MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 6 hours ago:
Well - if you want to devolve into argument, you can argue all day long about “what is reasoning?”
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 6 hours ago:
Hallucinations and the cost of running the models.
So, inaccurate information in books is nothing new. Agreed that the rate of hallucinations needs to decline, a lot, but there has always been a need for a veracity filter - just because it comes from “a book” or “the TV” has never been an indication of absolute truth, even though many people stop there and assume it is. In other words: blind trust is not a new problem.
The cost of running the models is an interesting one - how does it compare with publication on paper to ship globally to store in environmentally controlled libraries which require individuals to physically travel to/from the libraries to access the information? What’s the price of the resulting increased ignorance of the general population due to the high cost of information access?
What good is a bunch of knowledge stuck behind a search engine when people don’t know how to access it, or access it efficiently?
Granted, search engines already take up 95% (IMO) of the way from paper libraries to what AI is almost succeeding in being today, but ease of access of information has tremendous value - and developing ways to easily access the information available on the internet is a very valuable endeavor.
Personally, I feel more emphasis should be put on establishing the veracity of the information before we go making all the garbage easier to find.
I also worry that “easy access” to automated interpretation services is going to lead to a bunch of information encoded in languages that most people don’t know because they’re dependent on machines to do the translation for them. As an example: shiny new computer language comes out but software developer is too lazy to learn it, developer uses AI to write code in the new language instead…
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 8 hours ago:
I’m not trained or paid to reason, I am trained and paid to follow established corporate procedures. On rare occasions my input is sought to improve those procedures, but the vast majority of my time is spent executing tasks governed by a body of (not quite complete, sometimes conflicting) procedural instructions.
If AI can execute those procedures as well as, or better than, human employees, I doubt employers will care if it is reasoning or not.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 8 hours ago:
I think as we approach the uncanny valley of machine intelligence, it’s no longer a cute cartoon but a menacing creepy not-quite imitation of ourselves.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 8 hours ago:
My impression of LLM training and deployment is that it’s actually massively parallel in nature - which can be implemented one instruction at a time - but isn’t in practice.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 8 hours ago:
It’s not just the memorization of patterns that matters, it’s the recall of appropriate patterns on demand. Call it what you will, even if AI is just a better librarian for search work, that’s value - that’s the new Google.
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 1 day ago:
7.50 on each USB drive
Ouch!
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 1 day ago:
Not my hypothesis. And it is just bullshit, but if you pay attention, they have made similar runs at taxing and controlling the internet periodically since the 1990s.
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 1 day ago:
Well, that’s a big component: how efficient / environmentally destructive is the mining?
Also, as electricity consumption in areas like China, India, Africa increases, they’re going to start needing big multiples of the amount of copper used in the US/Europe/ANZ to-date.
- Comment on Amazon's new "Delivery Plus" service. For an additional $29.95 your stuff will arrive less fucked up. Free with Amazon Prime. 1 day ago:
Truth is, there’s precious little I need from Amazon, let alone need in a hurry. It mostly comes down to wants, supplies for projects which are themselves entirely optional, etc. As such, I will let a “want” item sit in my cart for weeks until it is joined by enough other want items to make the $25 or $35 or whatever arbitrary limit they have set to erase the arbitrary $6.99 small order shipping fee.
I don’t like to think about how much I have spent there, and elsewhere online, for things I don’t really need. I do like to take arbitrary months off from buying anything optional, kind of like intermittent fasting - gives me time to finish out things I have started, clean up stuff I have abandoned, do things that don’t require “stuff.”
If I am typical, the world could boycott over 80% of their amazon.com purchases without even bothering to get the stuff from elsewhere, and 80% of the remaining 20% could be sourced elsewhere, perhaps for 10-20% higher cost, perhaps not even that.
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 1 day ago:
And still do for live performance by cover bands.
- Comment on Amazon's new "Delivery Plus" service. For an additional $29.95 your stuff will arrive less fucked up. Free with Amazon Prime. 2 days ago:
They give me “Prime free for 30 days” every so often. The only difference I notice is that I can send in an order for one little cheap thing and get free shipping, instead of waiting until I have $35 worth of stuff to send the order.
The “faster shipping” with Prime isn’t faster most of the time - frequently promises fast and actually delivers slow, which is worse IMO than promising slow and usually delivering faster.
They run bogus discounts for “Prime members only” that just steer me away from the products altogether - add up all the “Prime discounts” I might have bought in my lifetime and it’s less than two months Prime subscription cost.
If I need something “right away” - that’s what local brick and mortar stores are for. Prime is a sucky attempt at competing with a 5 minute drive to the hardware store.
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 2 days ago:
In the 1970s/80s, the corporations just taxed blank media - because it was obviously used to pirate their warez.
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 2 days ago:
Youtube (under Google)'s implementation of US copyright considerations is a huge problem above and beyond the abomination that is the copyright law itself.
