sfRattan
Simple organizations too, and sometimes especially so. The amount of unrealized productivity many small business stand to gain just by adopting simple automations that computers have been able to perform for decades may be as large as (or larger than) the productivity gains ML model and agent adoption enables. And that adoption may just be enabling someone who never wanted to learn Excel macros or regular expressions to command an agent to go do those things which have been possible yet unrealized in a particular small business for decades.
The problem has largely been (and remains) humans set in their ways, of the sort who stopped reading books or seeking any new knowledge whatsoever the moment their mandated or socially expected schooling was complete. Incurious midwits are definitionally the bulk of any workforce, and getting them to change any process is like pulling teeth whether they're working in a small business or a megacorporation. Change often doesn't come until the midwit on some particular throne retires, quits, or is laid off.
"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.
How do you get there? "Mom and Dad, we're going to set up your home network so that it's blended with my home network. To all the machines in your house and mine, it'll look like they're on the same network together. That'll make it easier for me to help you with any tech problems you're having, on your computer or on any smart device. The connection between our houses will be encrypted and secure" You're installing a router/firewall for them and adding to your WireGuard overlay network, but you're not using any of those words to tell them what's going on.
What to do next? "How was watching TV last night from {$TIMESTAMP_A} to {$TIMESTAMP_B}? Yeah, my network sentinel detected that your TV was sending your viewing habits out to somewhere on the Internet and warned me and blocked it. I can't tell what you were watching, but {$TV_BRAND} sure can." You're monitoring their LAN via the router/firewall you've set up, but you are again not using technical language.
Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant. And continue to provide value to the family on the shared overlay network. Photo and home video backups, media server (it's like Netflix!), mutual offsite buddy backups, password management, a local Minecraft server for the kids and the cousins.
Build a family network garden that is good enough to consider leaving the leviathans behind and build walls around it that are high enough to commit to leaving the leviathans behind for what is now a garden inside a family network castle.
It's smart and supports only Z-Wave, not WiFi. So something like a machine running Home Assistant must sit between it and the Internet. And then its up to you to decide how you want to do remote access, but WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale.
None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
We as computer people need to internalize and accept the idea that helping our immediate and even extended family with technology is now part of defending human freedom. And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well.
No. Using the topic in this subthread: the methods described as "whole language reading instruction" contradict the methods of learning to read supported by science. That is an observation. If you think it is a projection or a hallucination, then maybe there is nothing left to say because we are talking past each other and you are being extremely pedantic in a way that is unproductive to communicating a problem that, yes, exists in the minds of humans. Humans who use LLMs without understanding LLMs, and walk away with information that is incorrect, useless, or worse-than-useless in the real world.
If you genuinely think computer-literate people are projecting the notions of contradiction and/or sycophancy into the workings of an LLM, I'm not sure how to persuade you otherwise. But I suspect most people on this forum using phrases like "sycophancy" understand what an LLM is (and why it is not technically a literal sycophant) and simultaneously understand that the phrase "sycophancy" provides a useful cautionary, metaphoric image for average people who are using LLMs absent deeper understanding of the technology.
And yes, something similar is happening with common core math. Curricula are trying to teach the tricks, shortcuts, and mental re-arranging of numbers that are only possible to comprehend once the basics are memorized and internalized. It was miserable memorizing times tables, but I remember being able to start to see the ways you could combine and recombine numbers after I had successfully memorized them. Trying to teach those things without any memorization is putting the cart before the horse.
IIRC it was a teacher in New Zealand[1] who had teacherly charisma, was earnestly committed to her method, and was so profoundly wrong that she became the first domino of a regression in reading ability which we are still feeling today across the English-speaking world. And teachers and education professionals became fans of both the method and the growing personas behind it. There were Americans who turned whole language hokum into a product for sale... using the cult-like sales tactics of Amway and other MLMs but applied to a target audience of largely woman-attended teachers' development conferences and fairs instead of Mormon housewives.
Sadly, humans were capable of producing plausible sounding nonsense long before the advent of LLMs. And promoting it persuasively.
Sycophancy and flattery are words that relate to how humans experience LLMs. It's appropriate to use words that could anthropomorphize as descriptors for a problem when that problem exists in the space of human experience. It doesn't matter that an LLM is merely a predictive model. It matters that humans who use the model perceive it as a conversation partner and walk away feeling 'flattered' by the model's predictive responses to the humans' input, which the model predicts without regard for factual accuracy, which happens in turn because (as you point out) "there’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model."
We could call the problem "LLM predictive output which tends to have the effect of flattering the user's opinionated assumptions without regard for factual accuracy" if you prefer that much of a mouthful, but "sycophancy" describes the problem well and is one word instead of twenty.
> One prompt will elicit a response based on one set of weights that are most closely related to the prompt. A different prompt will elicit a response from a different set of weights, for the same reason.
