packet_nerd

Green of course? Anything else would be highly unusual and a normal reader would expect it to be called out.

Do you disagree with my claim that GPT-4 can perform some sort of basic reasoning about puzzles that aren't in it's training data?

Ok, here's a (hopefully) better worded puzzle, again made up by myself right now.

There are 12 frogs. Five are green, 3 red, and 4 yellow. Two donkeys are counting the frogs. One of the donkeys is yellow, the other green. Each donkey is unable to see frogs that are the same color as itself, also each donkey was careless and missed a frog when counting. How many frogs does the green donkey count?

GPT4 answers 6 every time for me.

My point is that GPT is capable of a certain amount of "reasoning" about puzzles that most certainly don't exist in it's training data. Playing with it, it's clear that in this current generation the reasoning ability doesn't go very deep - just change the above puzzle a little to make it even slightly more complicated and it breaks. The amazing thing isn't how good at reasoning it is, but that a computer can reason at all.

ChatGPT 3.5? I'm using 4 and get 11 most times but other numbers occasionally.

It clearly says he didn't see some of them either at all or as unicorns. The correct answer is 11.

Edit: I do see now that "He saw" kind of messes the question up. My intent would have been better expressed with "There were". But again this proves my point! GPT4 is able to (most of the time) correctly work through the poor wording and interpret the question the way I meant it, and I think the way most people would read it.

Here's a question to ChatGPT I just made up:

> A magical frog was counting unicorns. He saw 5 purple unicorns, 2 green unicorns, and 7 pink unicorns. However, he made a mistake and didn't see 2 unicorns: one purple and one green. Also, since he was a magical frog, he didn't see unicorns that were the same color as himself. How many unicorns did he count?

It correctly answers 11 for me.

To me this has demonstrated:

* "Understanding": It understood that "didn't see" implies he didn't count.

* "Knowledge": It knew enough about the world to know that frogs are often green.

* "Reasoning": It was able to correctly reason about how many should be subtracted from the final result.

* "Math: It successfully did some basic additions and subtractions arriving at the correct answer.

Crucially, I made this up right here on the spot, and used a dice for some of the numbers. This question does not exist anywhere in the training corpus!

I think this demonstrates an impressive level of intelligence, for what up until about a year ago I thought a computer would ever be capable of in my lifetime. Now in absolute terms of course current gen ChatGPT is clearly far less good at reasoning and understanding than most people (well, specifically it seems to me that it's knowledge and reasoning are super-humanly broad, but child-level deep).

Can future improvements to this architecture improve the depth up to "AGI", whatever that means? I have no idea. It doesn't automatically seem impossible, but maybe what we see now is already near the limit? I guess only time will tell.

Oh, yes, pairs of words is a good idea. I also have a bilingual dictionary and can generate a prompt for each entry something like "here's a word in <lang_a>, write a dictionary definition for it in <lang_b>: <lang_a_word>: <lang_b_definition".

What would a good fine-tuning dataset for language translation look like?

I want to try fine-tuning to machine translate to and from a fairly niche language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S'gaw_Karen_language). How much text would I need, and what format would be ideal?

I have a number of book length texts, most only in the target language, and a few bilingual or multilingual. For the bilingual and multilingual texts, I can script out probably several thousand pairs of "translate the following text from <source_lang> to <target_lang>: <source_lang_text> <target_lang_text>". Do I need to vary the prompt and format, or can I expect the LLM to generalize to different translation requests? Is there value in repeating the material in different lengths? One set of sentence lengths, another paragraph, and another page or chapter length? Also what should be done with the monolingual texts, just ignore them?

People who practice Breatharianism claim to live without food and get sustenance from various mystical sources, including sunshine (they either don't live very long or else are frauds and do secretly eat).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWRniMqhr00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

To me it seems uncalled for to accuse go_elmo of lying about knowing some of these people.

This is something I've tried to figure out this week.

I tried Youtube Kids because I wanted the content to be pre-approve only, I liked the toddler friendly controls, and the app can go in single app mode on the iPad. It's subscription, which is fine, but the main problem is they won't let me approve the content I want. I can see some great kids stories and learning videos in our language on regular Youtube, but can't seem to find a way to get them into the Youtube kids app. (And I certainly am not going to turn her loose on regular Youtube.)

