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balder1991

@balder1991@lemmy.world

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balder1991 ,

copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else

This assertion dismisses the ethical considerations often intertwined with legal principles. Laws (including copyright laws) are influenced by moral and ethical values, and there are often huge books on theories about the validity of certain things which serve as the starting point of collections of laws.

the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture

While some companies do exploit copyright laws, not all companies use it in this way and whether it brings more harm than good is a point of discussion. But it can’t be generalized.

This completely overlooks the positive aspects of copyright as well, such as protecting the rights of individual creators and ensuring they can earn something from their own work.

balder1991 ,

They’re saying Windows will lock away some customization, but you don’t need a key to use it nowadays.

balder1991 ,

Possibly preventing being locked out of the EU.

Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough (www.xda-developers.com)

There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that...

balder1991 ,

In this particular case the RAM is part of the chip as an attempt to squeeze more performance. Nowadays, processors have become too fast but it’s useless if the rest of the components don’t catch up. The traditional memory architecture has become a bottleneck the same way HDDs were before the introduction of SSDs.

You’ll see this same trend extend to Windows laptops as they shift to Snapdragon processors too.

balder1991 ,

It’s just how machine learning has been since ever.

We only know the model’s behavior by testing, hence we only know more or less the behavior in relation to the amount of testing that was done. But the model internals has always been a black box of numbers that individually mean nothing and if tracked which neurons fire here and there it’ll appear just random, because it probably is.

Remember the machine learning models aren’t carefully designed, they’re just brute-force trained for a long time and have the numbers adjusted again and again whenever the results look closer or further away from the desired output.

balder1991 ,

The creator is already compensated as of now. They earn more if a premium user watches their video than a free user with YouTube ads.

So the sponsor is giving them more money regardless of whether the user is premium or not, which for them is probably a good deal but for us it feels like being double charged.

balder1991 ,

I don’t currently use a VPN but my impression is that nowadays I’d be greeted with captchas everywhere, is that wrong?

balder1991 ,

Doing that would require significantly more compute power, so there’s little economic incentive.

balder1991 ,

It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.

balder1991 ,

Is that even a battle worth fighting at this point?

I think they all know the safest option is to leverage Android’s ecosystem and add your own extras to it. Starting from scratch is like 90% chance of wasting lots of money and have no profit at all.

That’s why these massive projects aren’t usually started by companies, but by passionate individuals or orgs. They require a different incentive than the next quarter earnings.

balder1991 ,

The thing is, now that the game changed with machine learning techniques, there’s 0 incentive not to use it regardless of what previous deals existed in the past.

balder1991 ,

To be honest I expected that was the case since the beginning.

Some company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says (arstechnica.com)

Nearly two in five (37 percent) managers, directors, and executives believe their organization enacted layoffs in the last year because fewer employees than they expected quit during their RTO. And their beliefs are well-founded: One in four (25 percent) VP and C-suite executives and one in five (18 percent) HR pros admit they...

balder1991 ,

It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s that their incentives aren’t the same as the long term wellbeing of the company.

balder1991 ,

Yeah. I’m not sure that statement applies. It’s easier for humans to check something than to come up with something in the first place. But the thing is, the person doing the checking also needs to be proficient in the subject.

balder1991 ,

I think people don’t yet grasp that LLMs don’t produce any novel output. If that was the case, considering the amount of knowledge they have, they’d be making incredible new connections and insights that humanity never made before. Instead, they can only explain stuff that was already well documented before.

balder1991 ,

This myth keeps propagating online and it seems people never try to even Google what the issue was.

balder1991 ,

That’s true, but this happens because usually 95% of people are always on the latest version a few months after the new version was released. For developers, it’s really not worth supporting older versions when the overwhelming majority of users already upgraded.

Still, many large companies still support older versions when the user base is very huge. I work for a huge bank and we had to support all the way to iOS 10. Only this year it was recently upped to iOS 14, which now covers probably 99.99% of users.

balder1991 ,

Now we just have to wait for the crash.

balder1991 ,

It’s just like everything else in the world, 90% of things are shitty, but the good 10% of things are always worth finding.

balder1991 ,

That’s something I’d volunteer to contribute.

balder1991 ,

Linux has a lot of hardware problems, so the safest choice is always to do like the time I had a Hackintosh: buy hardware you already know it’s compatible.

But regarding making Linux easy for the average consumer, I don’t think it will ever be. The incentive just isn’t there. Even though some distros try to simplify things, there’s too many layers and different configs where problems can happen and not enough resources to handhold users through all the steps. Apple can only polish their operating system because they sell very expensive computers, so they actually make a profit from the average consumer.

In the end, it’s all about money and incentives, Linux philosophy was never to make things easy for the non computer savvy person. It could change, absolutely, with enough money, research, hardwork (most likely voluntary, which is scarce) and collaboration with other areas, such as good designers and UX people.

balder1991 ,

Apparently anything running on top of .NET is also harder than it should be.

balder1991 ,

Or using a virtual machine if the computer isn’t too crappy.

balder1991 , (edited )

As a foreigner, this is more of a US (maybe England?) thing in my perception (together with some Muslim and East cultures). The US was always a bit strange with sexuality themes.

balder1991 ,

I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.

balder1991 ,

I think they do have their help, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as some companies earning money from it want us to think. It’s just a tool that helps just like a good IDE has helped in the past.

balder1991 ,

Then I guess people will use the web less and less.

