utopiah
@utopiah@lemmy.world
- Comment on What are some self hosted services that you think are essential? 1 day ago:
So headscale?
- Comment on A TikTok alternative called Loops is coming for the fediverse | Users own their content, and Loops doesn’t sell or provide videos to third-party advertisers or train AI on them. It will be open source 3 weeks ago:
(insert here the “The TikTok at home” meme format) So actually I did my own with PeerTube (self hosted server side) and Latrix (mobile client to live stream) and you can see the result at video.benetou.fr/w/p/hfPcHz1kCgnM6zKhfPrS4b (playlist of 6 short videos with progress over time).
I’d argue it… works. Is it necessary or useful? Well I didn’t keep up with the format but it potentially can be. My point being… we already have quite a few tools in place.
- Comment on Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator 4 weeks ago:
I bet, but that’s just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to “most people” who have never written essays since high school and I but a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.
That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely “selected” him for the practice.
- Comment on Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator 4 weeks ago:
there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.
I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don’t know about Elsburg but wouldn’t you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.
How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is “normal” that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by “just” being.
- Comment on Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts 4 weeks ago:
Eh… “Robin Li says increased accuracy is one of the largest improvements we’ve seen in Artificial Intelligence. “I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved—meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer,” the CEO added.”
That’s plain wrong. Even STOA black box chatbots give wrong answer to the simplest of questions sometimes. That’s precisely what NOT being able to trust mean.
How can one believe anything this person is saying?
- Comment on OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman 1 month ago:
Search for “water positive” commitment. You will quickly see it’s a “goal” thus it is consequently NOT the case. In some places where water is abundant it might not be a problem, where it’s scarce then it’s literally a choice made between crops to feed people and… compute cycles.
- Comment on OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman 1 month ago:
I hope I won’t undermine your entirely justified trust but Altman is also a crypto guy, cf Worldcoin. /$
- Comment on How do I avoid enshitification of my keyboard and mouse 1 month ago:
What I meant to say is that a lot of commercial keyboard are sold with home “customizable” they are. And it’s partly true, you have tool allowing to make some shortcut on popular OSes. It might be sufficient for some people … but it is NOT the same as putting your own firmware in it.
I’m not advocating for a $300 keyboard over a $30 one, “just” for genuine customization. Some that doesn’t have arbitrary limitations from the manufacturer and doesn’t have support for only some OSes which in turns (well Windows and MacOS not to name them) also promote a consumer only with limited control options, as OP is saying about enshitification.
- Comment on How do I avoid enshitification of my keyboard and mouse 1 month ago:
Buy open hardware with open source firmware.
I’m typing this from a Corne-ish Zen and you can see my firmware (ZMK) with my keymap at github.com/Utopiah/…/corneish_zen.keymap#L27
Nobody can touch this but me. No update can break it. Yet, it’s more feature rich than most keyboards.
There are equivalents for most peripherals. It’s not cheap, usually even MORE expensive than already pricey ones like Logitech (I have an MX Vertical, still) but IMHO it’s worth it. It’s good right now, pragmatically speaking, but also morally speaking.
I advise against swimming upstream, namely NOT buying hardware that have such enshitification practices because if they don’t do it today, they might tomorrow when there is more pressure from shareholders. Also by buying alternatives you are economically supporting people whom you believe are providing better solutions for yourself and others.
PS: a gateway to such project is crowdsupply.com which is a kind of KickStarter for such projects.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
You’re just making another assumption, maybe the dorm has optic fiber with a big bandwidth and a lower latency that most home and business connection.
- Comment on I want an AI TV that blocks all forms of advertising. 2 months ago:
See also suggestion on hardware and commercialization lemmy.world/comment/12248508
- Comment on I want an AI TV that blocks all forms of advertising. 2 months ago:
no business in the capitalist world where selling ads is a billion dollar industry is going to make this available
How about an open-hardware open-source project on e.g CrowdSupply (something like www.crowdsupply.com/jie-zou/rggber but dedicated) where everything is setup to do so efficiently, e.g an HDMI/HDMI box where you put the signal in, get the signal out, and on its own does nothing but cool looking visual filters, e.g from color to black&white, yet when the user reconfigure it, with community made filter, it removes ads?
