TootSweet

@TootSweet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon experiences a glitch⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I had that happen a few times when I was quite young. At least once, I did it on purpose. I had a sleepover with a friend and was excited for the next day and was impatient for the next day to arrive now. I fell asleep and woke up the next day seemingly instantly. No dreams. No perception of passage of more than like a second of time. Just instant morning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow. I ran out of space in that post, but one more thing I wanted to say. I haven’t talked to speak of about Stable Diffusion and DALL-E (even after including them in my definition of “Generative AI”). (I guess I should also say that probably Soma qualifies as “Gnerative AI”.)

  But the short version of why I think those are a scam is because everybody hates everything that comes out of them. Hell, my YouTube-shorts-addicted mother has even been more and more boycotting AI content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you differentiate AI and Generative AI?

  So, back in 2005 or so when I was in college, I took a class called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”. In that class, among other things, I learned about the A* algorithm. If you’ve ever played a game where an NPC approaches your character while having to take into account obstacles or differences in terrain or some such, that used the A* algorithm. (For instance, escort missions in Skyrim.) It’s quite a versatile algorithm, in fact, and can be used to optimize a lot of different sorts of things.

  And if I were asked to come up with two algorithms more dissimilar from each other than any other pair of algorithms, the algorithm behind LLMs and the A* algorithm would probably be a pretty good guess. The A* algorithm requires no training. LLMs do. It can be easily understood by a “person having ordinary skill in the art” (PHOSITA) of coding how the A* algorithm came up with any particular answer it gave just by tracing through the code. With LLMs, there’s no real way to figure out exactly why it produced the particular output it did. (Asking “why did it do this particular thing?” is like asking “which specific rep at the gym made you able to perform that 500lb dead lift today?”.) The A* algorithm is for a pretty specific use case: finding the “least expensive path” from A to B (potentially in the presence of obstacles or differences in traversing cost on different path segments). LLMs are aimed at anything you might want to throw at them.

  Now, I don’t know that I have the most precise definition of “Generative AI”, and I haven’t researched the following bullets enough to be sure about all of them, but:

  • I don’t know that the term “Generative AI” is even very precisely defined. It’s probably valid to consider it more of a “marketing term” than something that actually has a direct connection to the algorithms behind it. (Like, for instance, the term “Enterprise Software”.)
  • It seems like the term “Generative AI” is “new”. So at very least any technology called “AI” before the term “Generative AI” came up is not “Generative AI”.
  • “Generative AI” seems to mostly be used for things that try to be as “big” and “general purpose” as possible. Stuff that tries to solve every problem, not just one niche of problems. (On that basis, I would probably generally exclude narrowly-focused SLMs from the definition of “Generative AI”.)
  • In Korea, the “AI bubble” seems more focused on bipedal robots. I don’t know that I’ve heard that called “Generative AI”, though, so I’d generally tend to exclude it.
  • I think it could be reasonable It strives for being as general-purpose as

  But perhaps more precisely, “Generative AI” pretty much seems to refer to LLMs, Stable Diffusion, and maybe the DALL-E family of image generation algorithms. (If there’s anything else that refers to, I’m not familiar with it.) That’s the definition I’ll use for this conversation (at least until further notice). I don’t have an opinion on (or care) whether some particular upcoming technology (like LeCun’s “Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture” or whatever) will or won’t be generally considered “Generative AI” or just plain-old “AI” or “not-AI” or whatever.

  Sidenote: All the articles that have gone super viral about new drug research breakthroughs from “AI”? They’re expecting most readers to think biochemists are asking ChatGPT to design new drugs. (Or at least to not think about it deeply enough to realize that nothing learned from building that kind of AI is going to benefit LLMs or Stable Diffusion algorithms.) It’s just a misleading way to drive up more AI hype.

  The investment bubble may collapse on them

  There are definitely voices out there saying that’s inevitable. (Ed Zitron one of the most vocal.) And I seriously hope Ed’s right. But I have to admit that the blockchain bubble hasn’t gone the way I would have expected. The bubble has popped in some sense. Almost nobody’s talking about blockchain any more. The big companies that used to support Bitcoin don’t any more. There isn’t a ridiculous proliferation of projects with shoehorned-in “blockchain” because they can’t get investment without including that term any more. It’s… popped.

