- 0 Posts
- 60 Comments
Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.
If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.
Why the quotes?
If you ever see quotation marks in a headline, it simply means they’re attributing the word/phrase to a particular source. In this case, they’re saying that the word “security” was used verbatim in the intranet document. Scare quotes are never used in journalism, so they’re not implying anything by putting the word in quotation marks. They’re simply saying that they’re not paraphrasing.
I feel like the answer is recycling deposits somehow. I’ve seen attempts at them here and there, but I guess we haven’t quite figured out the details yet. I guess electronics are a bit trickier to set up a deposit system for than pop cans. Even the places that do have electronics deposits, often you have to drive to a special recycling centre out past the airport that’s open 3 hours in the middle of the day, only for them to tell you that everything’s glued together so they can’t really separate out the parts they need and most of it will probably end up just going to the landfill anyway.
But theoretically, if we could get a serious deposit system that allowed for recycling to be profitable and gave manufacturers and incentive for making their stuff easier to take apart and recycling (and hence easier to repair), that would be pretty sweet.
I’m guessing childless adults are significantly less than that. Just thinking about my kids and all of their book readers, barking animal toys, light-up fairy wands, I have a bad feeling they may be bringing up that average.
Though the nice thing about kids’ electronics is they never get obsoleted. A light-up fairy wand is just as fun in 2074 as it is in 2024. So they just get cycled through the 2nd hand mommy communities until they break. It was $40 new, you buy it “mostly undamaged” for $20, hope your kid doesn’t scratch it too badly so you can sell it a couple years down the line for $10 or so.
The bad thing about kids’ electronics is it’s that for new stuff, it’s really impossible to tell how long it’s going to last. Could be 20 years, could be 20 minutes.
Sure! We can insure that for you! Oh we just noticed that our InsureLink service isn’t connecting to your car. So I’ll just need you to sign this waiver saying that you’re declining the InsureLink Safety discount. Just sign right here. It’s just saying that we cannot offer you all of our insurance services, just like if you get in an accident or something and we can’t remotely verify what you were doing at the time, we can’t help you. Great! And without the Safety discount your premiums will go up by only 372.50 a month.
Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?
The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.
All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).
It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.
Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).
Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.
I firmly believe US Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and uh, the Iraq, and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should. Our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, or should help South Africa and help the Iraq, and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.
I don’t see one on Civitai (though that doesn’t mean someone hasn’t published one somewhere else). Though if you want 2000s Movie Poster Style (American Pie/Road Trip Ensemble) style, I guess you can do that, at least.
This is a truly impressively terrible summary. I mean just the fact that the second word is “then” is something to behold. But then the second paragraph switches perspective without any warning so nobody has any idea who “you” refers to.
Also, I mean, the fact that it literally cut out everything that happened.
after all, people are taking pictures to actually capture the moment
Depending on what you mean by “the moment”, I don’t think that’s really true. Modern cell phone photography doesn’t really give you what the sensors have picked up. You take a picture of your friend with his eyes closed and the phone will change the picture to have his eyes open. You take a blurry picture of the moon and your phone will enhance it to make a better picture of the moon. I mean some people hate it but a lot people do actually like it.
And they like it because they don’t really take pictures for the purpose of posterity. They don’t take a picture of their friend because they need to look back 20 years from now and remember exactly how that one plastic bag 30m in the distance was crumpled. They take the picture because they want to post to Instagram, get some likes from their friends, and maybe look back 20 years from now to remember the general vibe, and if their phone can “enhance” that for them.
If people could record a voice memo and have their phone actually make a really decent Instagram post out of it for them, I 1000% believe people would do it instead of taking an actual picture. Posting pictures is more about socializing than it is about posterity.
More like robbers rob a bank and take hostages. They threaten to kill a hostage, but still don’t get any money. So they threaten to report the bank for not being up to code with an expired fire extinguisher if they don’t get some money.
They know the bank doesn’t give a shit about hostages being killed. But a few pennies for a minor fine is a threat the bankers really understand.
Some of it is incredibly difficult to imagine how to do in a private way, too.
