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frozenwind

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Tell me frozen wind, where have you been, where have you walked?

Just your curious noematic entity.

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Resetting Xbox 16 days ago

The Xbox series S is very convenient for me: it fits neatly in the TV stand which is quite slim.

I'm wondering: are there any simulator games in which you have to take care of the stability of a nation-wide power grid? This whole situation has me interested in logistics of power distribution now.

Zamba2-7B 2 years ago

That probably means it was trained on synthetic data, right?

As I sat down at my desk to start the work day and finish a dreaded task, my mind of course immediately drifted away and felt the urge to check some news on reddit or HW. I opened HW and this is the first title.

"It can be done".

Thanks for the motivation!

P.S. Of course, I also read the article :).

I am disappointed your comment did not have more responses because I'm very interested in deconstructing this argument I've heard over and over again. ("it just predicts the next words in the sentence"). While explanations of how GPT-style LLMs work involve a layering of structures which encode at the first levels some understanding of syntax, grammar etc. and then as the more levels of transformers are added, eventually some contextual and logical meanings are encoded. I really want to see a developed conversation about this.

What are we humans even doing when zooming out? We're processing the current inputs to determine what best to do in the present, nearest future or even far future. Sometimes, in a more relaxed space (say a "brainstorming" meeting), we relax our prediction capabilities to the point our ideas come from a hallucination realm if no boundaries are imposed. LLMs mimic these things in the spoken language space quite well.

Omegle 2009-2023 3 years ago

2 minutes is quite fast, congrats.

I inferred this information by seeing the number of comments on HN (a relevant parameter in estimating the importance of an event imo), the time period 2009-2023 and then immediately after clicking seeing a tombstone. This took me under 2-3 seconds.

The rest of the info I wasn't going time to spend on was the motives etc. It's not the first postmortem I see, I was just curious to why by skipping all of the boilerplate. Omegle is not important to me, but I know it was quite a phenomenon .

My point was that GPT failed blatantly at inferring this same easy task.

Omegle 2009-2023 3 years ago

I didn't want to spend time reading that wall of text, so I wanted a summarized version of it. Asked ChatGPT (4) to do it for me and it told me that Omegle is not going to close. My intuition told me otherwise, so the irony is that I spent more time than needed on this.

https://sharegpt.com/c/yhV8Hjh

Is this a sign of falling GPT quality? I think this was extremely easy to infer.

Sorry but I have to ask. In what kinds of contexts did you become experienced? Is LSD in at least a gray area anywhere on earth? The country I come from that is an illegal drug, but it being a neuroplasticity enhancer is what attracted my attention. I've also read about microdosing which can enhance focus or creativity. Can it be prescribed for treating depression or other mental deficits or the approvals are not at that stage yet?

I also like the rephrased paragraph. There's a certain flow to it, I never learned or improved my skill in that area.

The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world.

You've underlined the major risk these LLMs are for humanity. For a brief time in the history of human race, after information was democratized, most of us (at least educated people) had to use our own critical faculties to understand the world we live in. Now, that capacity will be outsourced to custom LLMs, most of them derived from other pre-trained with some ideological biases built-in. The informational Dark Ages of the technological era.

If they provide the tools to filter through the garbage, it'll probably be standardized in some way as an interface to the web. So just as HTML and its satellite technologies limit and standardize the representational aspect of information on the web, I think this AI-interface will severely limit the knowledge/wisdom aspect you can derive from information on the web. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, I hope you can understand what I'm saying.

I am aware of that. I like to think that millenials/gen-z at least knew a little how to sift through the fake information, and the gullible people were the elders. But now with such obscene amounts of fake info at every corner, I think the internet and all source of information (even printed! - because printed at least would require significant effort) will loose credibility. Science will be the last bastion, and even that can easily be influenced by money.

For now, this is just funny, I laughed. But with the advent of all these new open-source LLMs, it will get worse. If you thought people were gullible for falling for fake comments from bots, just wait for the near future. Post-factual/Post-Truth era truly begins. The internet that used to be a source of information is no more, only islands of truth will remain (like, hopefully, Wikipedia, but even that is questionable). The rest will be a cesspool of meaningless information. Just as sailors of the sea are experts at navigating the waters, so we'll have to learn to surf the web once again.

The funniest thing for me is how stupidly lazy are these jerks that employ GPT for such things. The printed book example really made me lol.

The simplest thing they could've done is use a service like quillbot to rephrase, just as I used here to rephrase my comment:

-----------------------

I chuckled. For now, this is just hilarious. However, it will grow worse when more new open-source LLMs emerge. Just wait till the near future if you thought people were naive enough to believe counterfeit comments from bots. The post-factual/post-truth age has arrived. Only isolated truths will remain when the internet ceases to be a reliable source of knowledge (like, ideally, Wikipedia, but even that is debatable). The remaining material will be an ocean of useless data. We'll have to relearn how to navigate the web, just as seafarers are specialists at navigating the seas.

The most amusing thing to me is how exceptionally sloppy these idiots are that use GPT for such things.

Me: who are you?

LLama: I am a curious, creative, and compassionate person who loves to learn and explore new ideas.

Me: answer that again

LLama: Again?

Me: yes, why not?

LLama: Why not?

Me: why are you parroting me?

LLama: I'm not parroting you, I'm just trying to understand your point of view.

Me: then just answer that again

LLama: Then just answer that again.

Me: Uhm, you are parroting me. Is this some kind of joke you're playing?

LLama: No, it's not a joke. I'm just repeating what you said.

Me: Why?

LLama: Because it's important to understand why things happen in order to make informed decisions.

