Yeah i really valued learning to code when I didn't have the internet available, if taught me patience and deep thinking, problem decomposition and organic (brain) execution
That is great for core principles. But languages and development environments have since assumed everyone has access to then internet. Meaning more "stuff" is the solution to problems (massive standard libraries or community created ones) rather that elegent language solutions.
The internet enabled all the complexity we have today. LLMs will have a similar effect, but instead of engineers actually having to understand the system (even in it's complexity) they will just be querying the oracle to build things or solve problems.
When the oracle can't help (or maybe refuses to) is when it gets interesting.
Similar to me, I learnt some html tags through a book which was sold at newsstand, once I was at my cousin's house using her computer without internet access, then I wrote a simple html page with the Win 95 cloud wallpaper as background image. My cousin was terrified how I did that!
I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powers (especially under the very broad definition of 'national security') to just get automatic compliance, using the same powers they can silence the companies from publishing anything about it too.
I of course feel bad for the student here too, he should not be targeted for exercising his rights to peaceful protest.
But Google is not the enemy here, I would bet good money their hand is forced to comply and their mouth is silenced. The enermy here is the overreaching government and ICE
I do not feel bad for Google here and they are at fault. If they are in a tight bind now it is only because they have eroded the privacy safety buffer so thin over the past few decades that they are finally having a hard time walking the line. If they had been fighting for strong, clear, boundaries then this wouldn't be an issue. Instead they have pushed automatic TOS changes that let them do what they want when they want and ignoring privacy settings and selling info to anyone with no consequences. Yes, they are likely in a 'tight bind' right now but it is one that they set up for themselves.
I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powers
Or they could implement end-to-end encryption for many of their products and they wouldn't be able to give the government the data, even if they wanted to. But that would hamper them to analyze data for ad targeting.
Google's sin here is not in obeying a warrant, it's by pressuring a strategy of extreme concentration of power and intermediation. Google wants to know who you talk to, where you are, where you work, how much money you make, what kind of jobs you are interested in, whether or not you've searched for recipes to make controlled substances, etc. etc. We can be happy that they failed, or at least are only weakly succeeding. They almost completely dominate email services, which were supposed to be distributed and run by whomever. This is hugely anticompetitive practice, right in the middle of our relatively new ubiquitous information infrastructure. One side effect of this is that they are one-stop shop for governments to get extremely detailed profiles of..to be honest, almost of all of us. But that's just one of the unfortunate side effects.
How does one feel bad for a corporation, especially of this size? Double so for one that quite literally removed "Don't be Evil" as its motto and from its code of conduct.
The corporation has no feelings and I don't imagine the board members or shareholders are feeling bad about this.
I don't! For one thing, Google is not a person and has no feelings. Individuals within Google decided to comply. And none of those individuals would face any significant consequences for not complying. The US government, even now, has an extremely good track record of treating companies separate from their employees.
The US is not in a full blown authoritarian regime. Big companies aren't failing to resist because they fear dire consequences. They're doing it because they don't care. If they think caving to the administration will result in $1 in additional profit compared to fighting it, that's what they'll do.
Big corporations are paperclip maximizers but for money. Treat them like you'd treat an AI that's single-mindedly focused on making number go up.
> Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says
This is true, but only because Google is a horrific monopoly and is allowed to continue to be (and to grow) only by the grace of government. If they don't do what they're told, they won't be allowed to steal in the way that they are accustomed to doing.
I don't think that anybody who controls Google misses a moment of sleep over it, though. They're being "forced" to do it like a kid is being "forced" not to do their homework if you offer them candy. It's easy and lucrative to be passive.
Utter nonsense. All it would take is for all of these trillion dollar companies to stand up to fascism. Yes, corporations don't have a conscience, but this would be good for their bottom line. They chose not to.
Yeah that was the reason for me too, in order to get the distro CD ROMS I had to mail $10 to some random address and wait 4 weeks for them to be mailed back!
I tell people you used to have to post a cheque when you bought stuff online and they just look at me like I’m nuts. It was basically just mail order, but on the web.
One of the frustrating parts about LLMs is that they are so neutered and conditioned to be politically correct and non-offensive, they are polite more than correct.
