teawrecks

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz

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teawrecks ,

Seems like a train that uses both sides of the track fulfills different requirements. A train can only be made to go one way at a time, but can hold more people (increased bandwidth), but these smaller half-cars can be moving people in both directions at the same time (lower latency). Seems quite clever if it works out.

Do we need to create increasingly more children for a stable economy?

So in the whole anti-natalism/pro-natalism conversation (which I'm mostly agnostic/undecided on, currently), my friend who is a pro-natalist, argued that the success/stability of our world economy is dependent on procreating more children each year than the previous year, so that we not only replace the numbers of the people who...

teawrecks ,

Why do they think population is proportional to ability to "pay back" debts? We have technology. If one example of a "debt" is taking care of the aging baby boomer generation, yeah there was a time when that would have been solely the responsibility of their descendents, but we have improved medical technology to keep old people healthier in life, we have conveniences that make getting groceries, doing activities, or socializing easier, and (in some countries) we have modern social safety nets to ensure that even someone without any living relatives can feel safe knowing that they are taken care of.

Another way to phrase my original question: would it be adequate for us to, instead of increasing the population, to develop a series of sufficiently advanced and efficient robots to do whatever task your friend thinks we need more humans in order to do? Just trying to understand the rationale.

teawrecks ,

I mean, just as you've phrased it, if generations only consume more than they produce in an environment of finite resources, the species would only survive a finite amount of time.

teawrecks ,

It depends: if you only listen to music (or view artwork) to feel "good" or enjoy "basking" in the emotions it evokes, then it makes sense to steer clear of artwork you disagree with or makes you uncomfortable.

But if you find value in viewing artwork that illicits a multitude of emotions, evokes introspection, throws you off balance, and forces you to consider concepts you wouldn't otherwise, then taking a moment to peak into the mind of someone you fundamentally disagree with is a great way to do that.

As Werner Herzog put it, "the poet must not avert his eyes".

teawrecks ,

Agreed. Show me a flawless human being, and I'll show you someone who doesn't have anything interesting to share with the world.

teawrecks ,

Historically, music changes to fit the medium that's used to deliver it to the listener. Short form video is no different. I just have to trust that artists will always find ways to say what they need to say. After all, "the enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

teawrecks ,

It's often attributed to Orson Welles, but I don't know if that's accurate. It is paradoxical, yes, but I find it to be a commonly relatable sentiment though across many art forms. It almost seems like the art world's version of "necessity is the mother of invention".

Without limitations, there's little opportunity for art; or to frame it another way, if everything is expected, nothing can be surprising. It's when an artist's work "jumps off the page" that people are in awe, so it's important there's a "page" to "jump off of" as it were.

teawrecks ,

This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.

Why does a state like California that has supermajorities in both houses of the legislature not have a livable wage, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, and other very progressive policies?

I keep being told it's because of the Republicans that we can't have nice things. So what gives in California? We should be overflowing with progressive policies.

teawrecks ,

They're called NIMBYs, "Not In my BackYard". Everyone wants all the social programs, affordable housing, etc, until it affects their property value/tax, or perceived safety. They want all the issues to be solved...somewhere else that doesn't affect them.

There was actually a decent video on this topic a couple of years ago: Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality

teawrecks ,

If I'm going to game stationary, something with more than 10W of horsepower would be nice.

I agree that the steam machine was too early. People hadn't been fully disillusioned by the planned obsolescence of their console libraries yet. Today, in a world of $600+ consoles that are impossible to find within 2 years of their release, hardly any worthwhile exclusives, and Nintendo trying to make you repurchase the old games at full price again, a steam console could potentially sweep the industry.

teawrecks ,

Maybe he's looking to retire and the board wants to make whoever follows him look like a godsend.

teawrecks ,

Honestly, I feel like you're being bizarrely calm about the situation. This is so far beyond unacceptable that one or both of them should be immediately fired for this offense, lest you have an open-and-shut hostile work environment lawsuit on your hands.

