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.

This is why I believe scientists should be required to take liberal arts classes; especially related to written and spoken language.

And yes, I also think liberal arts students should be required to take some level of hard STEM classes (not watered-down “libarts-compatible” stuff, but actual physics, chemistry, biology, etc) as well.

Yes to both points! I’m eternally grateful to my high school AP English teachers for teaching me how to write and communicate.

My somewhat unpopular opinion is that we’d be better off as a society if everyone in college took “real” STEM and liberal arts classes. The STEM folks can understand the why and societal implications of what they study (as well as just communication), and the liberal arts types can learn a bit about how the world actually works in a concrete way.

Unfortunately, I’ve been continually struck by how incurious people are. I get that everyone has their interests, but that shouldn’t be to the exclusion of all other study. So, I don’t think this will happen. :/

Yeah, they’ll probably have to check everything. Though, I wonder if even just checking that everything is good to go would save time from manually re-writing it all. While it may not be a smashing success, it could still prove useful.

I dunno, I’m interested to see how this plays out.

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 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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat.

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 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.

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 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.

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court Court of Appeals of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

EDIT: Caught me! I’m not from New York and didn’t check 😅

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.

Blue or green for me. Never could find a proper teal folder.

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.

This is awesome!

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).

Like @[email protected] 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.

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.