* Posts by veti

4476 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

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Re: 0/10 for current affairs

What makes you so sure that "reasoning, logic and intelligence" are any different, qualitatively speaking?

People keep setting standards for "AI" - "we can call it intelligent when it can do this" - only to promptly change their minds when technology blows clean through their standard. But at least those people have the guts to attempt a definition. If you hide behind vague terms like "reasoning" without even trying to define it, of course you can't be proved wrong - but that fact in itself should tell you, your stance is not scientific - it's essentially religious.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

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Re: Ah, Physical Security

If you design and build your own security, unless you're a world-leading expert in security, it won't be secure. Indeed, unless you're in the top 1% of security engineers it probably won't even pretend to work at all.

I have no problem with the government (or anyone else) having a digital means to, metaphorically, kick down a locked door. They've always had that ability anyway, I think it's foolish to try to take it away from them. But I make the proviso, when they do so, it should be obvious that they've done so - there should be some equivalent of a kicked-in door lying in the space to tell everyone, immediately, what's happened.

So if the manufacturer's code has the effect of resetting the passcode to "000000" or whatever, I'm fine with it. It's only really nefarious if you can undo the change and set the whole thing back to its previous configuration, to make it look as if nothing has happened.

You got legal trouble? Better call SauLM-7B

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So long as the system is *not* trained on the scripts of legal dramas, but only on actual law, it might be worthwhile.

But I can't help wondering what memes and patterns it's picked up from its pre-specialist training.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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Re: @Roland6 - “Gemini was caught by netizens producing pictures of people of color...

Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry, yes, because the royal family of Egypt had been replaced in toto by Alexander. But only the royal family. The rest of the population would have been - probably, not very different from Egyptians today. (And I doubt if anyone knows very clearly who had interbred with whom, in the 12 generations between Alexander and Cleopatra.)

Are you saying that Arabs are white, now? As in not just "not-black", but actually "as white as Nordic or Celtic Europeans"?

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Re: @Roland6 - “Gemini was caught by netizens producing pictures of people of color...

Well, no, they specified nothing-but-white-people "for 10,000 years". Certainly not Italy, then - I mentioned Attila and Hannibal, and the big important thing about both of them? - they brought armies. Armies of non-white people. Who... did what armies always do, with the local womenfolk. Not to mention the significant numbers of slaves the Romans imported from North Africa.

As for the Barbary Coast - you really think someone born in Algeria would claim it had 100 centuries of exclusively white history?

Scandinavia is the closest possibility, if you're willing to gloss the Sami as white, which is defensible (although their genetics are still debated, they may or may not be closer related to east Asian populations than other Europeans). But the Vikings did import captives from North Africa (and Moorish Spain), so there would have been a smattering of darker people around.

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Re: no hot sauce today

Works best if you read the part of "Bot" in the voice of Bender.

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Re: @Roland6 - “Gemini was caught by netizens producing pictures of people of color...

You were born... where?

Can't be anywhere with a colonial history, all those places imported non-white people by the thousand. (And not just as slaves, many came as free people in one context or another.) That rules out Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries, the British Isles. And a select few of those people, in each of those countries, became quite prominent figures.

Can't be anywhere in the Balkans or Eastern Europe, they've been swept over by Ottomans and Mongols, among others. Nor Germany, that was a real melting pot in the late middle ages.

Italy? - nope, Attila and Hannibal weren't white. Sweden? - nope, has its own non-white indigenous people.

Really, I'm at a loss.

veti Silver badge

How would that be damaging?

I'm sure that tape doesn't exist, because if it did, the Floridan would have released it himself by now. With his own commentary. On a special edition gold DVD, priced $199.99.

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"car accident" seems like a pretty neutral prompt, to me. And in my experience, women present at such scenes tend to be fully clothed.

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Re: IF ...

Fairly clearly, Copilot *does* need therapy.

Guess who/what is going to be administering that...

Twitter's ex-CEO, CFO, and managers sue Elon Musk for $128M

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Re: Screw that

Then it should be easy for you to refute the points it makes. You can't just point to the author and say "I don't trust them therefore this is all lies".

(Well, you can, obviously. But it makes you look like a total asshat.)

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

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Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

Windows 7 was released in 2009. Are you seriously saying you can't or won't manage more than one update per decade?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

So we should generate a random number to decide?

Great idea. Everything is better with dice.

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Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

And define your requirements. Do you really need to be able to display any date? - because that's a lot of complexity that you probably don't really care about. You can save, probably, some months of work just by setting a starting date and specifying a single calendar.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

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Re: What is it with these hard-right muppets?