I would make sure to keep the text as evidence and let HR know about it. If the guys are somehow not fired, and ever approach you again or try to retaliate in any way, go consult a lawyer.

teawrecks ,

Which is exactly why not having an HR dept is only detrimental for the company, not the employee. If the company doesn't have an HR dept, they should consult a lawyer for a hostile work environment case. The lawyer will probably say he should first at least let his supervisor know, and if nothing is done, or if they retaliate, then they can show them why an HR dept is a good investment.

teawrecks ,

Don't delete it, don't act like this is a minor inconvenience, walk directly to HR or your supervisor and tell them what is going on. This is will-not-work-until-this-matter-is-resolved levels of unacceptable.

teawrecks ,

Convenience fee.

teawrecks ,

And he was that close to mistyping "start sex" and getting "startx".

teawrecks ,

Unfortunately (and incredibly) Gboard is the only keyboard that fits all my needs. I'm on graphene so I feel ok about just blocking its network access. This means voice transcription doesn't work, but otherwise I get swipe, predictions, and other languages.

teawrecks ,

Cool, will do. It's weird to me that open boards need to pull the swype binary. Is it really that hard to replicate?

teawrecks ,

The election of Trump in 2016 was the culmination of many factors from the previous 50 years, all of which lead to a very predictable outcome.

  • Reaganomics loosening regulation on corporations, lowering taxes on the wealthy, and defunding public education
  • Rush Limbaugh and Fox news fostering rural nationalism
  • the advent of the internet which allowed those people to find each other and exchange their poorly informed ideas
  • the perception that politicians were prioritizing "them" over "real Americans"
  • 9/11 and the resulting surveillance state and 24h sensationalist news cycle.

By the time Obama was in office, Republicans and Democrats lived in different realities. Republicans just wanted someone who was willing to stand on stage and spout their version of reality, and Trump is the right combination of insecure and stupid to want to do that. He was an inevitable symptom of a decades long problem.

teawrecks ,

Via the popular vote, yes. But in the US, the popular vote doesn't decide anything. Should it? That's a different question. The point is they won the election legitimately.

We have work to do, but peddling election denial misinformation isn't it.

teawrecks ,

"Thanks for the advice, but this way is working out for me. If <your superior> prefers I do it differently, they'll let me know."

I feel like this is just the right amount of curtness.

teawrecks ,

This is business as usual for Rockstar development. Historically they wait until right after they ship, though.

teawrecks ,

And if we count protein research as nanotech, afaik folding research is having its heyday.

teawrecks ,

Why is that? Does the motherboard effectively just not have enough inputs for all the disks, so that's why you need dedicated hardware that handles some kind of raid configuration, and in the end the motherboard just sees it all as one drive? I never really understood what SCSI was for. How do the drives connect, SATA/PATA/something else?

teawrecks ,

I think if the 2nd LLM has ever seen the actual prompt, then no, you could just jailbreak the 2nd LLM too. But you may be able to create a bot that is really good at spotting jailbreak-type prompts in general, and then prevent it from going through to the primary one. I also assume I'm not the first to come up with this and OpenAI knows exactly how well this fares.

teawrecks ,

Oh, I misread your original comment. I thought you meant looking at the user's input and trying to determine if it was a jailbreak.

Then I think the way around it would be to ask the LLM to encode it some way that the 2nd LLM wouldn't pick up on. Maybe it could rot13 encode it, or you provide a key to XOR with everything. Or since they're usually bad at math, maybe something like pig latin, or that thing where you shuffle the interior letters of each word, but keep the first/last the same? Would have to try it out, but I think you could find a way. Eventually, if the AI is smart enough, it probably just reduces to Diffie-Hellman lol. But then maybe the AI is smart enough to not be fooled by a jailbreak.

teawrecks ,

Yeah, as soon as you feed the user input into the 2nd one, you've created the potential to jailbreak it as well. You could possibly even convince the 2nd one to jailbreak the first one for you, or If it has also seen the instructions to the first one, you just need to jailbreak the first.

