jamienk

I didn't realize the Gemini makes it so that saving chats in your sidebar = sharing chats with Google for AI training. They obfuscate this with their dark-pattern "Gemini Apps Activity"

> Keep activity

> Keeping your activity lets you pick up chats where you left off anytime and helps improve Google services, including AI models. When this setting is off, Google still saves chats for 72 hours to respond to you and help keep Gemini safe.

Why do we accept this "massive cost" phase all the time? I want to see the data and intelligent analysis of it. I think this is not clear yet.

The Chinese companies will not stay "open" if it doesn't serve their economic/political interests.

Why is there not yet fully open models made by/for the FOSS community (as opposed to open weight by entrepreneur-style companies)? Cost of training? But what is this cost really?

- Do not include costs of running model in cloud - Do not include IP costs - Do not include salaries, marketing, etc. (all these are separate expenses, different depending on individual goals)

There would be pre- and post- training "systems" that could be repeated.

Training data/acquisition could be separated out (so IP-liabilities could be taken on by individuals).

The idea would be a system for small groups/individuals to snap together the different aspects of training (data, pre-training, training compute, post-training) and to train their own (and share).

Won't this soon come down to a few thousand dollars for models that run on modern consumer hardware?

I'm anti-Anthropic and think their accusations are total PR FUD-packing. They don't focus much on the cc fraud because their PR firm landed on pushing the (tech-sounding) word "distillation" to try to scare people in the US and to try to make it a geopolitical issue where trade negotiators can put pressure. The Chinese companies see an advantage in being "open" right now, and it is working. They will not stay open once they see an advantage there. (Contrast with GNU.)

But I've slowly come to realize that AI+"dark resources"(scare quotes)=something bad! And this is imminent (maybe I'm naive and it is already ubiquitous).

We see here, with Kimi, that there's growing traction with the idea of eliminating types of training to avoid evil. I'm skeptical of that.

You think it is a lost cause to get credit cards, for example, less steal-able? Apparently there is a way to create fake cards that work for a few minutes, and stolen cards can be used. A lot of the current security is inelegant and lame. Could data-breech laws not light a fire under some company's asses?

Will there be a book of secret knowledge that only the initiated will be allowed to see? And they will all swear an oath to never input it into an AI system?

And then we'd also do that for all kinds of potential terrorism, sex-crimes, political subversion, and evil advocacy?

It would be the "restricted section" like in the Hogwarts library?

Does this make sense? It is the same as when Stable Diffusion tried to not have "people laying down" in their training data in order to block the generation of sex pictures.

Deliberately keeping all models ignorant doesn't make sense. It won't work (whoever breaks the pact has a massive advantage); it won't be enforceable; it will have downstream impacts on things you don't want it to be ignorant about; this kind of regulatory regime invites adding more and more to the "no-no list".

Is it not possible to focus on hardening? And on new legal liabilities for operators who do security attacks?

In looking into what Anthropic has accused the Chinese AI companies of, "distillation" is not the crux of the matter: they accuse them of the use of massive numbers of breached computers and credit cards. Supposedly (though not explicitly demonstrated) distillation campaigns used "dark web" resources (like stolen and faked credit cards and p0wned IOT devices, routers, etc) that were used to create many many accounts for distillation. (Note: I am generally in favor of distillation - it is "normal" use as far as I can see.)

So there are these "resources" out there: massive botnets, stolen credit cards and credentials, etc. These often seem to be linked to or supported by state actors.

How can we hope that these "standing reserves" aren't used generally by AIs as if they are just another "skill" they know how to leverage?

Our infrastructures need serious hardening.

"Free association" in psychoanalysis just asks people to let themselves speak, to fall into their speech, let it unfold - but it is very, very hard to do, because what you say tends to not be what you want to say. You want to avoid certain things, you can see your chain of speech leading up ahead to somewhere you don't want to go. So you stop yourself, or resist, and then what you are saying is not at all free but strained, hedging, tense and anxious.

Still can't tree shake. It's what makes my old css files grow into monsters. I feel like everyone has given up on this.

This is the whole Chompsky/Kant thing - the idea of "Poverty of the Stimulus" innate structures. You didn't "learn" a word/concept by direct exposure, but by socialization, association, emotional connections, vibes. LLM seem to learn the hard way.

The Saussure idea of the differential nature of language seems relevant here too: words aren't just lists of things you look up, they are connected to each other and distinguish themselves by being slightly different from the other elements of the clusters they belong to.

I'm not bragging: but I do not watch any (almost any) video of the news, so I never see Trump speak or see the Israeli military against the Palestinians or watch the footage of the trials, etc. I do read the news. I just sort of drifted into it when I was an early cord-cutter. I think around the yr 2000 there wasn't much video and I got used to it. I do find that I am much less overstimulated than my friends and family who watch a lot of news video.

Lacan described registers of experience: the Imaginary (visual, sexual, emotional, fantasy), Symbolic (language, associations), and Real (the unsymbolizable, "impossible"). Watching video is immersion in the Imaginary, you get roused, riled up, turned-on, activated, thoughts are connected by paranoia, magical thinking, and aggression. It makes HUGE difference to not not follow the news that way! Again, I'm not bragging, not proud of myself, not espousing a Mr Spock outlook. But it is hard to miss the difference.

I can kinda understand the motivation here: you push a bunch of slop (or is it deep, genius code?) but you have a kind of nagging suspicion that you should get to know it more familiarly, like back in the good old days a few months back when you sort of understood what was going on. I... don't... think this is going to work...? Remember Confirmation Fatigue? Soon we will have agents that interact with Sphinx for us.

They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!

