And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.

Say all you want about hallucinations, but AI will never be able to outperform humans at bullshitting, so sales and marketing is safe.

Wait, isn’t it the other way around? You should arrive in NY earlier than you left London, since NY is 5 hours behind London. So if you leave at 8:30 and arrive 1.5 hours later, it should only be 5AM when you arrive.

You might need a third breakfast before your elevenses in that case.

Interesting read, thanks! I’ll finish it later, but already this bit is quite interesting:

Without access to gender, the ML algorithm over-predicts women to default compared to their true default rate, while the rate for men is accurate. Adding gender to the ML algorithm corrects for this and the gap in prediction accuracy for men and women who default diminishes.

We find that the MTEs are biased, signif-icantly favoring White-associated names in 85.1% of casesand female-associated names in only 11.1% of case

If you’re planning to use LLMs for anything along these lines, you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step. Honestly, humans should do the same, but it’s impractical. This is, ironically, something LLMs are very well suited for.

Of course, that doesn’t mean off-the-shelf tools are actually doing that, and there are other potential issues as well, such as biases around cities, schools, or any non-personal info on a resume that might correlate with race/gender/etc.

I think there’s great potential for LLMs to reduce bias compared to humans, but half-assed implementations are currently the norm, so be careful.

After all these years, I’m still a little confused about what Forbes is. It used to be a legitimate, even respected magazine. Now it’s a blog site full of self-important randos who escaped from their cages on LinkedIn.

There’s some sort of approval process, but it seems like its primary purpose is to inflate egos.

It was an SEO hellhole from the start, so this isn’t surprising.

Do Forbes next!

I think there are two problems that make this hard to answer:

1. Not all sentences that can be parsed grammatically can also be parsed logically.

2. Human-language sentences do not contain all the information needed to evaluate them.

It is impossible to fully separate context from human language in general. The sentence “it is cold” is perfectly valid, and logically coherent, but in order to evaluate it you’d need to draw external information from the context. What is “it”? Maybe we can assume “it” refers to the weather, as that is common usage, but that information does not come from the sentence itself. And since the context here is on the Internet, where there is no understanding of location, we can’t really evaluate it that way.

It’s hot somewhere, and it’s cold somewhere. Does that mean the statement “it is cold” is both true and false, or does that mean there is insufficient information to evaluate it in the first place? I think this is largely a matter of convention. I have no doubt that you could construct a coherent system that would classify such statements as being in a superposition of truth and falsehood. Whether that would be useful is another matter. You might also need a probabilistic model instead of a simple three-state evaluation of true/false/both. I mean, if we’re talking about human language, we’re talking about things that are at least a little subjective.

So I don’t think the question can be evaluated properly without defining a more restrictive category of “sentences”. It seems to me like the question uses “sentence” to mean “logical statements”, but without a clearer definition I don’t know how to approach that. Sentences are not the same as logical statements. If they were, we wouldn’t need programming languages :)

Apologies for the half-baked ideas. I think it would take a lifetime to fully bake this.

However, it is still comparatively easy for a determined individual to remove a watermark and make AI-generated text look as if it was written by a person.

And that’s assuming people are using a model specifically designed with watermarking in the first place. In practice, this will only affect the absolute dumbest adversaries. It won’t apply at all to open source or custom-built tools. Any additional step in a workflow is going to wash this right out either way.

My fear is that regulators will try to ban open models because the can’t possibly control them. That wouldn’t actually work, of course, but it might sound good enough for an election campaign, and I’m sure Microsoft and Google would dump a pile of cash on their doorstep for it.

I also sometimes use the mbasic.facebook.com site from a private Firefox tab on my iPhone, but FB has just started telling me I need to use Chrome

WTF.

But really, using a Chromium-based or Safari-based browser in private/incognito mode will not be much different as far as tracking goes.

You might also be able to install a user-agent switcher extension in Firefox. I thiiiiiink Firefox supports extensions on iOS now, right? If not, you can try an alternative browser like Duckduckgo or Orion.

simply logging out or using an alt account

It is increasingly difficult to use X without an account. Not sure what the signup process is like nowadays. IIRC it used to require phone number verification in the Twitter days, but perhaps Musk relaxed the requirements in order to better pad the usage stats with spambots?

Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.

If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It’s hardly fair to compare AMD’s top-end to Nvidia’s top-end when Nvidia’s is over twice the price in the real world.

If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don’t absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can’t fit your whole model in VRAM. I’d take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.

You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you’d take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it’d still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that’s probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.

Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity

I’ll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.

For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. https://huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbytes/main/en/installation#multi-backend

Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.

You can root Graphene if you want to, right?

IIRC, Android has always had native support for keyboards and mice. I remember connecting a bluetooth mouse to my old Nexus 4 running…Android 4, maybe 5? It worked out of the box. Saved my butt when the touch screen broke. :)

Can’t say I’ve tried this in recent years but I think it still works, yeah?

I’ve never tried it myself, but I think you can run full Linux VMs on Pixel phones already. A quick search brings up https://www.xda-developers.com/nestbox-hands-on/

Anyone have experience with this or similar options? Personally I’ve never used anything more advanced than Termux (which is lean and super cool, but not a full-blown VM).

Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they’re probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I’m not really confident that Dropbox’s free tier will remain viable for long, either.

Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don’t remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve been using Android for over 10 years and I don’t think there’s a single app I used back then that would still work.

Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it’s open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It’s very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

At this point, I don’t even look at Google Play. It’s F-Droid or bust.

Yeah. It will almost certainly work, but you might not get the same quality as you get on Android. Check the specs of your specific model of earbuds to see which codecs they support. LDAC should work on Debian, but as far as I know Huawei’s proprietary L2HC codec does not work on Linux.

I’m not 100% sure about this since I’ve never used Huawei earbuds myself.

I only have a vague understanding of what iptv is but I guess it’s time to learn. This looks cool.