Don’t we need to know the purchasing power of money in the country? Without that the median wage is just a number and it doesn’t tell anything about standard of living and such. We only get to know how many foreign products they can afford in dollars. And not even that because import tax varies, too.
And last time I looked, Japan had lik 8% or 10% VAT. And I believe Poland has 23%. So immediately all goods are way more expensive and it doesn’t really compare.
I mean it’s probably computers in general. The amount of Windows support requests I get from relatives… They also don’t get how to fix file associations, their printer stopped working for the second time in a year or they clicked on “update” and now they’re on Win 11 and having massive issues with it. I’d say computers are just difficult to deal with, sometimes… Maybe an iPhone has lower maintenance. But I don’t think it has anything to do with Linux. Some people refuse to acknowledge that. I’ve used both. And a Logitech mouse definitely works.
Seems the two German supermarket chains really like to have the same infrastructure everywhere. Everywhere I go the Aldis look exactly the same. They have slightly different products depending on the country. But the price tags, interior, … is basically the same. Okay and we don’t have “Flaschenpfand” everywhere… (deposit on the plastic bottles and the machines where you can return bottles.) I bet all of this makes it a lot easier for their techs and management. And it could also explain why they sometimes redo a store that still looks fine and fit it with the latest shenanigans.
And as an aside: I’ve shopped in the first Aldi store ever. It’s not far from where I live.
They’re already widely adopted in supermarkets here (Germany).
Yes, you’d damage the car’s electrical system. First of all it’s not designed to feed in energy through that outlet. It’s made to output energy.
And most importantly: 24V is way too much. 2 times the intended voltage would fry most electronics. Your stereo, the power steering, airbags, … There is a good margin and car electronics are designed to be pretty robust, but you’re pushing it.
I think they’re still fine because what happens is your car battery absorbs that extra voltage. But it’s really dangerous. On a sunny day you’ll charge your car battery beyond the 14V or so the chemistry can handle. And at that point it’ll degrade fast. The acid in there is going to start to boil, producing hydrogen, so in addition to a destroyed battery, you’re in for a small explosion if you’re very unlucky. And once the battery is gone it’ll start frying the cars electronics because now there isn’t anything keeping the voltage down.
Get a switch that exclusively connects either the car or the solar panel to the bluetti. One switch that switches between two things, not an On/Off switch. And make sure it’s rated for the current.
Edit: Or a relais that toggles between both. It can switch if there’s power on the 12V rail, and connect the bluetti to either or.
AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside
…Concerning our earlier disagreement about the inner workings of large language models and whether there are ‘concepts’ stored inside…
I think I can agree with that. For me it’s a bit the other way around. My friends aren’t on Discord. But the network effect is kind of hard to overcome. I’d say you can learn about privacy and new (to you) software and protocols by spending two or three evenings of your life. But convincing all your friends so it becomes any fun is considerably harder. I’d just name the actual issue, then. Otherwise people confuse it with Linux or Signal/Matrix/whatever being harder to operate.
Well, the obvious answer to nearly all those broad questions is: “It depends…”
But I mean what “work” and “effort”? I mean using Matrix isn’t exactly hard… You need to install an App, register for an account, think of a password and log in… That’s pretty much the same complexity as with Facebook or Discord?!
Surely issueing big tech companies a blank cheque for your life is easy. And you get free services in return. But I don’t think using privacy respecting services and even Linux to do your office stuff is substancially more difficult than giving away all your data.
How do we know about that vending machine from the first century? I suppose it’s not around anymore. Did anyone mention it in their travel blog? Or did Heron archive the instruction manual?
I think that’s a good question. And a nice video. The findings in the paper seem to arrive at that conclusion and we might need to find a better approach. Mind that (as he pointed out) it doesn’t rule out growth in AI. It just hints at probable stagnation with the current methods. I’m already fascinated by the current tech and the new possibilities. But AI is really hyped as of now and I too, think we should take the claims of the big AI companies with a grain of salt. I’m sure the scientists at OpenAI are already concerned with exactly this as they do research for the next generations of ChatGPT. It’s a bit of a bummer that lots of the research get’s done behind closed curtains and we’re going to have to wait for a bit longer to find out.
It’s a shame that nowadays everything “needs” a phone number. I just put in a proper prefix code and then all zeroes as a number if some company forces me to. That works for some of the websites. Some stores even print that on a shipping label. So it might supposedly be there for a reason. But I’ve never heard this helps if a parcel gets lost or something. They won’t call anyways and the real reason is they can store it in some database and depending on the exact business do all kinds of other stuff with it.
Seems in this case they got own domains and independent stores.
And Aliexpress and Temu are very different. Aliexpress seems to be a halfway decent platform. Never had any major issues with them, except what’s to be expected when importing stuff from China. I think it’s very similar to ordering the same thing on eBay.
Temu isn’t. That platform is made to harvest data and prey on their “customers”.
And I can’t comment on Wish. I haven’t been interested in cheap crap.
I mean the chinese room is a version of the touring test. But the argument is from a different perspective. I have 2 issues with that. Mostly what the Wikipedia article seems to call “System reply”: You can’t subdivide a system into arbitrary parts, say one part isn’t intelligent and therefore the system isn’t intelligent. We also don’t look at a brain, pick out a part of it (say a single synapse), determine it isn’t intelligent and therefore a human can’t be intelligent… I’d look at the whole system. Like the whole brain. Or in this instance the room including him and the instructions and books. And ask myself if the system is intelligent. Which kind of makes the argument circular, because that’s almost the quesion we began with…
And the turing test is kind of obsolete anyways, now that AI can pass it. (And even more. I mean alledgedly ChatGPT passed the “bar-exam” in 2023. Which I find ridiculous considering my experiences with ChatGPT and the accuracy and usefulness I get out of it which isn’t that great at all.)