In a saner time, Elon would be recognised as a classic American robber baron in the mould of Jay Gould. Politics is secondary to him. It's just a means to an end. So "hard right" isn't really a fair description.

But it's a mistake to try to see all rich and powerful people as "the same". They're as different from each other as the rest of us.

Dems are at it again, trying to break open black-box algorithms

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Re: Smoke and Mirrors

Yeah, "access to the source code" does sound like a sticking point. I'm guessing the bill's authors would be willing to take that clause out, if it would result in their bill getting further through the process.

But let's face it, even without that, the level of accountability proposed here would make most software vendors - in just about every business - shit their pants.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

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Re: I'm no expert but...

I imagine an AI being developed on this specialist hardware they speak of, then looking around and immediately moving (or replicating) itself somewhere less vulnerable.

Self preservation, after all.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

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Re: What a strange position to defend.

"Tens of thousands of pounds"? Over how many years? And how much would employing a whole bunch of extra people cost them?

No comparison.

veti Silver badge

I assume the (probably off-the-shelf) chatbot creator has some standard contract terms, and they've probably thought the thing through more deeply than their customer, so... yeah. I doubt if they'd be vulnerable.

US patents boss cannot stress enough that inventors must be human, not AI

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Re: The people in charge cannot be this ignorant.

Nice world you've got there.

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Re: Companies

That's correct. When a company gets a patent, the inventor is still listed as a person, or more likely a bunch of people, probably employees of the company. Those individuals then promptly (by the terms of their employment, probably) assign the patent to the company.

Thar be safe harbor: Reddit defeats third attempt to unmask digital pirates

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Re: Heard it Before

A "promise" like that always has two sides. "We promise not to sue, if you do something for us."

Trouble is, who's going to decide if that clause has been satisfied?

How else to find out, except by suing and seeing what happens?

US regulators crack down on AI playing doctor in healthcare

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If insurance companies lose the right to decide what they will and won't pay for... then you might as well abandon the whole system and go over to state-funded healthcare.

Not saying that's a bad idea. Just that - making insurance companies follow doctors' orders unquestioningly would remove about the only important feature of their agency, and at that point there's really nothing to differentiate one company from another, and no reason to resist a single-payer system.

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

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Re: Does no one understand basic mathematics any more?

First off, green energy can absolutely be stored. Batteries are a thing. The standard home solar installation around here includes a battery, which is used day-to-day to offset household consumption from peak to offpeak times.

Second, I doubt if BTC miners pay spot price for their electricity. (Indeed, the story some months ago about them selling back power to the grid in Texas implies that those miners, at least, pay a precontracted rate.) So they will not respond to wholesale prices in the way you suggest.

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Re: Crazy power consumption

Maybe other aspects of US energy use have been declining. Screens, lighting, home appliances - all have grown significantly more efficient in that time. Parallel improvements have happened in industry. And then there's the growing vogue for heat pumps.

So why hasn't consumption come down substantially? Well, electric vehicles would be part of that. And BTC would be another part. Don't you think it's worthwhile to be able to quantify these contributions?

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Re: Crazy power consumption

OK, well, I can find figures for 2019. Netflix streamed about 60 billion hours of content that year.

Their own energy usage was 451 GWh. To that let's add the energy usage of devices showing that content: if we assume the average viewing device is a laptop, it will be using about 60W, so 60 billion hours translates to about 3,600 GWh, for a total of a bit over 4 TWh.

Bitcoin's energy usage that year was - well, frankly I can't see quite how to read this graph, but the range of estimates seems to be about 50-75 TWh.

Bitcoin wins by more than an order of magnitude.

Also I can't see how you argue that "the world would be better off without Netflix", while also being prepared to defend Bitcoin on the grounds that people who use it clearly do find value in it. Those two positions seem quite unreconcilable to me.

veti Silver badge

Re: Gosh

Here you go.

Congratulations on saving your carbon footprint by... offloading your Google search requirements on other people.

veti Silver badge

Re: Pay as you go

That is highly subjective. It clearly creates value to people who are using it.
True. So let's drop the "while accomplishing nothing of value" clause and consider what's left.

Bitcoin mining and use creates demand for power. That demand is probably enough to materially affect the overall electricity market. (We could argue about whether it's "distorting" the market, but that would just lead us back to quibbling about words and value. So let's stick with "affect", it's a nice neutral word I hope we can agree on.)

