judge that - my beef is if you’re extremely unhappy and yet basically want someone to change reddit for you vs moving on.
I am NOT at all arguing that it’s not difficult to move entire communities at all. I’m not sure if it’s possible - you’re going to basically fork no matter what. And that sucks, but it’s also something the community risked (and always does risk) on a given platform if it becomes crap for some reason. A community is also never fixed and your reddit community is changing no matter what with the various things going on. I don’t know how big a change it will be for any given community, but to the extent you’re empowered by the central platform, you’re losing some people (those like me) to alternative platforms. You can’t stop that. Heck, even without reddit doing their best to burn their platform trust to the ground, there were always going to be people who move along, try and make a spinoff community either on reddit or elsewhere etc. You can’t have a unified approach unless a large majority agrees to either live with reddit or to leave reddit to the same place. I don’t think either is actually going to happen in the long run.
And software wise, I think as you have pointed out it seems reddit wants to make things kind of worse and lemmy and the fediverse is trying to make things better. So over time, just like how lemmy is WAY more active now than it was a month ago, I think we’ll see the software improve too. So maybe today it’s really in reddits favor to stay there as a mod - though I know /r/photography didn’t agree - but I feel like each day those lines are getting closer together where you’ll cross and probably end up with 2 viable communities, and one isn’t on reddit and everyone has to choose if they want to be on both, or one or the other. The main thing is lemmy and the fediverse are all in on API access and anyone writing tools, and reddit has closed that off basically entirely. So as I understand it, there’s very little chance to get mod tools back on reddit, but there’s every expectation that people are building mod tools for lemmy. That’s not to say a closed system is inherently bad - but I’ve rarely found it to be the most inexpensive or option filled. I also heard a recent techdirt podcast on distributed moderation and reddit and that all their public competitors have (had? Twitter got rid of theirs but went private) professional trust and safety moderation teams, and there’s a good chance that’s going to be something wanted for an IPO by investors expecting legal or regulatory risk, and with that will be a push for a homogenized set of moderation rules across the entire site. I think that is very plausible, but also will further kill what made reddit special, and if we’re talking about centralized platforms, facebook dwarfs reddits users, and for the “I don’t care about how the site is run” large mass crowd that also does’t care about NSFW niches and such, and DOES care mostly about ease of entry and finding communities - I could see facebook groups eating reddits lunch in the masses, while the others move on to places like lemmy.
OT slightly: I’ve had multiple interactions on lemmy now where I seem to miss communicate something in a way I didn’t on reddit or in e-mail listserves. And I’m wondering if it’s cultural or ??? Specifically - I tend to quote and comment on the part of a comment I’m replying to that I have something to say about it. The parts I don’t quote I (thought) I was implicitly not arguing with or for and at worst would be neutral to I support because I didn’t “rebut” in my reply. But instead it often seems to be received like you did of me missing nuance. I tried in my initial reply to point out A) this is a rant (so don’t take it that seriously) and I tried to imply B) I’m ranting about this one specific nitpick of the post. Is there some way to do that better? A “signature” I paste in (seems pretentious)? Some formatting change vs quote -> comment / rebut? Thanks.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
This just feels like a cop out - welcome to the Internet, you need to search to find stuff? Maybe I’m terminally techie, or got online way “to early”, but my god, how did people get on reddit to begin with? It wasn’t a default homepage in a browser. How did they get an e-mail account? How did they find an ISP? Did they need counseling to pick a cell phone provider?
This feels just like the “Linux isn’t straightforward to …” - Ok? Neither is Android or Windows or MacOS. You just went through that at some point in the past and don’t remember the confusion.
And it’s not like Reddit started out with those communities. I mean, either you don’t care, or you care and hoping reddit changes is basically like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe try asking a techie friend if you really can’t handle a search engine and reading a small amount.
I mean, we’re not talking about setting up I2P to access an internal IRC network here, we’re talking about picking a website and getting an account. This should not be hard. And if you’re a mod fleeing reddit, maybe be the change you want to see and start a community on the fediverse.
I might be not getting something here but it just sounds like “All these people are trapped in a bad situation and I don’t believe they have any agency or ability to learn anything new to get out of it”. These people have agency. Instead of telling everyone “oh Lemmy is too confusing” - point them to the hundreds of posts and websites now explaining how to do it.
ok… breath… rant over.
I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.