jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
Appearances, preconceptions, stereotypes… are shortcuts used to deal with complex issues. Since VCs don’t really care about 90% of the startups, they only need to weed out the worst ideas, in the quickest way possible.
Story time: When I was 20, I had some job interviews lined up, so a family friend helped me pick a decent looking suit and robe that weren’t too expensive. Got offered 3 different jobs in a single week 🤷
- Comment on The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux] 1 week ago:
As long as you can re-disable it after playing the game…
I know, all background processes get impacted during gameplay, but that was the case already. The popup can explain the tradeoff, and who’s to blame (game dev).
- Comment on The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux] 1 week ago:
The new kernel.split_lock_mitigate knob, if set to zero, will disable the penalization of processes using split locking (while retaining the warning sent to the system log)
Sounds to me like it’s fixed. WINE could follow dmesg, and show a popup with recommendations when it detects one of its processes is getting throttled.
- Comment on The Job Market Is Hell: Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired. 1 week ago:
There are two sides to that story:
- There is not enough gold to match the increases in both population and productivity of the last 70 years, and you don’t want just a handful of people holding gold that spikes in value through the roof.
- Smart people invest in companies that pay dividends. Speculators invest in… whatever, tulip bulbs.
- Comment on The Job Market Is Hell: Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired. 1 week ago:
Q: What do you call a business that destroys itself?
A: Failed business model.Sometimes, the only way to learn that, is through pain.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
They get VC funding, like this:
Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the Friend necklace. (He is 22.) He has grown out his hair and cultivated a beard
A wise 22 year old with a beard… 😮💨
The VCs are clueless, they jump on a bunch of “feels good” and “disruptive young blood” stuff, hoping that maybe 1 in 10 will not fall and burn.
- Comment on OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly. 1 week ago:
There is a reason why people keep asking “How do you spell it?” when being told a name in English. The counterpart is, “How do you pronounce it?”.
Even with “long a”, I still can’t tell how would you want to pronounce “Rach”. I can come up with 4 different pronounciations right now: “Ra-ah-ch”, “Ra-ah”, “Ra-sh”, “Ra-kh”.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 1 week ago:
Try an RP chatbot.
They are far from perfect, but also far from the “helpful assistant” sycophants.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 1 week ago:
It’s not about capitalism:
1 human can talk to 1 human
1 chatbot can talk to 8 billion humansHuman therapy will be more expensive, for as long as we value human time more than machine time.
- Comment on Why Do Kids Play Roblox? | Remap 2 weeks ago:
Don’t like Fortnite? Think Roblox is bad? …and all the remaining points?
Wait until you see the future of gaming, coming to Xbox:
Muse, a Generative AI Model for Gameplay Ideation
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
The complaint is: Narcissistic incompetent dev spreads FUD while putting vulnerable people at risk.
It’s rather concerning, if true.
- Comment on Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine 2 weeks ago:
There is an experimental distributed open source search engine: dawnsearch.org
It has a series of issues of its own, though.
Per-user weighting was out of the reach of hardware 20 years ago… and is still out of the reach of anything other than very large distributed systems. No single machine is currently capable of holding even the index for the ~200 million active websites, much less the ~800 billion webpages in the Wayback Machine. Multiple page attributes… yes, that would be great, but again things escalate quickly. The closest “hope”, would be some sort of LLM on the scale of hundreds of trillions of parameters… and even that might fall short.
Distributed indexes, with queries getting shared among peers, mean that privacy goes out the window. Homomorphic encryption could potentially help with that, but that requires even more hardware.
TL;DR: it’s being researched, but it’s hard.
- Comment on Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine 2 weeks ago:
The basic algorithm is quite straightforward, it’s the scale and edge cases that make it hard to compete.
“Ideally”, from a pure data perspective, everybody would have all the data and all the processing power to search through it on their own with whatever algorithm they prefer, like a massive P2P network of per-person datacenters.