Yes or, in other words: there's sufficient contradictory data which were used to train the model's weights that it will predict (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) accurate information for some prompts and (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) inaccurate information for others. That the contradiction is beyond the LLM's scope is part of the problem. The two identical parentheticals above are (or ought to be) as unneeded as pointing out that a statistical model cannot technically be sycophantic.
You redefine syncophancy too narrowly. Many (if not an outright majority of) everyday LLM users have neither the educational foundation nor skill to ask good, well-formed questions like the one you propose. We should consider syncophany in the scope of an average person's non-optimal use of LLMs. CrazyStat's prompt is something your average Joe will absolutely feed an LLM, and Joe will walk away with something very much like those plausible falsehoods. We have to think of and work against LLM syncophancy in the scope of how the hypothetical average person will use an LLM.
And CrazyStat's implication strikes me as still largely true, so I'll make it explicit: even frontier LLMs will still resort to sycophancy when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights to reproduce only some of it in response to a user query. And the harnesses that LLM providers silently, invisibly integrate behind-the-scenes to counteract hallucination and syncophancy are definitionally patch-jobs at best. The latest models may be better when explicitly instructed or configured by default to search the web and pull sources into their context, but the root problem remains unsolved and can still rear its flattering head if you're not paying close attention.
[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271
When even a single button disappears from where I expect to find it in an application (and reappears somewhere else), that has never resulted in the application feeling more intuitive or easy to use. It has only ever been frustrating in the most literal sense of that word, and only every caused me to start looking into other programs.
A more subtle undermining of the user's trust that their tools will be where they left them on the screen the next time they open the application is arguably more insidious, not less. Both because it is more maddening to the end-user than a full redesign and because the damage of lost trust and user ire is harder to measure than the A/B engagement data until things progress too far for any easy, non-painful remediation.
A/B testing can be helpful as a part of an actual user study on users who are aware of what is happening. But unleashed on an unsuspecting user population out in the real world with real things to do on real deadlines, A/B testing inevitably becomes a harmful dark pattern.
Yep, and A/B testing as experienced by uninformed, unaware end-users is a dark pattern.
It undermines the perception of (and trust in) continuity which is necessary to make effective use of a tool. The best way I can describe it to the skeptical is: imagine the dials on your car's dashboard rearrange themselves occasionally overnight, and on some commutes to work you suddenly can't work the radio or the AC while moving at ≥35mph. Of course, since the widespread use of touchscreens, that example became very literal.
So the car manufacturer has figured out the "optimal" arrangement of dials and buttons on their dashboard for their preferred levels of user engagement. Great. How many of those users now associate their car's brand with inconsistency? "I can't trust the damn buttons to be in the same place the next time I drive."
It's a great resource!
If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is licensed under the AGPL[2].
[1]: https://readest.com/
My prod (now homeprod, thanks for the name!) has no HDDs, just SSDs. It's a proxmox cluster that runs opnsense in a VM for the whole network, Home Assistant also in a VM[1], and most other services in containers. In the age of expensive storage, it has just enough SSD space for VMs and containers. VM backups live on homebase, except for opnsense which also needs a backup on the same machine (same machine, not just same cluster) if the network goes down.
So my conceptual distinction is mostly that the only services/containers I put on homebase are doing work that really benefits being that close to the data. Oh, and I'm in the jolly position of needing to replace the hard drives this or next year. Yaaaaay.
My homelab is currently a cluster of 4GB Pis that I had lying around from before even the Raspberry Pi shortage. Whenever I upgrade my Framework 13 mainboard, I'll probably use the old one as a homelab instead of the Pis.
[1]: Home Assistant's plug-ins are themselves containers, so it's a good idea to give it either a VM or its own machine.
But I'm not as convinced as the article's author that "NAS" is outdated as a separate concept, just that as new people learn more about networking they rediscover why just having storage on in its own box can be a good setup. And when new people are brand new, having everything on one box is conceptually simpler, though not always optimal.
I think, in the family/household context, I like the names:
Homelab: the box/cluster you use to experiment and test new stuff.
Homeprod: the box/cluster you use to deploy stable services for family. Runs only things that have graduated from at least a yearlong successful deployment or so on homelab.
Homebase: the box/cluster you use to make ZFS pools and databases available to both homelab and homeprod (on the same network or overlay network). Basically a NAS in the older sense of the word, before homelabs started expanding its scope in casual use.
Famadmin: the sysadmin for the family (i.e. "you" in the three items above). The person to whom, as you say, "providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry," is a matter of deep principle. And well put, BTW.
There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. There are multiple frontends I've tried for my personal library of ebooks (mostly Humble Bundles of software/hardware books), and a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder (i.e. all identically named files in that folder treated as different versions of the same book... epub, pdf, etc) and folders above that can be whatever you want. BookOrbit[1] supports arbitrary folder hierarchies and Readest[2] supports at least one level of intermediate hierarchy.
In the context of existing software counterexamples, Jellyfin's delicate sensitivity to folder meta-structure is a regression from the baseline expectation. But I'd agree that ultimately folder naming requirements for the media items themselves makes good sense.
> In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.