For example, my browser can display AVIF images. If my browser announces in the Accept “hey, I’m able to display AVIF images. Please send me AVIF images if you have them rather than JPEG”, that helps to identify me, since most browser don’t display AVIF, which sucks. But I really want to get AVIF images: they’re efficient. So how do I announce that I want AVIF images without announcing that I want AVIF images?
Some of the other web features were well-intentioned but have just ended up being useless. Like your browser also announces what language you prefer. Like “hey if you a German version of this text, please send it to me in German, thanks”. But for some reason EVERY WEBSITE IGNORES THIS and just says “oh you speak Spanish and English but you’re travelling in Russian right now? HOPE YOU LIKE READING RUSSIAN FUCKER”. So it’s 100% only used for invading privacy now.
Some of the tracking mechanisms never should have been allowed in the first place (like timezone and which fonts I have installed), but some of them (like Accept) I can’t think of how to do in a secure way.
It’s a cool idea and the example they gave actually seemed pretty neat.
I’d (somewhat perversely) love to see this feature tried in a terminal emulator. ANSI does actually define escape codes for switching to alternative fonts (ESC [ 10 m through ESC [ 19 m) though I don’t know of any software or even term drawing library that uses it.
Awful headline.
Somewhat surprising results, though. They took a fraction of pig blood plasma and injected it into rats over the course of 8 days. Some organs in the older rats showed a lower epigenetic age, and the older rats also performed quicker in cognitive tests. The results are more extreme than they predicted they be (especially the liver and heart), so we’ll see what happens when someone tries to replicate the results.
Any speculation about applicability to humans is just science fiction, of course.
Omegle is a bit of a unique case due to their persistent non-action. Most places, if people start grooming children or broadcasting child porn, they’ll start banning offenders at the very lest. Omegle, nah.
At one point, they put a warning splash screen “Careful: there are pedophiles that use this” or something like that, but they took the warning down after a while. And eventually they did officially say that you can’t use the site if you’re a minor, but of course it was just enforced through the honour system.
Those are literally the only two actions they ever took to address criminal content and behaviour.
Yup, total bullshit. When I got to:
Kaufman hopes it will “transform how the medical community screens for diabetes”.
I started to lose faith that there was anything of interest there. For those who don’t know, “how the medical community screens for diabetes” currently is to…draw blood. Like, that’s literally it. You fast overnight, go to the doctor’s office, get blood taken, and the next day you learn if you’re diabetic. If your doctor is really fancy, they may do the thing where they take blood once, then ask you to drink some ungodly sickeningly sweet glucose potion and take blood a second time so they can see how your body responds. But that’s about the extent of it.
The authors are making it sound like you currently have to hike through the Himalayas to get a diagnosis now. No, you just take blood. It’s fast. It’s cheap. It’s easy. And it’s just about 100% accurate.
I can see that something like this could come up in some niche situations where someone’s very remote and it’s better than nothing, but “transform how the medical community screens for diabetes” overall is pretty laughable.
At a minimum they’ve got to design a wider issue. Current high-performance superscalar chips like the XuanTie 910 (what this laptop’s SoC are built around) are only triple-issue (3-wide superscalar), which gives a theoretical maximum of 3 ipc per core. (And even by RISC standards, RISC-V has pretty “small” instructions, so 3 ipc isn’t much compared to 3 ipc even on ARM. E.g., RISC-V does not have any comparison instructions, so comparisons need to be composed of at least a few more elementary instructions). As you widen the issue, that complicates the pipelining (and detecting pipeline hazards).
There’s also some speculation that people are going to have to move to macro-op fusion, instead of implementing the ISA directly. I don’t think anyone’s actually done that in production yet (the macro-op fusion paper everyone links to was just one research project at a university and I haven’t seen it done for real yet). If that happens, that’s going to complicate the core design quite a lot.
None of these things are insurmountable. They just take people and time.
I suspect manufacturing is probably a big obstacle, too, but I know quite a bit less about that side of things. I mean a lot of companies are already fabbing RISC-V using modern transistor technologies.
Many don’t know about DuckDuckGo and even more don’t care.