Back to reality, that’s pretty much insanely impossible. So we get a few search engines, with huge entry costs, offering more value the larger they get… which leads to lock-in, trying to game their algorithms, filtering, monetization, and all the other issues.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 2 weeks ago:
There’s a good commentary about that in here:
AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers
“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”
“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 4 weeks ago:
Tor has nodes all over the world: tormap.org
- Comment on After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis 4 weeks ago:
Education is supposed to teach “how to learn to learn”.
Left to his own devices, then, without knowing quite what to ask or how to interpret the responses, the man in this case study “did his own research”
The whole thing with “do your own research”, is kind of funny:
- some use it to avoid explaining their points
- others use it to come up with a lot of nonsense
- while the proper way to begin any “research”, is to… ask an expert.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 4 weeks ago:
Not sure if I’m not explaining myself, or you’re choosing to not understand me. I’m going to leave it here.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 4 weeks ago:
Kind of like saying that ChatGPT is people adding an AI player to the deterministic program of a chat… nah, I’m not going to discuss that. Tic-tac-toe is a classical example problem for neural networks 101, kind of a “hello world”.
- Comment on After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis 5 weeks ago:
Good news: advances in medicine have reduced “physical” natural selection so much, that “intellectual” natural selection is overtaking it.
Now, if only all countries could say the same.
- Comment on AI Is A Money Trap 5 weeks ago:
Keywords: NPU, unified RAM
Apple is doing it, AMD is doing it.
GPUs are an inefficient way of doing inference. They’ve been great for research purposes, into what type of NPU may be the best one, but that’s been answered already for LLMs. Current step is, achieving mass production.
5 years sounds realistic, unless WW3.
- Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules 5 weeks ago:
If the current rate of execution of Project 2025 is an indicator… no, there are no “decades” left.
- Comment on LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find 5 weeks ago:
chain-of-thought models
There are no “CoT LLMs”, a CoT means externally iterating an LLM. The strength of CoT, resides in its ability to pull up external resources at each iteration, not in dogfooding the LLM its own outputs.
“Researchers” didn’t “find out” this now, it was known from day one.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 5 weeks ago:
It still is: www.google.com/search?q=tic+tac+toe+ai
Plenty of examples out there.
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 5 weeks ago:
Looks fine so far.
- Comment on Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? 5 weeks ago:
[sarcasm] Too many words bad… next time, try this one: “Whaaat? 🤤” [/sarcasm]
Seriously, people really need to learn to use AI as a tool, not as an omniscient oracle, and not as an idiot baby.
- Comment on Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles | 404 Media 1 month ago:
Of course. I also hope this will stop like 99% of the skiddie spam. I’m just afraid that, like it has happened with hacking in general, a noob installing Kali will get a ton of one-click ways to bypass these measures… and then, what’s next?
Genai inserting watermarking would be great, but that’s hard to do with text, in any way that isn’t easily removed.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 month ago:
I’m seeing about as many wrong questions as wrong answers. We’re at a point, where it’s becoming more accurate to ask, whether the quality of the answer, is “aligned” with the quality of the question.
As for “AI” and “intelligence”… not so long ago, dogs had no intelligence or soul, and a tic-tac-toe machine was “AI”. The exact definition of “intelligence”, seems to constantly flow and bend, mostly following anthropocentric egocentrism trends.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 month ago:
Indeed. The point is, that asking about r is ambiguous.
- Comment on Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles | 404 Media 1 month ago:
Sounds fair. If someone doesn’t even try to clean up a generated article, then nuke it.
Only issue might be… that creating an automated cleanup tool to remove those triggers, wouldn’t be all that difficult.
- Comment on Would you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would | Eurogamer 1 month ago:
It depends:
- If I’m really interested in a game, and the difficulty proves to be too high from the beginning, or can be changed at any time… then I would try a lower setting.
- If I had already invested some time into playing it, and the difficulty proved to be too high… then I would rather abandon the game than start from scratch with a lower setting.
Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.
Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games… because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.