I feel like history is repeating itself - to many people AOL, Compuserve, MSN, et al seemed superior to "the web" in the early 1990s because they dumped money into making it slicker, licensed content, provided guardrails, made it easy for non-tech people... They had slick ads, were cultural phenoms, and people would take sides with the companies and think their arguments were strong and even obvious!

More and more it is the relentlessness of the models that strikes me. Leave no stone unturned! Go through ALL of these old boxes. Someone said they thought maybe it was over there somewhere >>shrug<<

I'm so old I still feel like Chrome is new.

I'm nervous that saying that there are "unknowns" is too passive. We all have to develop intelligent thoughts about what we see and what we want, not just wait for things to unfold, which might well mean: wait to get screwed in various ways.

The focus on "code" is sometimes too strong. This isn't just a code/quant issue. All of this applies too to any "answer" the LLM gives. Experts very often track their lineage - what teachers they had - because the details and slant of what they were taught guided their way of thinking and defined the "handle" they use to grab a problem. There is no "right way" to do most things - there are ways of approaching. Imagining that you are free-flowing and not in a channel is a rookie mistake! Encouraging this way of thinking is like the uptight enforcer of minor social mores: "Elbows!" no elbows on the table is how things are done and this is reified. Like you said "it takes no effort to produce and immense effort to debunk" and sometimes the stakes are high. I'm convinced that racism, for example, operates exactly like this: 0 friction go-with-the-flow insist it is natural...

You are staying on the surface with your examples. Dig into any and see the interesting complexities emerge. It's fine to have a surface-level acquaintance with many things (no one can be expert in all). But then you don't have "the right" to make pronouncements. It's like reading a newspaper article about something you've never heard about before (e.g., Turkish political parties) and thinking you now know that field.

AI operated by people who know nothing about Turkeye asking broadly "how do I solve the current Turkish political problems" will not get far fast. They might be impressed fast. This is not an argument against AI helping think through things in various ways.

I don't think it's a question of credentialism. It's about being easily impressed.

Is it a "goal post" shift or an insidious confusion? Clouds can be regulated, guard-railed, censored, spied on. Since your local computer is also just "cloud," it too can be regulated. This makes the mental-model change: what used to be "my personal thing" now becomes "a thing in the common network". That's different; it represents different values.

This article is NOT like the Dodo or Newton ones. The Dodo author was an expert in Dodos. The Newton one was by a Newton expert. In those cases, it was the relentlessness of the AI that found edge cases that were interesting.

But Here, the start is "What field should I approach and what questions should I ask?"

But this is NOT the same!

When I watch my non-tech friends vibe-coding, I'm struck by how they are so ignorant of basic tech stuff, but little tiny bubbles of "experience" start to percolate in them after a while. Things like "wait, I think this project has weird dependencies that are going to cause trouble when I move it to my office machine" or "hold on, the mobile version doesn't share the same text with the desktop version?"

It is much less interesting to have an attitude of "I don't know or care, just give me a 'result'" vs "Aha! I see where we could apply this in a productive way!"

This is like the Anthropic people feeling like they found many many "very important" Linux bugs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q - hint: no.

When it's something you know about, the overstating is obvious! It's only when you don't know about things that shallow work (or slop) feels significant.

I think you're underestimating how things used to be - you could go into any office, any closet, any coffee shop and find a shit-ton of half-baked, crazy-genius, kick-ass, retarded ideas and projects lying around everywhere in the world: filing systems, carpet organizing systems, outlines for film scripts, unsent letters to loved ones, etc etc etc. Whole worlds everywhere you look. And other people chipping in their two-cents worth, adding a few new filing cabinets, an idea for a film sequel, a new way to think about a different carpet, a notebook system to organize someone else's unsent letters... All this slop eventually thrown into nasty, fetid garbage dumps, forgotten.

Did anyone ever read The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn? It is amazing: in a Stalin gulag in the 1950's USSR, a bunch of Soviet engineers / techies are tasked with creating a speech recognition system. They show fake progress in order to keep from being jailed in worse ways. It is autobiographical, so good, but I read it so long ago and it convinced me how hard speech recognition would be, maybe even impossible!

Highly recommended. I see there is a "new" (2009, I getting old) edition & translation - https://www.amazon.com/First-Circle-Aleksandr-I-Solzhenitsyn...

Every time I look at my Claude Code settings, they have changed how it gathers my info: memories, search old chats, share with Anthropic, etc etc etc. I try to turn stuff off but they change the settings. They prompts me to allow it to suck up my browser cookies. Do you think this will get better? Or worse? Much much worse...

I'm not sure I like this framing - so much of AI research has been academic, in the open, building on others people's work. Much less comp sci generally, math & philosophy, etc. The idea that rich companies can just build stuff in secret because they have resources is a fantasy.

Why should we concede this "stealing" framing? If I want to put texts into my computer program, why should that count as copyright violation? I think that idea is as ridiculous as saying that reading a document is a copyright violation.

Regulate large cloud services and proprietary software - yes! But not on the basis of "Intellectual Property".

The "legal" issues here are very very complex and we should not passively wait for or accept corrupt court rulings, international trade agreements, proposed laws, or worst of all propaganda that pushes a parochial and craven view on this.

'run each image through multiple models and then combine the outputs into a final "merge these" prompt' << How to do this? This would be an amazing workflow to get documented. This could be the start of a full-service company "send us a bunch of notebooks, get back HIGH QUALITY text version"

My suspicion is that getting a big binary with full permissions is the goal here. Harnesses will only run their companion models and will demand your Contacts list.

My dad died and had many many notebooks of his journals with very hard-to-read handwriting. Is it worth the effort to scan all of these so I can feed them in and go to work. Seems like so much minutia is out there, ready to be meta-understood.