• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • There is a manual pre-installed on your machine for most commands available. You just type man and the name of the thing you want the manual for. Many commands also have a --help option that will give you a list of basic options.

    I should point out this isn’t Linux specific either. Many of these commands come from Unix or from other systems entirely. macOS has a similar command line system actually. It’s more that Linux users tend to use and recommend the command line more. Normally because it’s the way of doing things that works across the largest number of distributions and setups, but also because lots of technical users prefer command line anyway. Hence why people complain about Windows command lines being annoying. I say command lines because they actually have two of them for some odd reason. Anyway I hope this helped explain why things are the way they are.








  • I’ve tried making this argument before and people never seem to agree. I think Google claims their Kubernetes is actually more secure than traditional VMs, but how true that really is I have no idea. Unfortunately though there are already things we depend upon for security that are probably less secure than most container platforms, like ordinary unix permissions or technologies like AppArmour and SELinux.





  • That’s not true though. The models themselves are hella intensive to train. We already have open source programs to run LLMs at home, but they are limited to smaller open-weights models. Having a full ChatGPT model that can be run by any service provider or home server enthusiast would be a boon. It would certainly make my research more effective.


  • There is a lot that can be discussed in a philosophical debate. However, any 8 years old would be able to count how many letters are in a word. LLMs can’t reliably do that by virtue of how they work. This suggests me that it’s not just a model/training difference. Also evolution over million of years improved the “hardware” and the genetic material. Neither of this is compares to computing power or amount of data which is used to train LLMs.

    Actually humans have more computing power than is required to run an LLM. You have this backwards. LLMs are comparably a lot more efficient given how little computing power they need to run by comparison. Human brains as a piece of hardware are insanely high performance and energy efficient. I mean they include their own internal combustion engines and maintenance and security crew for fuck’s sake. Give me a human built computer that has that.

    Anyway, time will tell. Personally I think it’s possible to reach a general AI eventually, I simply don’t think the LLMs approach is the one leading there.

    I agree here. I do think though that LLMs are closer than you think. They do in fact have both attention and working memory, which is a large step forward. The fact they can only process one medium (only text) is a serious limitation though. Presumably a general purpose AI would ideally have the ability to process visual input, auditory input, text, and some other stuff like various sensor types. There are other model types though, some of which take in multi-modal input to make decisions like a self-driving car.

    I think a lot of people romanticize what humans are capable of while dismissing what machines can do. Especially with the processing power and efficiency limitations that come with the simple silicon based processors that current machines are made from.






  • If and until the abilities of AI reach the point where they can compensate tech illiteracy and we no longer need to worry about the exorbitant heat production, it shouldn’t be deployed at scale at all, and even then its use needs to be scrutinised, regulated and that regulation is appropriately enforced (which basically requires significant social and political change, so good luck).

    Why wouldn’t you deploy that kind of AI at scale?

    To be honest I think people keep forgetting that AI strong enough would be smarter than a human, and would probably end up deploying us at scale rather than the other way around. Terminator could one day actually happen. I am not even sure that would be a bad thing given how flawed humans are.