This is all so hypothetical, and probabilistic, and hyper-applicable to today's LLMs that I'd just want to try it. But I do think it's possible, given the paper mentioned up at the top of this thread.

teawrecks ,

Any input to the 2nd LLM is a prompt, so if it sees the user input, then it affects the probabilities of the output.

There's no such thing as "training an AI to follow instructions". The output is just a probibalistic function of the input. This is why a jailbreak is always possible, the probability of getting it to output something that was given as input is never 0.

teawrecks ,

Ah, TIL about instruction fine-tuning. Thanks, interesting thread.

Still, as I understand it, if the model has seen an input, then it always has a non-zero chance of reproducing it in the output.

teawrecks ,

Because it's probibalistic and in this example the user's input has been specifically crafted as the best possible jailbreak to get the output we want.

Unless we have actually appended a non-LLM filter at the end to only allow yes/no through, the possibility for it to output something other than yes/no, even though it was explicitly instructed to, is always there. Just like how in the Gab example it was told in many different ways to never repeat the instructions, it still did.

teawrecks ,

Oh I see, you're saying the training set is exclusively with yes/no answers. That's called a classifier, not an LLM. But yeah, you might be able to make a reasonable "does this input and this output create a jailbreak for this set of instructions" classifier.

Edit: found this interesting relevant article

teawrecks ,

Yeah, I suppose you're right. I incorrectly believed that a defining characteristic was the generation of natural language, but that's just one feature it's used for. TIL.

teawrecks ,

Modern Android Do Not Disturb is configurable enough for you to do this. Allow your family contacts through, block the rest.

teawrecks ,

Obviously a Google phone will be at least as bad, but I'm curious how de-googled Android forks like graphene would fare.

teawrecks ,

Depends on whether you consider dark-patterns to be "lying". If a normal user would reasonably think that data isn't being collected based on the settings they chose, then is it dishonest for them to still be collecting data? Is it good enough for them to say "well we technically never said that disabling X disabled all the invasive functionality needed to do X."

teawrecks ,

I've been running graphene for almost a year I think, and I haven't had to make any functional sacrifices. Though I was already not using Google's voice assistant features.

teawrecks ,

I think their point was, all things being equal, a server on discord vs a community on a Lemmy instance doesn't make a difference. In both cases, the people who ultimately own the platform have to decide whether to just delete them or go toe-to-toe with Nintendo in court.

Hosting everything themselves is a different story. Though...is it possible for a federated instance to exist inside the tor network? Maybe that's already a huge thing and it never occurred to me.

teawrecks ,

Yeah, the book felt like I was being beaten over the head with pop culture references...but then you open up VR Chat...

I feel like there was value in the predictions RPO was making, particularly at the time it came out, just before Facebook became Meta and basically made it their playbook. If the world ever gets so shitty that the friction of putting on a VR headset actually becomes preferable to doing literally anything else, I think it's a pretty believable future.

teawrecks ,

I feel like this isn't what you were going for, but chill music is music to have thoughts to.

If you don't want to room to think, put on some Frontierer.

teawrecks ,

For now, because Lemmy is relatively new. There's a reason many bot farms run accounts that are unassuming, "normal" people. Accounts that are established have value. They can then sell those accounts to another group who needs to sew discord. The older Lemmy is, the less useful the new account icon will be.

teawrecks ,

We're looking at 40 days based on 30 minutes of daily reading at 30% brightness, and with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off. Dropping the brightness down to 10% nets an increase to 53 total days of runtime.

So as long as you don't use it, the battery will last a long time!

teawrecks ,

From the airline's point of view, having the next person right there ready to get in their seat is preferable to having everyone come up one at a time. This is why they have boarding groups. You usually see between 3 and 5 boarding groups because it's a reasonable number between 1 and N (N being the total number of passengers). I'm curious how ~10 boarding groups would fare, but presumably there's a reason airlines don't do that.

teawrecks ,

I was initially interested in the idea of Gemini, but when looking for a client, I happened upon this blog post by the creator of one of the clients about why they were abandoning it.