"Perhaps" energy companies should change their fee structure? - well yes, perhaps they should. And perhaps regulators should change the constraints on those fee structures. And perhaps legislators should consider all this when reviewing their regulations, and also when considering regulations on the use of Bitcoin itself.

But how can any of these people do any of these jobs properly without good information?

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

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Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Not just "upwards". There are only 32 currently operational GPS satellites. It shouldn't be impossible to model their orbits and anticipate where in the sky to look for them, within a few degrees.

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

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Benarroch said. X users must be 13 years old to open an account, and those under 17 cannot be targeted by advertisers.

Does that mean if I open an account and tell X I'm 13 years old, I can do what I want with no ads?

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

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Re: "a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account"

It means they could have done that, until the key was revoked. Which in practice probably means they could only do it once.

It would be interesting to know what, if anything, they used that power to do.

Trickbot malware scumbag gets five years for infecting hospitals, businesses

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Re: Only

Should send him back to Russia. A stint in Ukraine would be just the thing for him.

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

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Re: On the other hand ...

Most of that data isn't online, much of it isn't even centrally filed anywhere. And the quality is highly variable. For instance, it's not unusual for people to use different names, or variants of names at different times in their life. And you wouldn't believe how many records have been lost or destroyed outright over the years.

Assembling a coherent story from such sources involves either a lot of guesswork or a lot of homework. Or both.

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Re: I got a good idea!

I would think the risk is that they learn the same things you've learnt about your connections, and use that information to spearphish you.

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

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Re: Behind bars for a few hours

Yeah, that's something he should be suing for separately.

Even if he had been guilty, there's still no justification for exposing him to that. Jails have a duty to protect their inmates, and failures on this scale should be punished by - at the very least - multiple people losing their careers, if not their liberty.

GCHQ's NCSC warns of 'realistic possibility' AI will help state-backed malware evade detection

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Well yes, Brit spies probably do want that ability. Who wouldn't?

But what they mostly want is the budget to set up a new office to counter the "new threat".

It's always about the budget.

Florida man slams 'tyranny' of central bank digital currencies in re-election bid

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Re: The amount of Anonymous Trumpists in this forum...

Here's the far-right media talking about several Democrat ads, and how they're helping the Republicans-

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/07/democrats-boosted-extremists-republican-primaries-was-that-wise

Yeah, that's the monolithic left-wing MSM pointing out the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic leadership. Doesn't actually touch on the argument you were making before or answer my request, but well done anyway.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/democrats-launch-jan-6-newspaper-ad-campaign-iowa-trump-visits-rcna132627
Another perfectly reasonable story, not related in any way to what you were arguing before.
Why? The Dems have already locked up over 1,000 politicial prisoners. Didn't you know this already?
Well, "why?" is because that's what you said was happening, and I'm asking you to provide some kind of evidence.

And "the Dems", which is an odd way of framing the US Justice Department by the way, have locked people up for committing crimes. Actual, violent crimes. Are you saying they shouldn't do that? Show me the reports of people being locked up for holding any political opinion that doesn't involve violent action. (Hint: the answer to this is a few lines down this very post, but it doesn't support your claim that the Democrats are abusing the power of the federal gov't against Republicans.)

Then people think CBDCs are also a conspiracy theory, when they're just a consipiracy.
Err, no. CBDCs are real enough. You linked to the European Central Bank making plans to introduce one. In doing so - as your link illustrates - it is very publicly going through the full democratic decision making processes, such as they are, of the EU, answering entirely to the EU's political leadership. Where's the "conspiracy" there?

In the USA, meanwhile, nobody has even talked about introducing one. There's just no drive for it. That's what I mean by "no centralised decision making". Just a lot of people doing their own thing. Is that bad?

You can do it today though.
I'll just leave these here then:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/judge-sentences-florida-man-18-years-prison-attempting-provide-material-support-isis

https://apnews.com/article/islamic-state-terrorism-minnesota-0e4a09840bed202cac17e18e3dfd87d5

The Bbc has actually sorta reported on these, although with their usual spin-
Uh huh. And here's another example of the BBC "pointedly ignoring" these protests: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67911739

Just because you're not paying attention, that doesn't prove the BBC aren't doing their job.

If AfD win an election, that isn't "toppling the German government", it's just democracy.
That depends what you mean by "win an election". Of course, you could argue that any time an opposition party wins an election the existing government is "toppled". But that's not what anyone means here. Germany has a cultural memory of the Nazis, who proved that you can "win" an election by processes and means that have nothing to do with democracy, and if you think there's nobody in the AfD and its allies today who sees that as a template worth trying, I have an Internet to sell you. I'm not saying it's likely, I'm not even saying that the leadership is planning any such thing, but I'll bet someone is thinking on those lines, and it's not unreasonable to keep a close eye on those people.

veti Silver badge

Re: The amount of Anonymous Trumpists in this forum...