Its too easy to "lead the witness" if you say "could the problem be X?" It will do an unending amount of mental gymnastics to find a way that it could be X, often constructing elaborate rube Goldberg type logic rats nests so that it can say those magic words "you're absolutely right"
I would pay a lot of money for a blunt, non-politeness conditioned LLM that I would happily use with the knowledge it might occasionally say something offensive if it meant I would get the plain, cold, hard truth, instead of something watered down, placating, nanny-state robotic sycophant, creating logical spider webs desperate for acceptance, so the public doesn't get their little feelings hurt or inadequacies shown.
But you don't get the plain, cold, hard truth in the second case. You just get an LLM with output in that style. The model will still be as path dependent as ever, it doesn't output the truest answer, it selects the answer that best fits the prompt.
The problem is understanding what is true and not true? Its a much harder problem to solve than you think. OpenAI is using this method - they over index on citation to the point where ChatGPT will almost blindly assume something is true when published in some credentialised place.
The alternative is to use its own intuition to understand what is true and false. Its not super clear which option is better?
This isn't a discussion about finding absolute truth, which is hard because nobody has even created a univerally generalised definition of truth, let alone a way to find it; and literally everybody knows that, implicitly or explicitly.
This is a discussion about how a model that is fine tuned to be polite is less true than one that is not
You can set your prompt to do that. You can have it be extremely skeptical. You can even make it contrarian, if you wanted to be extreme. My current prompt challenges me often, and wants to find weaknesses in my argument.
Intelligence is a factor of many things - this just talking about domain knowledge, which is pretty blunt and naive view of intelligence.
Intelligence is:
Domain knowledge, ability to abstract, ability to compose, creative fluidity (idea generation rate), creative originality (new idea novelty), ability to empathize as well as understand and navigate complex social dynamics, metacognitive ability, and much much more
Often the reduction of intelligence to something simpler is "the engineers fallacy" - an engineering mind is so desperate to quantify something numerically, they oversimplify to try and get some scalar value they can maximize; but the cold hard truth is that the over simplification is too basic to encapsulate the important things, which are often not easily quantifiable numerically
Eeek, I can't imagine what this is like if it scales. What happens to the fire risk when theres 20,000 laptops with aging batteries all sitting together? I hope they take the batteries out, however many laptops use batteries to smooth out power fluctuations.
Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.
I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!
I worked for a place that did something akin to this in the early 2010s. Someone figured out how to add 32-bit company laptops to the virtualization cluster (likely because they were using one as a stand in for a server that at the time would have been in the works but not yet purchased) and so once that work had been incurred they just kept "retiring" unserviceable company laptops to the cluster. Imagine a standard wire metro-rack crammed in a telecom closet beside a normal server rack. Now imagine that metro rack literally full of Toshiba Satellite Pro's from about 2005-9. The cluster hosted virtual machines for testing.
No fires, no hardware problems. No special cooling other than the mini-split that was in the closet to cool the server rack. They just kept trucking. But modern hardware is much more high strung and I don't doubt you'd have weird failures.
Edit: Back then VMs were how things were done and RAM was seemingly always the bottleneck by a mile, so the cluster did add up to a meaningful amount of extra performance compared to not having it.
My old Lenovo t420 has been running 24/7 pegged as a multi-camera DVR since 2011, no issues whatsoever. Of course the battery is removed, but I don't see many decent laptops struggling running under load for prolonged periods.
Yeah this is key - in order to get out of full-screen you have to find and navigate some some ini file, then its still doing the mouse capture thing, which I think is also a setting, but all this faffing about just to get it into a usable state is pretty user hostile
I want the window to be open like any other window, and the mouse pointer to work transparently in and out of it - like when I hover the mouse over the dosbox window, change the pointer but keep the same mouse speed, momentum etc
I think this would be really hard to do in an emulated environment, maybe even would require patching each game executable to get the mouse speed right (not sure?), the modern environment integration, like you say, is what Im after too
Market in this context doesn't necessarily mean the publicly traded markets, it can mean the investor market (and their ability to raise), the financial market (their ability to get loans or other financial products), all of these things are dependent on their overall company performance, which can be manipulated in the short term by mass firing 1k employees so some executive can hit a KPI and get their bonus. Ya know, sociopathic stuff like that.
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