I should say that DuckDuckGo is generally much more strongly censored and controlled than Google. This won’t affect people in say, the US. But in many places around the world (like my country of South Korea), using DuckDuckGo is not realistic as a daily driver without using a VPN or making heavy use of the “!g” bang to fall back to Google (which doesn’t blanket censor words). Overall it makes it less accessible.
And I know, part of the reason people use DuckDuckGo in the first place is to avoid region-aware results. But that does not change their censorship policies.
(I think you’re arguing from an ethical standpoint whereas OP was arguing legally, but anyway…)
Theoretically, someone would be able ask an A.I. to recite an entire book for them
No, that shouldn’t happen. If an AI were ever able to recite back its training data verbatim, that AI would be overfitting. It happens by accident sometimes early on in development when your training data is too small and your model is too big, but it’s an error, and is something to be avoided and corrected.
The whole point of training is to get it to a point where it can’t recite back any of its training data. In order for that to happen, the AI is forced to sort of generalize and abstract (sorry for anthropomorphizing) its training data. That’s the only way to get it to be able to generate something new, which is the whole point of the endeavour.
Long story short, if an AI could recite back an entire book, by definition it could not be an AI, and it wouldn’t resemble any of the popular LLMs we have now like ChatGPT. (But you may see snippets and pastiches and watermarks show up)
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt “the real Internet” was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I’ve come to realize that it’s always been shitty. That’s my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn’t understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet.
PGP itself is a bit of mess.
For one thing, there’s really only one major/popular implementation of it these days, which is GPG. The codebase is arcane. Pretty major security vulnerabilities pop up constantly. It doesn’t have stable funding. Several years ago the entire project almost collapsed when the world discovered it had been maintained for several years by a single person who didn’t have any time or money to maintain it. The situation is a little bit better now, but not much.
(For this reason, people are starting to use age instead of gpg, as the code is much smaller, cleaner, forces safe defaults, and doesn’t seem to have security problems)
But the bigger problem that was never properly solved with PGP is key distribution. How do you get somebody’s key in the first place? Some people put their keys on their own personal (https) webpage, which is fine, but that’s not a solution for everyone, and doesn’t scale very well. Okay, so you might use a key server, but that has privacy implications (your identity is essentially public to the world) and centralizes everything down to a handful of small “trusted” key servers (since there would be no way to trust key servers in a decentralized way). We should probably just have email servers themselves serve keys somehow, but nobody’s put that into the email standard protocols.
The fact that keys expire amplifies all the problems with key distribution, and encourages people to do really unsafe things with keys, like just blindly trust them. You can sign other people’s keys for them, but that also does not scale very well.
The key distribution problem is something that things like Signal have “solved” with things like phone number verification, but there’s really no clear way to solve it on something totally distributed like email.
This one incident has had so many variations and urban legend-ish twists. This article itself even incorrectly lists the date as 1945 in one place, which is a common twist on the story, but incorrect. (This computer didn’t even come into existence until 1947, so the bug couldn’t have been found in 1945). For any know-it-alls who like to one-up people with the correct facts, here’s the truth behind the story, best I can figure out:
- This is indeed a real log entry book from September 9, 1947 (not 1945, as is sometimes reported)
- Grace Hopper did not write the log entry book
- Grace Hopper did not find the bug. She wasn’t even there that day
- Grace Hopper did make the story famous, though. Even though she wasn’t personally involved, she found it funny, and liked to tell it, which is how she got associated with the story
- This was not the first usage of the word “bug” (obviously, since “First actual case of bug being found” wouldn’t have been funny). The earliest recorded usage of “bug” (in an engineering context) was Thomas Edison in 1878, but it surely predated him, as well. It was in common usage among engineers in the early 20th century
- It was not the first usage of the word “debug”, as is often attributed. We have a record of the word “debug” being used in 1945. (Maybe this is why some versions of the Mark II story are sometimes given as 1945). “Debugging” was used in the aviation industry before the software industry
- The earliest recorded usage of the word “debug” in the context of software is 1952, but again, it probably predates its first record. Who knows if the word was already in use in 1947!
I recently discovered that he believes it’s theft if you watch one of his videos with an adblocker. Just out of spite, sometimes I put one of his videos on in the background (muted) with an adblocker.