There don't seem to be any other apps that do what I want so I ended up setting up a Plex media server and use yt-dlp to download the videos for her. This works pretty well, but is a lot more work. And the app is not great.

The attacker conducted a series of sophisticated voice phishing attacks under the guise of various trusted organizations attempting to convince the victim to accept multi-factor authentication (MFA) push notifications initiated by the attacker.

This is why we need webauthn everywhere! Push notifications and friends are all susceptible to this kind of attack, webauthn is not.

I haven't really talked to anyone who's contested the fact that thousands of Russian soldiers and Russian speaking Ukrainian civilians have been killed.

Yes, of course it's likely there are some who oppose the war but are uneasy about expressing that to a stranger. I was just surprised to get no support at all.

I've been text messaging with random Russians a bunch over the last couple weeks and have had conversations with ~100 people, some of them quite extensive. Not once has anyone really condemned the war. A few are cynical about their government, people, and the rest of the world, and sad that this has to happen. But the vast majority weren't even that. Just straight up nationalist, repeatedly saying that they had to do something or they would be destroyed by the west. And insisting that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Absolutely no-one denied the facts as far as the toll on human life or the destruction of Ukraine, and not a single person thought its a "special operation" instead of a war. I heard a lot of what seems to me to be extreme paranoia about NATO, America, and Nazis just waiting for an opportunity to invade and destroy them.

The whole experience has been kind of shocking to me. I went into this believing that Russians where like innocent captives of evil politicians and oligarchs and had no idea what was going on. But based on the conversations I've had, that is not the case at all. They know exactly what is going on as far as the cost in human lives, and believe it's necessary to ensure their own survival.

I had a good laugh when I saw my grandma using her iPad calculator app to do her finances. The app was displaying an an ad, she didn't want to see it and stuck a sticker over that part of the screen. :-)

Is my grandma's sticker going to be illegal in this forced advertising future? If not, where in the stack between the webpage and your eyes will it start to be legal to block? What about blocking in the graphics stack in the OS? The display? A sticker in front of the display? A smart film in front of the display? Smart glasses? Will it be illegal to avert your eyes from advertisements, à la Black Mirror?

The moon doesn't visibly have bulk or mass like a ball, house, or mountain does. And I was referring to earth as the entire world. Edit: But the landscape, fields, meadows, districts, states, countries, and continents are all still flat.

Edit 2: Now that I think about it, I should have used "spherical" to describe that category rather than "round."

Yes, sort of, but a lot more than counting. I think Thai has counting words too, but I think they are not as central to the grammar or as flexible as Karen classifiers.

Sort of like you can say "a sheet of paper" or "5 sheets of paper" in English to count papers, but imagine you could also say "typing on a sheet", or "your sheet is full of typos", or "could you hand me a sheet", where "sheet" is a broad category and that you mean a sheet of paper comes from the context in which the sentence is spoken.

Edit: Another interesting use for them is disambiguation. Super useful if, like me, you're just learning and don't always nail the tones or pronunciation. For example, I might throw in the animal classifier in "ga cha ta doo" just to make sure no-one misunderstands my poor pronunciation of "elephant" as "mountain". That's a crude example, but native speakers benefit from the disambiguation too in colloquial speech.

The Sgaw Karen language from Thailand and Burma has a system of what I've always called classifiers, but reading this, it sounds like they might be properly called genders too?

Everything is classified into one of a bunch of classifiers, where a bunch might be a few dozen? Maybe hundreds, I'm not sure.

Some really common ones:

Rational beings like people, God, angles, etc. = "gha" (but not spirits, demons, ghosts, etc.; they are animals)

Flat things like the earth, plates, leaves, fields, the sky, etc. = "bae" (but modern Karens sometimes use "round" for the earth and moon instead)

Round things like balls, houses, rocks, a person or animals head, eyes, etc. = "pler"

Long skinny things like a stick, snake, road, etc = "bo"

Most kinds of animals = "doo" (but fish and birds are flat, and insects are round)

These words show up all over the place in basic grammar. Like "5 cows" would be "cows 5 doo". Sometimes they stand in for the actual name of what you're talking about, for example you might say "this cow" as "ta doo ee" and drop the word for cow entirely.

