inkysigma

402 karmajoined vor 3 Jahren

comments

vorgesterndiscuss

Given more code hosting services, I wonder if we'll also see a corresponding increase in the number of alternative VCS or if git is legitimately very entrenched as a tool. I am just being a bit grouchy but I do wish there was more development of alternative VCSs. pijul at least looks cool even if I don't know if it scales well. Git LFS can be somewhat finicky to work with so maybe we'll see perforce like systems. It's obviously not the most practical thing to have a variety of very different VCS's and definitely a PITA to learn multiple tools but git does seem somewhat suboptimal given the number of anecdotes about people just re-cloning the repo. I was recently trying jj and it seemed to work well (excluding the lack of LFS support) so here's hoping.

vorgesterndiscuss

I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.

However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.

On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.

I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.

It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

vorgesterndiscuss

I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is:

https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks

To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example,

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot...

If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.

Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.

The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?

vorgesterndiscuss

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.

I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

letzten Monatdiscuss

This is essentially an open research question. ML theory is unfortunately very weak relative to where the empirics are. I think there's a relatively optimistic paper that was posted a while back here but I would also take it with a grain of salt.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21691

There's of course empirical results and relatively weak theoretical results like the UAT but I also don't think that answers your question fully, especially since it seems impossible to definitively answer questions that the industry seems to betting on like whether or not there is a lower bound to their error rate or whether hallucination as a problem can be solved. We have much stronger ideas of what linear regression is doing relative to what LLMs are doing.

letzten Monatdiscuss

At a high level, the text samples are how the relationships are derived. If we treat text samples as sequences of tokens, then the sequences of tokens describe the joint distributions they occur together which confers the relationship between them. Iirc, this is related to the idea of the distributional hypothesis in NLP: the idea the semantics of words should be similar if they occur in similar situations.

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

One example along this path as an example is that every function must either terminate or have a side effect. I don't think one has bitten me yet but I could completely see how you accidentally write some kind of infinite loop or recursion and the function gets deleted. Also, bonus points for tail recursion so this bug might only show up with a higher optimization level if during debug nothing hit the infinite loop.

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

So I can't tell if the linked commit is an actual attempt or just an experiment but it did always strike me as odd to make a JS runtime in Zig when my impression was there were a lot of work-stopping compiler bugs at the time.

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I'm curious how this view fits in with BERT or the T5 release which prior to the current LLM craze were the de facto language models for use in pretty much any tasks. Was this a position that would've otherwise grown without the llama release?

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Some of those organizations (Linux and Mozilla) work on open source code for which they are already trained on. For clients like Apple, they almost surely have agreements to not do that.

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Well it did contain a request to not notify according to that same letter. I suppose that brings up several questions.

1. Does that mean the same thing in the ToS?

2. How valid are these requests?

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Depends on how legitimate you consider an administrative warrant and how willingly you think complying with one is.

On a more practical level, forcing them to go to court might not be much better. If this went to a FISA court, those are essentially rubber stamps and give nearly 100% approval.

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

His anti censorship stance isn't necessarily born out by the data:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

X under Musk has sustained more government takedown requests.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I think in this context, scaffolds are generally the harness that surrounds the actual model. For example, any tools, ways to lay out tasks, or auto-critiquing methods.

I think there's quite a bit of variance in model performance depending on the scaffold so comparisons are always a bit murky.

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Actually given boot chain protection, this will probably get harder as time goes on but even assuming some kids are able to, this is clearly definable as a user error: the fault lies with the kid and as a parent you need to think about your threat model.

Right now, it's not even clear how to create parental controls at a reasonable level so there's no clear path for what to do or how to respond.

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Except none of these bills (California or the one in question) as currently written require an ID to actually be verified, merely that the user provide an age. This seems intentional as it's seems to solve the user journey where a parent is able to set a reasonable default by simply setting up an associated account age at account creation. It's effectively just standardizing parental controls.

I think this is a reasonable balance without being invasive as there's now a defined path to do reasonable parenting without being a sysadmin and operators cannot claim ignorance because the user input a random birthday. The information leaked is also fairly minimal so even assuming ads are using that as signal, it doesn't add too many bits to tracking compared to everything else. I think the California bill needs a bit of work to clarify what exactly this applies to (e.g. exclude servers) but I also think this is a reasonable framework to satisfy this debate.

I've seen the argument that this could lead to actual age verification but I think that's a line that's clearly definable and could be fought separately.

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I think this is the third time this has effectively been posted see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365597

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Some of these are also just like really weak? One of them for example seems to be some random employee at FB donating ~$1k to a politician and calling that a link. The entire "Proven Findings" is all over the place and provides no coherence. I don't think it's a particular secret that Meta would prefer age verification be done at the OS level so I'm not really sure what the added claim here is.

> A Meta employee (Jake Levine, Product Manager) contributed $1,175 to ASAA sponsor Matt Ball's campaign apparatus on June 2, 2025. Source: Colorado TRACER bulk data.

> No direct Meta PAC contributions to any ASAA sponsor across Utah, Louisiana, Texas, or Colorado. Source: FollowTheMoney.org multi-state search.

While it is true that Meta has funded groups that advocate for age verification, a lot of them also appear to have other actors so it's not like this is some pure Meta thing as some of the other commenters are suggesting.

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

Depending on the implementation, I could see that having rate limiting effects. There're only finitely many IDs so scaling sockpuppeting will saturate these IDs quickly but it's quite easy to spin up a new anonymous account. For example, I think the EU ID system has an upcoming way to create pseudo anonymous identifiers that can identify a user per website.

This presents the problem of governments being able to gatekeep speech which I am quite uncomfortable with but maybe there's some safeguard within the eIDAS proposal that makes this idea incorrect?