jrm4

I confess, I've read this twice and I don't really get what's going on here; and I have both MoCA and Powerline going on in my house as well, so I'm like -- why not one of those?

Interesting, I was surprised to go back down this far to see another XPS. I got my first employer provided one pre-Covid, but its battery died around then. Around Covid, I wasn't as mobile so I was fine with something clunkier, and then afterward, I was thinking about what to buy -- but was like, you know what -- let me get a new battery for the XPS and see how that fares.

And that's what I'm still using right now.

Well, they may never even may be able to "become a Netflix" because the practical-slash-IP situation is so different.

Apparently, the world is "used to" the way intellectual property works (or doesn't work, depending on your view) for TV shows and Movies, in a way that probably wouldn't fly for video games; which is to say -- in both you're going to have to compete against "free" or "on the internet" or whatnot. I suspect monopolizing video games is much harder than TV and Movies (probably because we're so beholden to arguably odd copyright ideas?")

UPDATE: Y'all, I haven't even hooked up any models to it. It's only 5 megabytes.

It just opened. Instantly. Every button and thing happens instantly. what are we doing everywhere else. I'd forgotten that things can be this fast.

Thanks.

and

FIVE megabytes. Wow. What are we doing everywhere else.

Yup. Looks like I'll have to build from source. Which used to be perhaps a deal killer, but now I'll just get gemini to walk me through it. :)

I had just about the opposite reaction. As in "hey are we in 2000? nice!" Like back when you couldn't much afford to have stupid bloat and there was much better attention paid to "just do the thing and nothing else?"

Can't wait to try it.

"Vitalik as basically an influencer" is kind of a wild take, like maybe saying Linus Torvalds is an influencer.

Love or hate it, he invented the 2nd -- maybe even the 1st -- most impactful form of cryptocurrency.

Exactly. Interaction with healthy humans is, of course, better than interacting with AI.

But I'd also guess that interacting with AI is better than unhealthy humans, esp those put in front of you by social media.

No one knows for sure, but my guess is no? The difficulty with this conversation of course, lies in the details - specifically in terms of "to what extent can the user, or other presumably positive forces, modify what the person puts in their own brains."

This is why I'm a huge proponent of something like "small AI."

Fwiw, having taught online for well over a decade, I keep (kept?) trying to put people on to the marvel of a virtual machine for this (minus the sharing this offers, I suppose)

Just have a VM that you tell Zoom or whatnot is the "window to present" Now you can do anything, slides and more, and also that thing can be the only publicly seen thing, your computer stays private.

We don't disagree; I'd call what you are doing refining the principles?

Fwiw, I'm liking the koboldcpp "ecosystem", including koboldlite; basically it's letting me try a little of everything, though there may be something of a "jack of all trades master of none" thing going on. But it has these nice little presets for, e.g. llms, voice, music, images, a "chatgpt"-esque interface, etc.

So there are a zillion of these, including ones that do what yours does. But that being said, I'm going to always upvote every single one of them because this is better and more important that what the big companies are doing across the board.

It's interesting how I can be of two minds here, nearly simultaneously. Absent the horrific circumstances, my nerd brain says -- well, this is why phones should perhaps just be dumb devices that completely sync elsewhere such that physical possession is mostly meaningless. This also solves, e.g., border phone searches.

And also, yikes, don't actually want these type of horrific people doing this? It's difficult all around.

Okay, so -- your flip answer is pretty much exactly how the law should not operate?

That's the point of law. To come up with principles that you can follow consistently, regardless of your feelings in the situation.

20 years ago called and wants its take back.

Open source developers work on Linux. What you're saying presently makes no sense at all.

Objectively?

I use Libreoffice and I ... objectively... find it slightly less of a pain in the ass.

I mean, I was "there" for a lot of it in the modern-ish era, basically when air travel was like bus travel, buy ticket, get on plane.

FAR less distance and time between "car" and "plane." Closer parking, curbside service, but even if not, you're just physically closer to the gate. No TSA, etc.

This is a joke, right? "Flapping airplanes" is a great metaphor for AI as it exists today; e.g. we basically already have what we need and more is stupid.

Planes are awesome and important, and also building ones that actually flapped is technically possible and also wasteful and pointless.

For the record, I believe that the whole "building something as good as Photoshop" is BS, and a sort of retroactive justification of lock-in.

Yes, building something as complicated and locked in as Microsoft Word required a lot of work, and Microsoft has gained considerable money and power over it, but that doesn't mean that Word is necessarily good.

No different from "McDonald's hamburgers are objectively very good."

At present, nobody does. You'd have to see what a court case says.

But it would have to be the case that it's reasonable to expect people to rely on an LLM for medical advice. Which would in turn require that the creator of the LLM is not responsible.

Absolutely.

And for this the company responsible for the AI disseminating this information in such a way that people are relying on it should be prosecuted and/or sued into oblivion.

The original poster of the bad information should perhaps as well, but only also if it was reasonable to rely on them for this.

(We have the legal principles, we just need to use them.)

With the exception that it's harder to make the argument that "it's bad for the consumer."

McDonalds', over time, will make you less healthy.

AI slop over time will perhaps change aesthetics, but hard to chalk that up to anything other than personal preference.

Great article -- and maybe this is just me -- but I do find the primacy of the online services interesting. Me and my 16gb vram card can get most of this done at home for "free."

"Actively harming" is a technically true and also legitmately crazy way to frame this.

As a black person, if I thought Stormfront had considerable dangerous influence, I would quite literally try to join immediately.

"reputable journalists"

oh how I wish that were a thing that carried the weight it once did

"know thy enemy"

This is exactly as intelligent as "if you don't like America, leave."

I neither love nor hate the place; in fact -- yes -- today I dislike it more than I like it.

But again, my like or dislike doesn't matter. It exists and has influence. And for that reason, there are very moral reasons to engage with it even if you think it is evil.