I donno, I've come across or read about fair number of people who worked on a crazy idea for a very long time, as if they were planning to throw their life away chasing that idea. Some had a breakthrough and ended up being a huge win. But I'm sure there are many many more who just ended up nowhere. So, I guess it's a gamble.
There is no way to access the Internet from inside Iran, not for private citizens, nor for companies, or even many server hosts. Just very very few places, directly linked and controlled by the government, have limited Internet access.
There is not even the option to call phone lines inside Iran, or call abroad from Iran (not tried direct call, but no VoIP works).
You still can access any server inside Iran ("Internet-e-Melli" or National Internet, they call it), but none of these servers in turn have access to free Internet.
Would love to hear your thoughts if there is a technical way to bypass such restriction (me and my friends, fairly tech savvy, could not find a way).
To those argue that LLMs might cheat by using EXIF, I saw a post recently on twitter (https://x.com/tszzl/status/1915212958755676350) and out of curiosity, screen-captured the photo and passed it to O3. So no EXIF.
It took 4.5m to guess the location. The guess was accurate (checked using Google Street View).
What was amazing about it:
1. The photo did not have ANY text
2. It picked elements of the image and inferred based on those, like a fountain in a courtyard, or shape of the buildings.
All in all, it's just mind-blowing how this works!
I have friends in faculty positions at well-known universities who were very unhappy about these practices, but could not publicly discuss it fearing repercussion, prior to these events.
TBC, I am not supporting any of the things happening. I do think the DEI thing went too far, but what the new admin. is doing can be much worse.
If you are interested in this topic, I suggest watching the conversation between Edward Gibson and Lex Fridman. In the middle of the conversation [1] Edward talks about how there is a "human language comprehension network" within human brain, which gets activated only when we read or speak in any human languages, but nothing else. For example for those speaking multiple languages, reading or writing in any of those languages activates the network. But reading gibberish or computer code, neither activate the network.
Thanks for the links. I watched some of his videos where he explained how DataColada did their forensic investigation in data manipulation.
What amazes me is how simple was the fraud (or at least the ones reported by Pete!). They basically just opened an excel file, started from the top, changed some random numbers, until they reached the effect they aimed for!!! Really? What about those that can do more sophisticated data manipulation?
I have a set of PDF files, and this week was thinking how I can link them to an LLM and be able to ask questions about them. So this was very timely.
I did a quick side-by-side testing against Nougat, and it clearly works better. On a handful of PDFs I tested, Marker extracted considerably more text (the text did not have any math, just academic papers), finished the job faster, and did not crash on any pdf, while Nougat took a lot longer to finish, and sometimes crashed due to out-of-memory error (could not allocate more than 7GB RAM!)
I don't think tweeting and blogging can be compared really. I would see tweeting as a form of "talking to a group of people". You often don't research, proofread, and rewrite yourself when talking. The UI to tweeting also boosts this (mostly mobile devices I assume, via a small text box).
While bloggin is for writing an essay. You may write the essay and just publish it, but in most cases you do some research and at least proofread it once. And again the blogging UI is optimized for this: you have an empty page, nothing other than your written content.
And they really complement each other: you talk to people to get ideas for your essays, and you write essays to share your ideas with people and use them as the base for your writing. I don't think you ever can replace tweeter (or similar services) with blogging.
> ‘If America attacks Iran,’ I said, ‘won’t people be killed?’
> ‘They don’t kill people. Our own government does. No enemy in our history has done to us what these clerics have done.’