HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

dTal

17,904 karmajoined 13 лет назад

Submissions

Between-Device Sharing Still Sucks

hackaday.com
3 points·by dTal·2 месяца назад·0 comments

The quiet obsolescence of generosity, and a commercial alternative

malus.sh
2 points·by dTal·4 месяца назад·1 comments

Loko Scheme: bare metal optimizing Scheme compiler

scheme.fail
165 points·by dTal·9 месяцев назад·15 comments

comments

dTal
·вчера·discuss
Conversely, declaring a space "politics-free" tramples a hell of a lot more than curiosity.

Incidentally, the comment immediately below this one begins with the words "I'm curious". So I think we're good.
dTal
·позавчера·discuss
The point of the comment you are replying to is that it's also not worth the time and effort to use LLMs to find vulnerabilities, if "time and effort" can be measured with "money". If you factor in all the money spent on training, GPU data centers etc, it's not actually a financially efficient way to find bugs unless you profit from creating demand for LLMs. LLMs aren't cheaper than humans per unit work, yet. They're just massively deficit funded because capital thinks "AI" is going to reshape the world order, and wants in.
dTal
·3 дня назад·discuss
It does more types of charts, including Gantt charts. Very useful.
dTal
·3 дня назад·discuss
if you have a 2 dollar budget to make a viewfinder work, just throw in a ten cent plastic lens and be done with it.
dTal
·3 дня назад·discuss
>LLMs use a neural network to interpolate

"interpolate" in what vector space, pray tell? What does "interpolate" even mean, when I prompt it "write me a story about a sentient banana in the style of Hemingway and oh make it a commentary on class consciousness"? You can't assemble such a thing by cutting and pasting pieces of other text. That kind of "interpolation" has to happen at the semantic level - ipso facto, there is a semantic level.

Not to mention that no, they don't predict the next token in the training set. Give any LLM the first paragraph of any Wikipedia article - almost certainly in the training set, and uniquely so - and it won't predict the next word correctly, a lot of the time. But it will predict a word that is grammatically correct, stylistically apropos, and most likely factually correct. So what's it really doing, hm?

LLMs aren't even large enough to contain their training data - not even remotely close. It can't "stitch together things it saw" because it doesn't remember them. It only remembers the ideas used to construct them. The learned abstraction is the entire point of the exercise. LLMs would be useless if they were overfit the way you say they are.
dTal
·3 дня назад·discuss
Rats are a weird choice for that comparison. They're some of the smartest animals on the planet, some say smarter than dogs.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
Are you sure? It's popular to call them "ineffective" because it's a safe way of saying they annoy you while virtue signalling that you do in fact care about climate change and do think that something should be done.

But I've never heard anybody follow up that complaint with their own, more effective suggestion. In the general case, disruptive and particularly self-sacrificing protest does work. It's how women got the vote.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
They do not "stitch together" anything. Neither on a technical level, nor a philosophical one. It "scales better than you expected" because your mental model is wrong.

And, not to insult you, but it's quite obviously wrong. As a mental model it fails to explain basic capabilities. How can an LLM follow elaborate instructions? How can it respond appropriately to user input, when the user input doesn't match any previously seen text? Hell - how does it even balance parentheses? There is no way to explain any of this without conceding that the LLM has semantic understanding. It knows that this comes after that, but "this" and "that" can be at an arbitrary level of abstraction.

Sure - they generate text "like" text they've seen before. That "like" does a ton of heavy lifting.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
I was idly browsing F-Droid yesterday and found a Claude coded B-REP CAD program built on OpenCASCADE, all touch friendly and everything. Definitely something happening.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
No thanks.

>We don't need kernel level anti cheats.

More than that, they'd be illegal by your own standard, if applied fairly. You can't steal control of someone's computer just because they bought a game from you. That's a strictly more severe "exploit" with strictly more impact on "quality of service" than sending bogus data to a server. Cuts both ways.

But we all know how it'd really play out. If lying to a server counts as "hacking", but corporate rootkits and locked bootloaders are fine, all you've really done is solidify "felony infringement of business model". You haven't protected anyone. Video games are a stupid thing to immolate computing freedom for.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
This already exists more or less exactly as you describe. Family mobile phone plans offer the ability to designate a number as having parental restrictions, and the phone company will intercept DNS requests and substitute a version of Google with SafeSearch enabled and locked, provided by Google for this purpose along with a friendly message "your network operator has locked your safesearch settings etc etc". Don't let anyone tell you this isn't mainstream.
dTal
·4 дня назад·discuss
Mobile phones rather famously tend not to be plugged into landlines.
dTal
·5 дней назад·discuss
So quite a lot then?
dTal
·9 дней назад·discuss
They're resigning because Google is complicit in killing people. How is that "identity politics"? Do you just throw the word "identity" in there for no reason?
dTal
·9 дней назад·discuss
Uh huh. And why is it crazy?
dTal
·10 дней назад·discuss
>If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.

That's an unfair comparison. We are talking about operational costs, not capital costs. A fair comparison would include nuclear's capital costs, which don't do it any favors - nuclear plants also need fancy turbine blades.

Not that I'm against nuclear, I think we're completely mad to be still burning (burning! so primitive!) ancient plants, coming up on a century after Magic Energy Rocks were discovered. "Cost" is a fickle metric when so many costs are externalized in both space and time - nobody cares if the effects of pollution are felt years down the line, thousands of miles away.

But it's funny that governments throw wildly generous subsidies and special legal treatment at domestic food production, correctly perceiving cheap reliable food as upstream of a functioning society, yet fail to similarly "overinvest" in energy sources for machines as well as humans. I hazard that most of the European countries that depended heavily on Russian gas would not have been so blase if their population had been subsisting off Russian food imports.

We should be building out tremendous energy capacity using every conceivable technology available. Any country that does this is virtually guaranteed wealth, for energy is fungible with almost everything else. The equation is so obvious that failure to do so implies regulatory capture by entrenched energy interests. "Too cheap to meter" belongs in the same rhetorical bucket as "Perfect sound forever" - a promise that was retracted as soon as it became clear that scarcity was more profitable than abundance.
dTal
·11 дней назад·discuss
If your language is indeed the first to be born in a mobile phone, after all this time, that would rather suggest that there is a difference. Ergonomic differences and artificial restrictions are still differences and restrictions.
dTal
·14 дней назад·discuss
that you know of
dTal
·16 дней назад·discuss
Bits is bits - so sorry you couldn't figure out the right bits to make the hardware do what you want, but those bits do exist and they are findable in principle - it's still all software! Your lack of knowledge of the signing keys is qualitatively no different than your lack of knowledge of any other undocumented proprietary information required to program the chip. Frankly you'd struggle even with the keys.

Infeasible? Oh my yes. Impossible? No. That's the point - there is a distinction.
dTal
·17 дней назад·discuss
Bad take. Some things are feasible and some things are not, "anything is possible" is a useless framework. Example: go convert two smartphones to communicate p2p over their 4g radios - it's all software!

LLM "awareness" is similarly irrelevant. They process information usefully, in a way grounded in reality, and that's that.