After a lot of thinking, I’ve realized there is one main reason I don’t keep coming back to Gemini: it offers no advantage over how I already use the Web.

In practice, the Web already has all the Gemini content I’m interested in from various people, and then of course everything else. Having everything in one place (whether my web browser or feed reader) makes for a much nicer experience.

Gemini is a reaction to bloated modern websites, but in fact I don’t actually visit that many gross websites like that. When I do, my ad blocker and paywall bypasser usually make them decent again. Otherwise, I spend the majority of my non-work Internet time on lightweight sites like my feed reader and Hacker News, and some time on sites that Gemini can’t emulate: YouTube, Reddit, Discord. The reality is that Gemini just wouldn’t actually improve this experience for me.

These are exactly the reservations I had about the concept, so to have someone so invested in it reach this exact conclusion and leave it made me decide to forego it. I think it's a neat toy, and if it becomes relevant I'll definitely take another look, but I think it's a bit of putting the cart before the horse. I don't want to use a protocol for the sake of using a protocol, I want it to serve a purpose and solve an actual problem I have.

teawrecks ,

I'm not familiar with the Gemini protocol, but how does it differ from just starting up a webserver pointed at a single folder with an index.html? Isn't it still just as possible to make a simple site using http?

Can someone demystify computer Ports for me? Please? Blocking, unblocking, opening, allowing, VPNs and their effect, what ports are and what they do, step by step, when you have to interact with them?

It's the one thing when I'm configuring things that makes me wince because I know it will give me the business, and I know it shouldn't, but it does, every time. I have no real idea what I'm doing, what it is, how it works, so of course I'm blindly following instructions like a monkey at a typewriter....

teawrecks ,

If IP addresses are for finding the specific computer on a network you're wanting to talk to, Ports are for finding the specific application you want to talk to on that computer. So kinda like a phone extension. When an application "opens" a port, they're just telling the OS "hey, if any packets come in on this port, send the data my way, I'll know what to do with it".

A firewall is a special program the OS uses to control access to its ports. It says what programs are allowed to access what ports, effectively controlling the ability for all apps to access the network.

The only other thing to know is that the first 1024 port values are usually heavily controlled by the OS because there are specific protocols that are traditionally used on those specific ports, so you usually don't want just any application claiming one of those ports willy-nilly.

Oh, and you may have had to deal with "port forwarding" on your router. This is because, if some computer outside your network sends a packet to your router targeting a specific port number, the router doesn't know which computer it should go to. So by default, it just ignores it (which is usually the safest thing to do). Port forwarding tells your router, "if any packets come in on this port, send them to the computer at this IP, they'll know what to do with it."

teawrecks ,

Yeah, didn't want to dig deep in the interest of brevity, but I didn't want to say that specific applications use those ports, even though I already said that ports in general are for applications. You can use whatever ftp, ssh, or http server you want as long as they "speak" the expected protocol.

teawrecks ,

Hah, tbh, I didn't realize it was originally formulated to argue against consciousness in the room. When I originally heard it it was presented as a proper thought problem with no "right" answer. So I honestly remembered it as a sort of illustration of the illusion that is consciousness. But it's been a while since I've discussed it with others, mostly I've just thought about it in the context of recent AI advancements.

teawrecks ,

For this part:

think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.

I agree 100% (except for the part where the list of competitors was WAY larger, but that's neither here nor there). Yeah, obviously luck is always a factor for everyone, and opportunities don't present themselves to everyone, but for those who do have the opportunity, the person willing to be the most unethical will have the largest advantage, and thus is most likely to beat out the rest.

I agree that I don't think we can take the discussion further than this. Good talk. I'm just glad I found someone on here that didn't call me a proto-captialist nazi for calling the original post oversimplified.

Have a good one!

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