Me: What the hell, I just want you to answer my question again. That's all. Can you please do that?

LLama: Yes, I can answer your question again.

Me: Do it.

Llama: Done.

Me: I don't see the answer.

LLama: I don't see the answer.

Me: Can you remember what question I asked you to answer?

LLama: Yes.

Me: What was it?

LLama: It was a bird.

This is the first time I had a good laugh while interacting with LLMs.

From what I understood they used 175 seed tasks as an example for da-vinci which then generated the 52K instructions used to fine-tune LLama.

What I don't understand is how did they achieve giving this context to GPT, since afaik the context window is just 2048 tokens? It seems that it's not fine-tuning, but few-shot.

But that skill you're describing here is equally trainable and it probably will be in the near future, such that a specialized Artist AI will immediately guess what you're after, and if not, present you several iterations. That Artist AI, in turn, will become a subset of a Market AI which will have access to a lot of data about what makes people tick, testing and deploying market strategies accordingly. That Market AI, in turn, will be a subset of... you know where I'm going. All of this felt like Sci-Fi a while ago, but now you can almost taste it.

Nothing in the information space will be left untouched by the ML/AI revolution. I was a bit skeptical last years, but seeing this space evolve in the last 2-3 years left no question about it.

The only thing stopping this a Butlerian Jihad, probably. Actually, it probably can't be stopped.

Humanity as a whole seriously needs to start considering alternate incomes and ways to support people existing. We need to shift our perspective from the human individual as a value-producing asset to a right-to-exist-and-experiment-reality entity.

All of this is really awesome, but for me it's like admiring the exquisite beauty and calm of the blue sky in the center of a hurricane.

I'm still trying to adjust: am I too fatalistic or people are clearly ignoring of the tectonic shift that's happening?

Humans Need Play 3 years ago

I remember having to write an essay in high school about playing & the human being. Then I assumed that playing is a privilege of the kids and young adults. Now, later in life, I've changed jobs not only for a better pay, but also because I started feeling that everybody was becoming too serious at my last workplace. Either that or I've lost my perspective, and to be honest I've always felt that I'm a bit too serious and that was alarming to me - I give too little space for playing and too much space to passive entertainment.

I've felt the vicious cycle the article tells too: not playing enough made me dull, depressed and that in turn makes you loose the appetite for playing.

It was a good reminder, thanks.

It'll get interesting once AI algos proliferate to other knowledge domains such as physics and engineering and start hallucinating solutions, as does GPT-3 now. Some of those solutions, adjusted and fine tuned, will have real world applications. How will patents be relevant then?

I'm highly suspicious of the fact that other life forms in the universe necessarily resemble our own, although I tend to think about some things that seem to be universal like the the laws of physics and organic matter. I'm not yet very convinced that the whole organic machinery revolving around RNA/DNA is universal, although I have a very deep feeling it is... In any case, "The Caloris Network" is a reference example for me when attempting to think about how different alien lifeforms might be.

Is intelligence necessarily organic matter based? Maybe not. Maybe somewhere in the universe a spontaneous self-replicating turing machine appeared. Maybe there is life on the event horizon of a black hole, or maybe a hot type of intelligence lives inside a star.

I think we can make all kinds of wild assumptions.

My basic audio editing needs were always met by Audacity, but in the 2000s I used to use Goldwave for a specific need: ambient sounds that need to be played in a loop in Half-Life. I can't remember how it's done anymore, but you had to set 2 markers (or at least one), usually at the start and at the end of the sound if it's smoothly loopable. These markers are baked in the resulting 8bit .wav file. Goldwave was the only program I knew that did that.

I have the same thoughts. Though after seeing The Matrix recently and the recent news about Facebook's Meta (or Meta's Facebook?), I begin to see what these NFTs will be used for. Simulacra and Simulation. I don't think a rational mind could ever justify them from an efficiency standpoint. Just like any rational mind couldn't justify a glorified linked-list. But we're not rational creatures.

Let's say I buy a collectible silver coin which is a limited edition emitted by the government or some entity. This has both value in that it's rare, and that it's made of silver and so can appreciate in value over time.

Would it be correct to think of NFTs in the same way, but adding a higher risk associated to it? (the risk of the copy leaking in the public and thus cancelling any benefit of the supposed ownership this NFT blockchain would grant - excluding the possibility of an NFT blockchain becoming some kind of worldwide enforced standard way of verifying ownership...but even then...)

I came to the comment section to better understand what's the opinion on NFTs too :)). I could see some edge-case uses with these NFTs, but I feel a lot of its usefulness is exaggerated. In my opinion, anything that's digital can't have its access enforced once out in the public. Only laws can restrict an agent (humans, usually) from gaining contact with the digital asset if it's public (or out in the public by any means, be it a copy on the internet or a CD, HDD, card etc.). I keep thinking my opinion is wrong and there's something magic about these NFTs that I didn't understand.

This reminds me of a book I got as a gift, "Mind Map Mastery". I think the top review on Amazon for that book pretty much summarizes my feelings too :)). Tl;dr mind mapping is a nice technique to organize information but it's just that: a technique, one out of many. And although I agree that a book can be justified to explain and give examples of just one technique, you somehow get a feeling that these things are more about the author boasting about something they "created". I have no idea if there is a similar legal situation concerning "mind mapping", but I guess claiming that the pomodoro technique is something so special falls in the same category. I wonder if the author would just change the words to "the tomato technique", would he be pursued legally for that too?

This thread is interesting, I'll be looking for other suggestions in the comments. I'm currently using the free option of remote.it to connect to a raspberry pi behind a router, though I always have to go through the step of obtaining the connection url and random port before using something like putty.