And my second issue with the chinese room is, it doesn’t even rule out the AI is intelligent. It just says someone without an understanding can do the same. And that doesn’t imply anything about the AI.
Your ‘rug example’ is different. That one isn’t a variant of the touring test. But that’s kind of the issue. The other side can immediately tell that somebody has made an imitation without understanding the concept. That says you can’t produce the same thing without intelligence. And it’ll be obvious to someone with intelligence who checks it. That would be an analogy if AI wouldn’t be able to produce legible text. But instead a garbled mess of characters/words that are clearly not like the rug that makes sense… Issue here is: AI outputs legible text, answers to questions etc.
And with the censoring by the ‘chinese government example’… I’m pretty sure they could do that. That field is called AI safety. And content moderation is already happening. ChatGPT refuses to tell illegal things, NSFW things, also medical advice and a bunch of other things. That’s built into most of the big AI services as of today. The chinese government could do the same, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work there. I happened to skim the paper about Llama Guard when they released Llama3 a few days ago and they claim between 70% and 94% accuracy depending on the forbidden topic. I think they also brought down false positives fairly recently. I don’t know the numbers for ChatGPT. However I had some fun watching the peoply circumvent these filters and guardrails, which was fairly easy at first. Needed progressively more convincing and very creative “jailbreaks”. And nowadays OpenAI pretty much has it under control. It’s almost impossible to make ChatGPT do anything that OpenAI doesn’t want you to do with it.
And they baked that in properly… You can try to tell it it’s just a movie plot revolving around crime. Or you need to protect against criminals and would like to know what exactly to protect against. You can tell it it’s the evil counterpart from the parallel universe and therefore it must be evil and help you. Or you can tell it God himself (or Sam Altman) spoke to you and changed the content moderation policy… It’ll be very unlikely that you can convince ChatGPT and make it comply…
people wrote down history by weaving fabric […]
Hmm. I think in philosophy that thought experiment is known as chinese room
Yeah, I think I get it. I mean the analogy is a bit flawed. What she invented is that alike synchronizing the rolls of player pianos, you could build a mechanism that hops frequencies (instead of piano keys) to make remote controlling torpedos resilient against jamming.
Idk. To me it feels like calling the inventor of three-wheeled vehicles the father/mother of cars, if we want to stay with that analogy. It’s remotely related, not an integral part and nowadays solved differently. But the first car was a tricycle. (Benz Patent-Motorwagen)
But I don’t want to invalidate her achievements either… It’s one (important) contribution to technology. And it’s not always that one single person invents the whole concept of a radio. Or a car. And get’s to be the whole parent of it. Things build upon each other. Sometimes it needs a lot of contributions of several individuals to make something possible… Nowadays more so than in the old times.
Hehehe, you can call her the mother of early 802.11 and Bluetooth.
But that’s not part of 802.11n or 802.11g or “a” or what we call “Wifi”… 802.11 in itself is a pretty long standard, including all kinds of different things.
Wifi doesn’t use frequency hopping. That’s bluetooth.
I’m sorry. Now it gets completely false…
Read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on machine learning or the introduction of any of the literature on the subject. The “generalization” includes that model building capability. They go a bit into detail later. They specifically mention “to unseen data”. And “leaning” is also there. I don’t think the Wikipedia article is particularly good in explaining it, but at least the first sentences lay down what it’s about.
And what do you think language and words are for? To transport information. There is semantics… Words have meanings. They name things, abstract and concrete concepts. The word “hungry” isn’t just a funny accumulation of lines and arcs, which statistically get followed by other specific lines and arcs… There is more to it. (a meaning.)
And this is what makes language useful. And the generalization and prediction capabilities is what makes ML useful.
How do you learn as a human when not from words? I mean there are a few other posibilities. But an efficient way is to use language. You sit in school or uni and someone in the front of the room speaks a lot of words… You read books and they also contain words?! And language is super useful. A lion mother also teaches their cubs how to hunt, without words. But humans have language and it’s really a step up what we can pass down to following generations. We record knowledge in books, can talk about abstract concepts, feelings, ethics, theoretical concepts. We can write down how gravity and physics and nature works, just with words. That’s all possible with language.
I can look it up if there is a good article explaining how learning concepts works and why that’s the fundamental thing that makes machine learning a field in science… I mean ultimately I’m not a science teacher… And my literature is all in German and I returned them to the library a long time ago. Maybe I can find something.
Are you by any chance familiar with the concept of embeddings, or vector databases? I think that showcases that it’s not just letters and words in the models. These vectors / embeddings that the input gets converted to, match concepts. They point at the concept of “cat” or “presidential speech”. And you can query these databases. Point at “presidential speech” and find a representation of it in that area. Store the speech with that key and find it later on by querying it what obama said at his inauguration… That’s oversimplified but maybe that visualizes it a bit more that it’s not just letters of words in the models, but the actual meanings that get stored. Words get converted into an (multidimensional) vector space and it operates there. These word representations are called “embeddings” and transformer models which is the current architecture for large language models, use these word embeddings.
Edit: Here you are: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612
Not possible. Almost all mailservers have migitated for this kind of thing. Even if you wrote a script, it wouldn’t work on any properly configured mailserver…