Ha! Around that age (actually probably a little older) I begged and pleaded with my mom to get saltpeter and sulfur to make firecrackers and rockets. Eventually she relented and got it for me, but with the stipulation I had to wear a welding helmet, heavy coat, and heavy rubber gloves while working with it, and that only under supervision... Anyway, the actual gunpowder I managed to make didn't really work, just kind of fizzled out. I never managed to get a firecracker to actually make any noise. It sure was a lot of fun though. :-)

Maybe so.. but technology wise I don't think there's anything here that doesn't exist yet or that is even exceptionally advanced. It's just a matter of putting it all together and writing the code.

I want an appliance that combines the functions of refrigerator, pantry, stove, oven, dishwasher, and that has manipulators inside capable of picking the ingredients, cleaning, peeling, chopping, and otherwise preparing them, cooking the entire meal, cleaning up, and spiting out the meal on serving dishes. :-)

It should be able to cook good tasting homemade meals from real ingredients (even fresh from the garden if you have a garden), not just plastic wrapped junk food. You load food items through hopper or door in one side, then a manipulator arm picks them up, reads or otherwise identifies what they are, and stores them in the inbuilt pantry or refrigerator.

It should keep an inventory of the refrigerator and panty and be able to suggest recipes that use what you have on hand while optimizing for cost, nutrition, and minimizing wasted food from spoilage. It should be able to produce shopping lists for you based on foods you use frequently or recipes you want to cook in the future. (It could even auto order foods and have them delivered, although I like the idea of just getting a shopping list and buying it myself better.)

It should be able to help you avoid wasting leftover foods by reaccepting leftovers, storing them, displaying the leftovers as a suggestion for the next meals so you don't forget, and know the optimal way to reheat or re-prepare them.

It should be controlled through an app on your phone, over the local network, and definitely not dependent on some cloud service. You should be able to still get a nice hot supper if the Internet goes down.

The app should show you a list of recipes that can be made with the ingredients on hand, you pick one or a couple, it tells you how long it's going to take to prepare. You tap go, and 45min later you have a perfect homecooked supper!

I set this up for my family and I a few months ago and we set all our browsers and devices to use it as the default search engine. We've been really happy with it.

I also set up a small script on a cron job that queries random search strings every few minutes and opens the first few hits in selenium. My theory is that if I can't completely stop them from tracking us, I can at least dilute their data with bogus searches.

We haven't had any issues from Google.

I.e. when you are being selected for random questioning entering US as a non-US citizen, you'd benefit from steganography-like approach: you give a password, and relatively bland, non-personal stuff shows up, giving appearance of full access to a system.

Is there a practical way to implement this today with Linux? I know VeraCrypt supports hidden operating systems, but I think only Windows?

Let companies decide what is ok on their own platforms, but don't let them get so big, and break them up now that they have become so big.

Unfortunately they will have to add Myanmar to the 2021 report. The junta has sentenced protesters/resistance to death.

https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-regime-hands-me...

I believe in practice the Tatmada keeps a tight grip on satellite Internet, and don't allow services that they don't control.

Remember, this is the country where one of the charges they brought against Aung San Su Kyi during the Feb coup was importing analog two-way radios. And more broadly, people are regularly arrested and imprisoned or sometimes executed for mere possession of radio equipment.

Yes

The amateur radio rules prohibit music (except a weirdly specific exception for NASA). Also, HF tends to be really noisy and low bandwidth, not sure it'd be very pleasant for music.

Edit: And another problem that's probably even more important for this use case, most common ham radio equipment is simplex (only one person can transmit at a time). In the VHF/UHF range you might be able to engineer a high bandwidth duplex (or TDM) system, but then your range would be limited to a few miles.

I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-)

[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.

If it's a government office or some service that only serves people from one country, then sure whatever, be a hard-ass if that's what you want to do.

The problem is it's every SaaS online service in the world many of which happily do business in Myanmar. You can't just tell an entire country with its own unique culture and 50 million citizens "FU, you're wrong", and when you do, it's you that's wrong not them! Everyone from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, to federated platforms like Matrix or Mastadon, to developer tools, to every forum on the Internet [1] requires a first and last name! These platforms have literally millions of users or customers around the world - and at least one entire country - that don't fit the <first> <last> mold and I find it highly disrespectful to force it on them like this.

[1] My info might be out of date on some of these as I've been out of the country and not paid much attention for a few years. I would hope that by now at least some of these big multinational companies would get it right. However, suffice it to say, the vast majority of SaaS platforms today are disrespectful to people with one name.