thatsnothowyoudoit
@thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down 5 days ago:
What is success here? The few founders and VC get filthy rich as the larger population dumps their money into Discord stock while the users and teams with limited foresight, who’ve moved their communities to discord, suffer?
I mean yeah I guess that’s the success Cory Doctorow warns us about again and again.
But that’s not my definition of success.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.
But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.
You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.
If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.
My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.
That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.
Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).
We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probably that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.
Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
Really? I read your reply as saying the output is libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based in fact.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).
But great can come out of this case.
Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.
But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.
TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).
Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 5 weeks ago:
It’s all hallucinations.
Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.
It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.
- Comment on Qobuz reveals how much it really pays per stream, and I want to see more of this transparency to help us spend money more ethically 5 weeks ago:
While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.
I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.
- Comment on Substack open source rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse 5 weeks ago:
You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.
- Comment on Substack open source rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse 5 weeks ago:
No it’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 5 weeks ago:
But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 5 weeks ago:
I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day. More noise, more useless features.
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 5 weeks ago:
I’m not defending them because it’s a shit move, but they clearly understand the most valuable feature is not their ad-ridden free content but rather the original value prop of the service.
- Comment on LLM crawlers continue to DDoS SourceHut. 5 weeks ago:
We 444 every LLM crawler we see.
- Comment on “It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews 1 month ago:
I think that depends on what you’re doing. I find Claude miles ahead of the pack in practical, but fairly nuanced coding issues - particularly in use as a paired programmer with Strongly Typed FP patterns.
And their new CLI client is pretty decent - it seems to really take advantage of the hybrid CoT/standard auto-switching model advantage Claude now has.
I don’t use it often anymore but when I reach for a model first for coding - it’s Claude. It’s the mostly likely to be able to grasp the core architectural patterns in a codebase (like a consistent monadic structure for error handling or consistently well-defined architectural layers).
I just recently cancelled my one month trial of Gemini - it was pretty useless; easy to get stuck in a dumb loop even with project files as context.
And GPT-4/o1/o3 seems to really suck at being prescriptive - often providing walls of multiple solutions that all somehow narrowly missing the plot - even with tons of context.
That said Claude sucks - SUCKS - at statistics - being completely unreliable where GPT-4 is often pretty good and provides code (Python) for verification.
- Comment on Pixelfed's first plateau in progress 2 months ago:
As per my other comment - the algorithm is only part of it.
A big aspect however is the slickness and ease-of-onboarding for mega-Corp apps. It’s a thing that would relatively easy to begin work on.
I’ve seen first hand the amount of time and money even growth-stage startups spend on onboarding and have lots of first-hand reports from peers at the big girls - it’s a critical part of success. Make it easy to get started and easy to stay using.
It’s missing from most fediverse experiences. Pixelfed being a serious contender for an on-boarding rethink.
“time-to-value” - you want that as low as possible.
- Comment on Let's Encrypt Ending Support for Expiration Notification Emails 2 months ago:
Agreed.
For us the mitigation is to do a little monitoring with alerts set to start casually at 29 days out and enter critical 13 days out (out from expiry).
- Comment on Apple’s first Mac mini redesign in 14 years looks like a big aluminum Apple TV 5 months ago:
It exists for the outgoing Mac mini. We ran two minis in a 1u, colocated in a DC, for years. They ran Ubuntu server.
Rack mini: www.sonnettech.com/product/
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
For those of us who work in (or love) tech - we (myself included) grossly overestimate how much the general public cares about, or cares to be informed about, this stuff. Heck, even people in tech who know better.
I wish it wasn’t the case but look how long and hard Microsoft moved on Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the early days of the web.
Google and Chrome is just another bit of history repeating.
As an aside, I’ve been using Zen for about a week and it’s been wonderful. Easy transition from Firefox because it largely is Firefox, so anll my containers, extensions, annd settings carried over. Zen’s workspaces provide exactly the promise I’d hoped “tab groups” brought with Safari (but never worked right). I just wish there was an equivalent to the Hush plug-in on Safari (even after a year of full-timing FF, consent-o-matic is quite poor).