  But… Bitcoin’s still worth $84,000-ish? Jesus Christ. If I were making predictions, I would have thought the death knell for blockchain would have come in the form of people finally figuring out that Tether was inventing fictitious trillions of USD that didn’t exist and the Tether “stablecoin” going to zero, bringing the whole blockchain ecosystem, resting like a house of cards atop Tether, down with it. Maybe that’ll still happen? Who knows. Whatever the case, I’m glad I don’t have to think about blockchain these days or get buttonholed by my deranged coworkers about it these days.

  I don’t think the investment bubble in “AI” is sustainable in the least. But I fear no one can really predict how (nor, unfortunately when) exactly the unrealistic mania will resolve.

  but the usage isn’t going anywhere but up.

  I mean, the same was true of Beanie Babies, blockchain, subprime mortgages, fiber optics, and tulip bulbs until it wasn’t. That’s how bubbles work. The promises have to get more unrealistically, unreasonably bold all the time to make sure “line go up”. And dumbass CEOs keep falling for it because all the other CEOs are falling for it and due to FOMO.

  I don’t know why you think it’s some sort of scam.

  Jeez. Where to start.

  I guess if I had to pick one thing, probably the biggest issue with LLMs is that getting your employees en masse to outsource their thinking and forget how to think themselves is a losing strategy. Especially when subtle hallucinations are such a problem with LLMs (which I don’t think can be overcome). The evidence that LLMs are causing more problems than they’re fixing are in, if nothing else, the massive Amazon outages that have resulted because “whoopsie doopsie the AI deleted the whole IT department and rebuilt it from scratch and the engineers all had their brains switched off from too much LLM use and didn’t prevent it ahead of time”.

  But also, the finances just don’t seem like they can possibly work. The LLMs are all being sold at a ridiculous loss and burning investment capital to fund this ill-conceived experiment. To be actually profitable, OpenAI/Anthropic/etc will have to charge many times what they’re charging now. And “local” LLMs aren’t that much cheaper.

  If it was such a scam, companies that have been using it for two years already would be throwing it in the trash

  It’s not like we don’t have examples of that. Klarna is one that has scaled back on AI adoption. As is SalesForce with regard to its whole “AgentForce” thing.

  and instead they’re buying up more capacity.

  Again. That’s how bubbles work, until of course they don’t.

  I have legitimate business use cases for it today

  …or maybe you have a “mild” case of AI psychosis and are ignoring all the drawbacks. Plus, again, if you’re using LLMs today, remember that the pricing scheme you’re observing now is still in the “sell at a sizeable loss to get people hooked” phase and there’s no guarantee people will ever get “hooked”.

  and my company can’t get hands on hardware or even available compute from the big players because it’s in such high demand.

  It’s not like that problem started with AI. What business case do you have for blockchain now-a-days? And when was the last time you bought a graphics card for… you know… graphics?

  But also, companies have bought ridiculous amounts of hardware that they can’t even use because the data centers don’t exist. And the “plans”/promises they make about the rate at which they’re goig to build data centers are beyond outlandish.

  All that to say that the reason you can’t get your hands on software is because OpenAI/Anthropic/Microsoft/etc are hoarding billions of dollars worth of chips that they’re not even plugging in. A theory that Ed Zitron has put forth is that likely Nvidia has told their buyers that “if you don’t buy this generation’s chips, we’ll refuse to sell you the next generation chips” and so the big players in LLMs are buying way more of every generation of chips than they can use so they don’t fall behind because Nvidia is still selling newest-generation chips to their competitors. Nvidia’s just playing into the LLM companies’ bottomless well of FOMO. (Did I say it was a “bubble”?)

  It used to be that most of the compute was going to training models, but that hasn’t been the case for a year now. The majority (and it’s increasing fast) is inference at this point and while it doesn’t live up to the “It will do your entire job and get you fired” it’s definitely useful in many situations.

  Without hearing more specifically what “situations” you’re referring to, I can’t really comment. But any time you have a use case in mind, you should be asking yourself whether it would still be worth it at many times that cost. As well as whether you aren’t sacrificing more (more of your brain, more in terms of the quality of your output, more good will among your presumed customer base) in the long run than you’re getting in value in the short term. Furthermore, I think there’s a lot of danger of kindof losing touch with reality when using LLMs. They’re ridiculously sycophantic, and it’s not like people aren’t already going into using them with the mindset of outsourcing their thinking to the LLM. AI psychosis is obviously a really stark example, but you don’t have to think you’re the second coming, destined to wed ChatGPT who you “awakened” and is now your completely conscious soul-mate to have lost enough touch with reality to think LLMs have a use case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  “AI” is great.