- Comment on I want an AI TV that blocks all forms of advertising. 2 months ago:
annotate them by adding the time stamps then the location on the image
Depending on your legislation it might be legally mandatory to disclose, so if one can have an automated way to know this, it would simplify greatly the problem.
- Comment on I want an AI TV that blocks all forms of advertising. 2 months ago:
I agree but I don’t watch TV so I don’t bother. Yet… I still hate product placement so I might be interested in such a solution. Anyway here is how I would do it :
- evaluate what exists, e.g SponsorBlock, and see what’s the closest that fit my need, try it, ask in forum or repository issues if modifications are possible
- gather videos of the typically problematic content, say few hours to start
- annotate them by adding the time stamps then the location on the image
- replace problematic content with gradually complex solutions, e.g black, average color of the area, denoising (quite compute intensive)
- honestly evaluate the result
- rinse and repeat, sharing my result back with the closest interested community
Honestly it’s a worthwhile endeavor but be mindful it’s an arm race. There are a LOT of smart people paid to add ads everywhere… but there are even more people, like you and I, eager to remove them. IMHO the key trick is, like SponsorBlock, to federate the efforts.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Right, and I mentioned CUDA earlier as one of the reason of their success, so it’s definitely something important. Clients might be interested in e.g Google TPU, startups like Etched, Tenstorrent, Groq, Cerebras Systems or heck even design their own but are probably limited by their current stack relying on CUDA. I imagine though that if backlog do keep on existing there will be abstraction libraries, at least for the most popular ones e.g TensorFlow, JAX or PyTorch, simply because the cost of waiting is too high.
Anyway what I meant isn’t about hardware or software but rather ROI, namely when Goldman Sachs and others issue analyst report saying that the promise itself isn’t up to par with actual usage for paying customers.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
I’m also no stockologist and I agree but I that’s not my point. The stock should be high but that might already have been factored in, namely this is not a new situation, so theoretically that’s been priced in since investors have understood it. My point anyway isn’t about the price itself but rather the narrative (or reason, as the example you mention on backlog and lack of competition) that investors themselves believe.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
I’m not sure if you played PCVR in the Summer but imagine that in a tiny room… it’s just way too hot. Again I’m NOT saying it’s good, or bad, I’m only saying you made assumption about OP usage. I’m not sure if you tried CloudXR but basically, it works and it’s not that complex to setup (e.g 1h) so it’s relatively faster and cheaper than building and owning a gaming PC.
I don’t understand why you are even arguing about a legitimate usage.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
Sure yet it’s a perfectly legitimate one. I’m not OP, it might be exactly their use case.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
You do if you are rendering in the cloud, e.g NVIDIA CloudXR. Not sure what OP plans to do.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
Not a lawyer but if you have an email that says you can, I’d argue it’s override the ToS assuming the person giving permission actually legally can.
Anyway I bet what they avoid is reselling access so I believe as long as you don’t pay for yourself then resell to others you’ll be OK.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Stuff like LLMs or ConvNets (and the likes) can already be used to do some pretty amazing stuff that we could not do a decade ago, there is really no need to shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it.
I’m shitting rainbows and puking glitter on a daily basis BUT it’s not against AI as a field, it’s not against AI research, rather it’s against :
- catastrophism and fear, even eschatology, used as a marketing tactic
- open systems and research that become close
- trying to lock a market with legislation
- people who use a model, especially a model they don’t even have e.g using a proprietary API, and claim they are an AI startup
- C-levels decision that anything now must include AI
- claims that this or that skill is soon to be replaced by AI with actually no proof of it
- meaningless test results with grand claim like “passing the bar exam” used as marketing tactics
- claims that it scales, it “just needs more data”, not for .1% improvement but for radical change, e.g emergent learning
- for-profit (different from public research) scrapping datasets without paying back anything to actual creators
- ignoring or lying about non renewable resource consumption for both training and inference
- relying on “free” or loss leader strategies to dominate a market
- promoting to be doing the work for the good of humanity then signing exclusive partnership with a corporation already fined for monopoly practices
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few but basically none of those criticism are technical. None of those criticism is about the current progress made. Rather, they are about business practices.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Their valuation is because there’s STILL a lineup a mile long for their flagship GPUs.