The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....

balder1991 ,

Yeah it is a bit weak on the arguments, as it doesn’t seem to talk about trade offs?

balder1991 , (edited )

AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.

I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people I see actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.

Most people just either find it useful for some specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on it.

balder1991 ,

You're doing it right now. You're criticizing that user for saying it's okay to talk about AI's failures. You're the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.

It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I'm criticizing, which clearly isn't what you claimed.

And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That's a masterclass in civility right there.

balder1991 ,

Thanks, I’ll try to use it from title to time.

balder1991 ,

Why wouldn’t companies have already got their data long ago? Internet archive is nothing new.

balder1991 ,

Yeah, that’s fair.

balder1991 ,

Yeah when you use Gemini, it seems like sometimes it’ll just answer based on its training, and sometimes it’ll cite some source after a search, but it seems like you can’t control that. It’s not like Bing that will always summarize and link where it got that information from.

I also think Gemini probably uses some sort of knowledge graph under the hoods, because it has some very up to date information sometimes.

balder1991 ,

Nope it’s because on Search it was summarizing the first results, the “pure Gemini” isn’t doing a search at that time, it’s just answering based on what it knows.

balder1991 , (edited )

You can use something like VirtualBox or VMWare. Won’t be the fastest experience, but also not so bad. It’s good enough to have a feel of how something works.

balder1991 , (edited )

The actual article does mention it.

balder1991 ,

Yeah, there’s a reason this wasn’t done before generative AI. It couldn’t handle anything slightly more specific.

balder1991 , (edited )

I don’t even think it’s correct to say it’s querying anything, in the sense of a database. An LLM predicts the next token with no regard for the truth (there’s no sense of factual truth during training to penalize it, since that’s a very hard thing to measure).

Keep in mind that the same characteristic that allows it to learn the language also allows it to sort of come up with facts, it’s just a statistical distribution based on the whole context, which needs a bit randomness so it can be “creative.” So the ability to come up with facts isn’t something LLMs were designed to do, it’s just something we noticed that happens as it learns the language.

So it learned from a specific dataset, but the measure of whether it will learn any information depends on how well represented it is in that dataset. Information that appears repeatedly in the web is quite easy for it to answer as it was reinforced during training. Information that doesn’t show up much is just not gonna be learned consistently.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/dDUC-LqVrPU

balder1991 ,

Yeah, I think the problem is really that language is ambiguous and the LLMs can get confused about certain features of it.

For example, I often ask different models when was the Go programming language created just to compare them. Some say 2007 most of the time and some say 2009 — which isn’t all that wrong, as 2009 is when it was officially announced.

This gives me a hint that LLMs can mix up things that are “close enough” to the concept we’re looking for.

balder1991 ,

I don’t think it’s awkward, it’s kinda necessary.

Because the people who are answering questions there are doing it for that ideal of having a knowledge repository. No one is helping you because they think you and your specific problem are so important to demand their time. Especially with very tricky errors.

balder1991 ,

Yeah maybe SO should have this kind of warning when you’re writing your problem or question, or maybe it does already (it’s been a long time I posted a question myself).

In any case, it is an interesting case about a tricky social problem to solve. I used to listen to the SO podcast many years ago, and they always had multiple problems to deal with. One of them was to show the experts good questions, because beginner questions really turn off the experienced people and too much of that would drive them off the website, and at the same time beginners don’t have the habit of searching duplicates etc. so it’s common to spam the website with duplicate.

At some point they also restricted questions about opinions, because they lead to never ending threads with no objective answers. I’m sure they had a reason for that based on SO history, so the baggage if restrictions start increasing for newcomers to understand the rules. It’s tricky to balance the needs of power users and casual users because they’re often conflicting.

balder1991 ,

I don’t think this will affect StackOverflow website though? The blog implies that ChatGPT will use StackOverflow API to use as a knowledge source (and probably be paid for it).

OpenAI and Stack Overflow are coming together via OverflowAPI access to provide OpenAI users and customers with the accurate and vetted data foundation that AI tools need to quickly find a solution to a problem […]. OpenAI will also surface validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly into ChatGPT, giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years.

This seems to be exactly to prevent hallucinations when there’s a good vetted answer already.

Either people didn’t read the blog or is there something I’m missing?

balder1991 ,

I’m not entirely sure because I’m not very knowledgeable about CPUs, but it seems this is largely a problem with ARM architectures and their lack of standardization, isn’t it?

balder1991 ,

Yeah, the best way out of it is to get a few of the most recommended ones and test by yourself.

balder1991 ,

Not counting the “projects patterns” that would be invented because some manager thinks it’ll be cheaper and machines taking the fun part, leaving you to do the boring or frustrating part.

balder1991 ,

A month ago I decided to paint a new door that was placed at home. It felt like a chore to me, even though I was satisfied with it at the end.

balder1991 ,

Ads have almost always been part and parcel of the YouTube experience. However, there's a point at which ads become so frequent, so irrelevant, and so relentless that they start hurting the user experience. We've been past that point for a while now.

Ironically, without an ad blocker it’s hard to read the Android Police blog. I invite anyone to try.

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