  Generative AI is a scam.

  The best thing I can say about Generative AI is that eventually the bubble will collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reflects on a mistake⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Situational awareness, Grasshopper.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you replace the beef patty in hamburger with a think slice of ham does that make it more or less a hamburger?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I once ate a ham hamburger in a berg near Hamburg.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good luck, space cowboy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ooo. Thank you. I think I’ll do just that. Wait until it starts in February.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wait, let me discuss with my team first⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My team:

  > sort -R /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 100 | tr -s '\n' ' ' ; echo
  hoodwinks rotten damnation bunghole's ray's gaskets rubdown's framework's conductive certitude barrings boomed chatting drivels refine gelds signer imponderable aspirate powwowing flirtations lenders calked mannerism's almond's sadist aconite's treasury's illegitimate dividers sweep entrepreneurial bastardizes viscid Mirabeau's weighing plenary's Mondale's Laurel's hairstyle mooning lagging plopping Angel bungholes nonverbal midwifery's lull's unsupervised Korzybski's comedowns Guineans bishop's scagged dissension's submerge before linger thoroughgoing flog feminism's expiring coyly breeziest dextrose helpmeet's Pontianak VP Parsons's Faye Staubach somersaulting reproductions Weyden bassinets Eyck urged Doreen's asset aqueducts herbivore queenly grinder's workingman's PD vibraphones vanadium choppily Spencerian's cessation's shopaholic twiddling deft telescopes suppliers butternuts rules cloth's dilute immolating 
  

  Better in every way than LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has a nephew⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with as many downvotes and with as much disagreement as you’re getting, I do believe there’s more merit to the what you’re saying than others are allowing for.

  Not all “pushing them out of their comfort zone” is beneficial. A lot of child actors/performers have a great amount of trauma from being forced to perform as children, for instance. I struggle with such trauma myself.

  And I’m not sure I can nutshell exactly the difference between abusive coercion and encouraging personal growth, but maybe some rules of thumb:

  • If it’s motivated by some deep-seated emotional need of your own rather than for the benefit of the child, that’s harmful for sure.
  • If you’re already thinking about it as “forcing” the kid even from the get-go, that’s a huge red flag.
  • If you’re pushing them into something they have no interest in (as opposed to encouraging them to stretch to achieve some of the passions/wishes/desires/goals they themselves authentically express) I think that’s problematic. Especially if it hampers the kid’s ability to engage in what they are interested in.
  • The child’s temperament and environment in which they have to operate is also important. e.g. If they’re super introverted and have to extravert way more than they’re comfortable with even without being pushed socially, I think giving the kid more room to self-regulate is more helpful than trying to force them to be more extraverted or whatever. (And similarly with the reverse. And there are plenty of other examples one could come up with.)
  • If someone’s guilting you into making your kids do stuff (a church pushing you to get your kid more involved or whatever), that’s shitty too.

  The wholesome flip side way of encouraging personal growth in social areas might be something more like playing chess with your kid when they start showing an interest, then suggesting they join a local chess club. Or maybe their thing is debate (debate club). Or writing software (LUGs and user groups for whatever language or whatever). Or art (lots of libraries and art museums put on things that might apply). Or music (local orchestras or whatever). Or drama (drama clubs, improv classes, etc).

  The leadership part comes later. Maybe they take on some responsibility at whatever club. Maybe they get good enough at their craft to start teaching one-on-one lessons/tutoring. Maybe they get some of their works displayed in museums or contests and get some notoriety that way. Maybe they give talks at school in public speaking classes about their areas of expertise.

  But let the kid engage in what they’re authentically interested in engaging in. Don’t be throwing some kid arbitrarily in a chess club if they couldn’t give a fuck. Especially if you’re weirdly invested in them being good at some particular thing. I think it happens more and can be more damaging than a lot of people realize.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon fears The Hand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wallmaster fanfic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨fedi is freedom⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Based.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon learns about astronomy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  7-year-old brother with Masonna really quiet on his bluetooth speaker system: 😈

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had a tooth problem that needed a root canal and crown, how long would you expect it to take to get it resolved?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I am hazarding a guess you’re in the USA so your dentist is probably trying to milk your health insurance company for all they’re worth.