When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Folders and hierarchical structure are objectively useful, though our search-addled brains make that less obvious than it used to be.
[1]: https://bookorbit.app/library-file-structure/#grouping-folde...
Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.
I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.
I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."
Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.
[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...
There is near zero chance that a judge or jury will decide you have plausible deniability for providing a duress PIN when asked by police for an unlock PIN. It is your phone, you had to configure the duress PIN when setting up the phone, knowing what it does, and provide it to police instead of the unlock PIN.
> I am advocating for civil disobedience in defense of privacy and the right not to self incriminate.
You have a right to silence, not a right to lie, and certainly not a right to lie in a way that is the proximate cause of destruction of evidence during a lawful search. Call the lie civil disobedience all you like, but expect totally avoidable federal felony charges in cases like then one at hand, when all you had to do was remain silent (especially as in this case with a GrapheneOS device).
> I don't believe there's any prohibition against reading people's minds
Common law often doesn't require specific prohibitions (or specific updates in the manner of computer code) because the practice of common law has long functioned on the good faith application of human reason and common sense by jurists. Consider the relevant language of the 5th Amendment: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." I think it's extremely likely that, when mind-reading tech is invented, it will be treated as a form of compelled testimony, and therefore impermissible against a defendant (though potentially permissible against a witness with immunity).
Assuming that is the preceding paragraph you reference, then there is nothing to respond to because the law is clear. As zugi mentions, obstruction of a federal investigation by tampering with evidence (i.e. potentially anything in the scope of a particular search of which you are aware) in just about any sort of way is illegal under 18 USC § 1519 (and again, most states have similar laws with regard to state officials/departments and searches).
This subthread, the general thread, the linked article, and the original event it covers are all within the context of someone aware they are detained or under investigation. In that context, the prosecution doesn't need to demonstrate that what was destroyed is evidence. Just that the suspect obstructed the search by destroying, altering, or tampering with something in the search's lawful scope.
This state of affairs isn't any more or less rife for abuse than the general process for obtaining a warrant or the standards for an officer assessing probably cause.
Most juristictions have a duty to preserve or not to spoil evidence once you are clearly detained or a search is clearly imminent (i.e. the police are knocking on your door), or when litigation can be reasonably anticipated. Behavior like locking the door and then burning/shredding papers, wiping a phone, or even flushing a toilet can absolutely be considered destruction-of/tampering-with evidence past that point, even (and especially) if the evidence is impossible to recover.
> Also I just so happened to catch a bad case of indigestion right as the police knocked down my door. There were absolutely no drugs in the toilet when I flushed it.
To repeat, for emphasis: the law does not care about "I'm not touching you"-level rationalizations.
> The response described is what everyone ought to do without exception when asked for their PIN by law enforcement. The right not to be forced to provide access to your own devices needs to be staunchly defended.
If by "response described" you mean "remain silent," then absolutely. Not 100% clear from your last paragraph.
This is where machine-like personal consistency is deeply important to opsec. Not just for technical reasons, but for legal reasons also.
If you wipe your phone before every national border crossing and restore it after every border crossing as a part of your standard procedure for travel, it will be much harder for a prosecutor to argue that you have ever done so in anticipation of some particular search. If your employer's security policy mandates doing so, that is even more evidence against anticipating a specific search. If a large body of infosec/cybersecurity professionals advise a wipe/reset of your phone before any and all international travel, that is further evidence for defense.
If yes, then those confessions or statements could become inadmissable (i.e. the suspect was effectively compelled to testify against himself, in violation of the 5th Amendment). When police combine deception with coercion or threats, the answer to that question leans toward yes, but it will depend on the juristiction and the judge and is often assessed on a case-by-case basis. Police in any given juristiction probably have a reasonably good sense (from their own accumulated experience and local training) of what kind of deception results in the produced evidence becoming inadmissable in the courts where the defendant will appear.
Game it out at the systems level. If the prosecution had to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that what was destroyed would have been evidence, then destruction of evidence would be functionally permissible whenever done competently.
> ...either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.
Agreed. And activists should generally work with lawyers in order to be familiar with areas of the law they are likely to encounter in the course of their activism. Especially activists who travel internationally.
Selectively detaining this guy, likely overreach.
Trying to get his phone's unlock code to go on a fishing expedition for whatever they can find, absolutely overreach.
But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.
You have the right to remain silent, not to lie to the police when detained (18 USC § 1001, and many state-level laws to the same effect also exist). Our justice system could not function if people had a right to lie to the police. Once you are detained, whether or not that detention is eventually determined to be lawful, destroying or disposing of your possessions to prevent police from accessing them is also generally a crime.
You fight abuses later, in court. Or, if you're going to use a duress PIN in the moment, you accept the legal consequences.
And yes, giving a duress PIN to wipe a phone when asked for an unlock PIN is a lie which may result in destruction of evidence. And no, the law does not care about "I'm not touching you"-level rationalizations of whether something is a lie or whether it was technically the police who entered the code to wipe the phone. Proximate cause is a longstanding legal concept.