Genuinely curious, how do you know where the valuation, any valuation, come from?
This is an interesting story, and it might be factually true, but as far as I know unless someone has actually asked the biggest investor WHY they did bet on a stock, nobody why a valuation is what it is. We might have guesses, and they might even be correct, but they also change.
I mentioned it few times here before but my bet is yes, what you did mention BUT also because the same investors do not know where else do put their money yet and thus simply can’t jump boats. They are stuck there and it might again be become they initially though the demand was high with nobody else could fulfill it, but I believe that’s not correct anymore.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Unfortunately it’s part of the marketing, thanks OpenAI for that “Oh no… we can’t share GPT2, too dangerous” then… here it is. Definitely interesting then but now World shattering. Same for GPT3 … but through exclusive partnership with Microsoft, all closed, rinse and repeat for GPT4. It’s a scare tactic to lock what was initially open, both directly and closing the door behind them through regulation, at least trying to.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
I’m sure whatever the next fad is will require a GPU to run huge calculations.
I also bet it will, cf my earlier comment on rendering farm and looking for what “recycles” old GPUs lemmy.world/comment/12221218 namely that it makes sense to prepare for it now and look for what comes next BASED on the current most popular architecture. It might not be the most efficient but probably will be the most economical.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
move on to the next […] eager to see what they come up with next.
That’s a point I’m making in a lot of conversations lately : IMHO the bubble didn’t pop BECAUSE capital doesn’t know where to go next. Despite reports from big banks that there is a LOT of investment for not a lot of actual returns, people are still waiting on where to put that money next. Until there is such a place, they believe it’s still more beneficial to keep the bet on-going.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
there’s a lot of potential in analytics with AI
I’d argue there is a lot of potential in any domain with basic numeracy. In pretty much any business or institution somebody with a spreadsheet might help a lot. That doesn’t necessarily require any Big Data or AI though.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
They just design them.
It’s not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.
That being said I don’t think they were “just” lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Right, it did have an AI winter few decades ago. It’s indeed here to stay, it doesn’t many any of the current company marketing it right now will though.
AI as a research field will stay, everything else maybe not.
- Comment on The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble 2 months ago:
Interesting, I did try a bit of remote rendering on Blender (just to learn how to use via CLI) so that makes me wonder who is indeed scrapping the bottom of the barrel of “old” hardware and what they are using for. Maybe somebody is renting old GPUs for render farms, maybe other tasks, any pointer of such a trend?
- Comment on Amazon cloud boss echoes NVIDIA CEO on coding being dead in the water: "If you go forward 24 months from now, it's possible that most developers are not coding" 2 months ago:
there isn’t a single serious project written exclusively or mostly by an LLM? There isn’t a single library or remotely original application
IMHO “original” here is the key. Finding yet another clone of a Web framework ported from one language to another in order to push online a basic CMS slightly faster, I can imagine this. In fact I even bet that LLM, because they manipulate words in languages and that code can be safely (even thought not cheaply) tested within containers, could be an interesting solution for that.
… but that is NOT really creating value for anyone, unless that person is technically very savvy and thus able to leverage why a framework in a language over another creates new opportunities (say safety, performances, etc). So… for somebody who is not that savvy, “just” relying on the numerous existing already existing open-source providing exactly the value they expect, there is no incentive to re-invent.
For anything that is genuinely original, i.e something that is not a port to another architecture, a translation to another language, a slight optimization, but rather something that need just a bit of reasoning and evaluating against the value created, I’m very skeptical, even less so while pouring less resources EVEN with a radical drop in costs.