barnacs

5 ms·

1.
by barnacs 2mo ago
The "AI" does not give "financial advice". It autocompletes your prompt. If you provide the right context and ask the right questions you will get the most likely consensus on such a widely discussed topic.
2.
by barnacs 2mo ago
It turns out LDL has different subfractions based on size. Normally, the liver produces large ones which shuttle fat around the bloodstream, lose their payload and shrink then the liver reabsorbs them and the cycle continues. The problem ap
3.
by barnacs 2mo ago
Mathematics is a language. If anything, it's much more well defined and formal than most others. Train on enough examples and statistical autocomplete gets you places. I'm surprised how anyone would even consider this intelligence
4.
by barnacs 2mo ago
I hold my stance that LLMs are stochastic parrots. Making the parrots ever more complex and training on ever more data produced by intelligent, creative beings may make them more useful or convincing but does at no point give rise to intell
5.
by barnacs 2mo ago
Similar to your contractor example, I like to think of the useful way to use LLMs as doing "grep -C" (show lines surrounding the match). You provide some context you are looking to expand on and let the LLM autocomplete provide yo
6.
by barnacs 2mo ago
It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you even notice? As for now, autocomplete is only as good as the
7.
by barnacs 2mo ago
I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!
8.
by barnacs 2mo ago
This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.
9.
by barnacs 5mo ago
I don't think most people have been inconvenienced enough yet. ID verification is invasive enough and should cause enough friction to push another bunch over the edge.
10.
by barnacs 5mo ago
Hopefully this will give yet another push towards decentralized, open source services. Platforms where noone and everyone is responsible and the state does not get to decide the rules.
11.
by barnacs 6mo ago
Just a reminder: LLMs are statistical models that predict the next token based on preceeding tokens. They have no feelings, goals, relationships, life experience, understanding of the human condition and so on. Treat them accordingly.
12.
by barnacs 6mo ago
Get with the newspeak, it's called "sideloading" now and your corporate overlords get to dictate the terms.
13.
by barnacs 7mo ago
In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties to all citizens.
14.
by barnacs 7mo ago
I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years. [0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
15.
by barnacs 7mo ago
I don't think using git should necessarily be taught as a part of a CS education. Any self respecting engineer will be capable and have the curiosity and motivation to dig into it on their own. CS should give them the prereqs to do so,
16.
by barnacs 7mo ago
If the fields of a structure or the string keys of an untyped map don't match then you don't have compatibility either way. The same is not true for restricting the set of valid values. edit: To put it differently: To possibly be
17.
by barnacs 7mo ago
Every time you introduce a type for a "value invariant" you lose compatibility and force others to make cumbersome type conversions. To me, invalid values are best expressed with optional error returns along with the value that ar
18.
by barnacs 7mo ago
Agreed. "Be the change you want to see". In this case, both as a user and a professional.
19.
by barnacs 7mo ago
> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a
20.
by barnacs 8mo ago
Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the
21.
by barnacs 8mo ago
Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US. To quote from my other comment: > In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not reg
22.
by barnacs 8mo ago
I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about. But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.
23.
by barnacs 8mo ago
> other important aspects like what?
24.
by barnacs 8mo ago
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort t
25.
by barnacs 8mo ago
As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
26.
by barnacs 8mo ago
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last foreve
27.
by barnacs 8mo ago
I'm looking for a language optimized for human use given the fundamental architectural changes in computing in the last 50 years. That way we could skip both the boilerplate and the LLMs generating boilerplate.
28.
by barnacs 8mo ago
That's probably why a boundary (like MCP) is useful. Imagine maintaining the critical application logic the "old fashioned way" and exposing a MCP-like interface to the users so that they can have their LLM generate whatever
29.
by barnacs 1y ago
> the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does? To me, that's not even close to intelligence.
30.
by barnacs 1y ago
> Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion What LLMs do is using what they have _seen_ to come to a _statistical_ conclusion. Just like a complex statistical weather forecasting model. I have never heard anyone arg

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