- Comment on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback 2 days ago:
The problem is that LibreELEC is piracy-adjacent. So you get these bogus take-downs because different people draw the line differently, and fighting a legal battle is 1000x as expensive as the outcome is worth to most people.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Nice thought, but how will the rich demonstrate their status from a Vespa? Perhaps by paying off the judge so they don’t get restricted?
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
The crosswalk light might help in the lawsuit after you are seriously injured or killed, if anyone submits video evidence at the trial.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
I learned to drive in Florida. Saw my first snow while driving five years later, I was trying to take a (rented) front wheel drive minivan out to get breakfast and about 5" of snow had fallen overnight. I put it in drive and it barely moved. I cut the wheel and it moved a little, I cut the wheel back and it moved a little more. I tried saw-toothing the steering left and right and got up a little speed, finally getting up to about 5mph while sawing the wheel back and forth. I drove around the parking lot like this, twice, before deciding: people do this all the time, it has to get easier after I get going… as I started toward the exit, I noticed: the parking brake was on, I had been dragging the locked rear wheels around the parking lot behind me. I released the parking brake and driving in snow became 100x easier from there on out.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
The U.S. death rate is about 750 / 100,000 overall, with about 14.1 of those 750 declared suicide (you can never really know, but the suspected actual suicide rate is a bit higher, to preserve insurance benefits…)
The current US death rate by automobile accident is around 13.4 per 100,000 - so, by those statistics, people are already slightly more likely to take their own lives by choice than they are to die in an auto accident.
Of course if you choose to walk, you’re not entirely safe, the US pedestrian death rate is around 2 per 100,000, and that’s with most people driving everywhere most of the time.
Another fun way to look at the end is lifetime odds:
Death by suicide: 1/87 Death by automobile accident: 1/93 (which seems to indicate in itself that deaths by auto accident are expected to decline slightly?) Death by firearm: 1/91 Suicide by firearm: 1/156
Next time you’re driving on a 2 lane highway at speed, oncoming cars approaching at a relative velocity of 100mph and more (50 in your direction 50 in theirs…) count oncoming cars. When you get to 87, odds are that one of those drivers will ultimately die by suicide… there’s a little solace in the fact that most of them won’t be doing it by swerving into oncoming traffic, and the bigger relief is that most of those that do, won’t be doing it at that particular moment just before you pass.
As for guns - that’s a whole different mess, but interesting that the numbers are so close.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Lifetime care for the additional seriously injured will be very expensive…
I live in a retirement center, here it is very obvious that driving licenses should be revoked when vision, reflexes and other driving skills reach the level of the average 75 year old. But, since the majority of voters here are retirees- instead they keep making it easier for the extremely elderly to keep driving themselves - because, of course the world can’t take their freedom of movement away from them.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
That’s actually another good use, a kind of passive turn signal - though if they’re really turning you should be able to notice their reduced speed without a light - and drivers who start depending on the front brake light to read intent to turn might actually have more accidents instead of less.
Just yesterday I watched a car pull out into an intersection less than one car-length in front of a car driving straight through the intersection, slowly. I can’t know what they were thinking, but I would guess they assumed that the slow car going straight was about to turn, then they quit paying attention and pulled out just in time for the collision to be un-avoidable.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Well, around here “good drivers” can “read” the bad drivers’ intent, and in a setting like a four way stop they can usually avoid getting hit by yielding, regardless of right of way circumstances.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
I was having a very hard time seeing any possible benefit of a front brake light, since nobody accident prone ever looks in their mirrors.
I suppose in today’s world of automatic transmissions that move the car forward whenever the brakes are released, they might serve some purpose at a four-way stop adding information about immediate intent of the other parties, but even there… that’s more of a Darwinian situation where people who get into crashes at four way stops are sorting themselves out from the rest of reasonably competent drivers. If they’re going fast enough for injuries at a four way stop, they deserve what they get. If they get a minor fender bender - that’s a lesson to read the other traffic better next time.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Buses, as implemented in the US, are vehicles of humiliation and mental torture. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZkouut-9RQ
How to waste an entire day? Take a bus trip somewhere that you could drive in a private car in 20 minutes.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Passing a test is very different from internalizing the lessons tested.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 3 days ago:
Define safe? If everyone drives safely enough that you are more likely to die of suicide than an automobile accident, is that safe enough?
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 4 days ago:
If your provider is working for you, then all is good. I suspect they either A) have hundreds of thousands or more e-mail users in total, or B) they work through one of the big providers for you.
If your provider only serves 20,000 or fewer e-mail clients, the costs for them to play white-list, black-list, whack-a-mole, pleading to keep their legitimate users’ e-mail working smoothly would be prohibitive - upwards of $10 per year per e-mail account just for the employee(s) tasked with negotiating (and solving) those issues behind the scenes for their users (including you), not to mention policing their users to prevent them from abusing the e-mail system.
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 5 days ago:
When they have no choice…
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 5 days ago:
That might be borderline - probably easiest (and most cost efficient) to work through a big provider (M$, Google, etc) to let them solve the problems for you, for a small fee, rather than tasking 0.1 FTEs on constantly whacking the moles.
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 5 days ago:
Icons look different, etc. People are ridiculously inflexible.