astronaut_sloth

astronaut_sloth , 6 days ago

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.

astronaut_sloth , 6 days ago

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.

astronaut_sloth , 5 days ago

Yeah, I'm in the same boat.

astronaut_sloth , 1 month ago

escooters which are terrible

That's a bit of a stretch. They aren't great, but they're still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.

E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I'd say e-bikes are more versatile.

astronaut_sloth , 1 month ago

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.

astronaut_sloth , 3 months ago

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.

astronaut_sloth , 4 months ago

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).

astronaut_sloth , 4 months ago

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.

astronaut_sloth , 4 months ago

Like @Crack0n7uesday 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.

astronaut_sloth , 5 months ago

It's not just convenient for them to do it; it's how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It's not impossible, and I wouldn't even say it's even hard. It's just time consuming to set up (if it's the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it's virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won't because it's not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

astronaut_sloth , 5 months ago

I work/study in AI, and it is completely over-hyped. For one thing, the C-suite can't wrap it's head around the fact that AI != LLM; they all seem to think all AI is just LLMs. On top of that, they are way too eager to throw humans out of the loop.

That said, I think LLM applications, even in their current form, are super useful in development and business practices. I myself use it to increase my productivity in coding. But, I use it as an augmentation rather than a replacement. One of my friends put it best the other day, "LLMs are like a junior dev to your senior dev. You need to be hyper-specific, and you need to check it's output." In other words, it's great for off-loading some work, but it isn't going to completely replace humans.

With that said, I'm a bit annoyed that other AI fields are being over-shadowed by LLMs. There's a ton of other interesting work being done in those fields that is super useful and important. All of them, though, are not going to replace humans but rather augment and make humans more productive. I've found that an AI-Human team is most effective.