  Oh you sweet summer child.

  Health insurance in the U.S. doesn’t cover teeth. What are you crazy? Dental issues aren’t medical issues, you see. They’re dental issues. And dental issues are a whole different thing. So if you want dental coverage, you need dental insurance specifically.

  And it’s a lot more common not to have dental insurance than not to have medical insurance. Because I think not being “medical” insurance exactly, they’re less regulated and so can deny more of the claims that they get than medical insurance can. Which runs you the risk of paying monthly for it and then getting your claims denied when it really matters.

  And I’m one of the ones who doesn’t have dental insurance. (Partially because as I said earlier, I haven’t had a cavity in 20 years.) So it’s me they’re milking, not an insurance company. To the tune of about $4,200 so far between the dentist, endodontist, and periodontist. I think that includes the cost of the crown (like, they had me pay in advance for the crown, which makes it even more infuriating that they’re putting me off).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how to build a loopback device⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got one in my wall and my clothes dryer is plugged into it. My house was built in 1962 and the electrical situation in my house remains the fucking nightmare it was when the house was built, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how to build a loopback device⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You plugged those into the wrong ports. You’re supposed to plug both ends into here:

  220v power outlet

  Don’t worry if you have to use a lot of force to get it in there. That’s just to make sure it doesn’t come out if you trip over it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨you can date the time period by popular catch phrases⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon listens to music⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, basically this. Sexually (when she was underage) and every other way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon listens to music⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Dance Gavin Dance and Crystal Castles are two that I’ve been bummed to find out about relatively recently. :\

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon listens to music⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Reading Mein Kampf now, but I’ve decided it’s a romance novel.

  (/s, obviously)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨everybody get comfy now⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this is a shitpost community, but it’s still worth checking accuracy, and I haven’t been able to get any confirmation of any of the claims in this meme.

• If you had a tooth problem that needed a root canal and crown, how long would you expect it to take to get it resolved?
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩ | ⁨10⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come we still haven't engineered a solution to this??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a clamshell thing. A little oven with a door on the front that opens downward. Some of them also have air fryer capability. I’ve got a Ninja Flip and I’m quite happy with it. One nice feature about it is that you can stand it up on its back when not in use in order to save counter space. I threw away my regular-old bread toaster when I got it. And of course it’s great for pizzas or melting cheese on your toast or air frying tater tots or just using like you would an oven to roast or what have you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come we still haven't engineered a solution to this??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Toaster oven. Solves this problem entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where is ShitLemmySays?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dayum, OP done got modded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨9/11⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The sharingan is the final touch that makes it perfect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare and (friendly!) bots⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok. That helps a lot. Thanks much! I’ll take that back to my drawing board and I’d imagine that’ll fix things for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare and (friendly!) bots⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hrm, well, now I’m noticing that I’m getting inconsistent results.

  I keep getting {“error”:“rate_limit_error”} from the login endpoint, and I’ve made… maybe 10 requests to that endpoint over the course of the day? And I’ve had that block this user (like, my @TootSweet account) from being able to log in. But I really don’t think I’m sending any noticeable amount more traffic than I would be without the bot testing.

  But sometimes I get past login and get a Cloudflare page back on another call. (In the unhappy path it tries to DM me, and it’s tried that and failed.)

  Maybe I’m just not waiting long enough between requests? I had it set to wait 3 seconds between requests, but maybe I’ll bump it up to 5.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare and (friendly!) bots⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not using any headless browser or anything. I’m using Go’s “net/http” package from the standard library which just… makes HTTP requests. I’m making requests to endpoints like https://lemmy.world/api/v3/user/login and https://lemmy.world/api/v3/post. The basic process is that every time it runs, it:

  • Gets the community id by name.
  • Logs in (getting the JWT token).
  • And then posts to the community in question (using the JWT token).

  The user agent it uses is Go-http-client/1.1 if that helps any.

• Cloudflare and (friendly!) bots
  Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨support@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨7⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just a few⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My first thought was Flow.