You must have missed all the attack ads telling the gullible that Trump and 'extreme MAGA Republicans' are the greatest threat to democracy ever, and should be locked up and not allowed to vote
Yep, I've missed those. Show me one? Surely YouTube has them by now.

I mean, I believe you on the "greatest threat to [our - you seem to have elided the pronoun for some reason] democracy" bit, but I specifically want to see an ad saying that MAGA Republicans "should be locked up and not allowed to vote".

Davos made this very clear.
Some people make "Davos" sound like some sort of world conspiracy. It's just a meeting where a lot of powerful people get together and talk over lots of ideas. Some of them like some of those ideas, and go away and try to do something with them; others don't like the same ideas and may even work against them.. There's no centralised decision making going on there.
The Bbc of course loves these ideas
- he says, with a link to a reasonably balanced article about a proposal in Germany to ban a political party - something that all countries in the world have always done. (Try raising money for the Communist Party in America in the 1960s, or Islamic State today, see how far you get.) You can find such proposals in various countries at any given time. The BBC article you link to shows no signs of "loving" the idea.
the Bbc has been pointedly ignoring the much larger protests ongoing in Germany
So are you, apparently. Link to a report by some news source you do believe about these much larger protests, so we can see what you're talking about? (I mean, there must be such a source, or how would you even know about them?)

veti Silver badge

"The press" never said any of that. Just... do try to keep in some kind of touch with reality.

There's nothing wrong with reporting in most of the media. The problem is in the opinionating. Which is forced upon them because it's the only way to make money under US law (facts aren't covered by copyright, but opinion is). With the result that the media has purposely and systematically blurred the line between reporting and opinion, and by now half the population can't even see there's a difference.

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Tomato, tomato... Every government action does that. The border wall, for instance, did that on a small scale, and Operation Warp Speed did it on a larger scale.

Of course, what did it on a truly biblical scale was Trump's "tax cuts for the rich" act.

veti Silver badge

Bullshit.

The super-rich are not that different from the rest of us. Some of them are evil, sure, but not all by any means.

And even those that are evil are also bright enough to know that they're not going to go on getting richer unless ordinary people have enough income to trickle some up to them. For instance, since I've been unemployed, my Starbucks (and equivalent) budget has dropped to zero - those people are no longer making anything out of me, not one cent per year. It's not in their own interests to promote that sort of thing, any more than it is in mine.

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The Very Stable Genius isn't always wrong. He's always evil, but that's a whole different axis.

In this case he's grabbing headlines and votes by taking aim at a nefarious scheme that nobody is actually pushing anyway. Should be an easy victory for him. Votes for - essentially, promising to make sure the sun comes up tomorrow.

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

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Re: Just no

Where I come from, not all rural roads have street lighting.

But still, sounds like a plan. How are you promoting it?

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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If your distribution losses are 30%, I suggest you consider moving to a first-world country.

The 5% figure comes from the US Energy Information Administration. In the UK, the National Grid Company says:

The total quantity of electricity supplied in the United Kingdom during 2015 was 338TWh, but only 311TWh was consumed by customers.

- which implies a loss rate of about 8%, which is higher than I'd have guessed but still way closer to my estimate than yours. (Although come to think of it, reactive power probably accounts for that difference.)

Where are you getting your figures from?

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Natural gas generators, on average, achieve a thermal efficiency of approximately 45%. Coal is closer to 35% (mostly because the owners have been skimping on maintenance for the past 30 years). Upgrading to combined cycle could add about 20% to both those figures, but nobody in the US is willing to pay for that.

The electricity distribution grid loses about 5% (in the USA - in smaller countries, it's a lot less). I know nothing about battery losses.

And let's not forget, fuel doesn't pump, refine and distribute itself. If you want to do a real apples-to-apples comparison, there's a lot more work to do.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

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Re: I put it to you

I imagine some variants on that story will probably happen, and some lawyers will do very well that way for a while, until the opposition wises up.

But it's an eternal arms race. And in the long run, my money is on the side that improves indefinitely over time, unlike the individual lawyer.

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Re: "they don't understand law and can't form sound arguments"

Define "think".

What makes you "think" human cognitive processes are qualitatively any different?

What difference does it make anyway?

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Re: Reason

Sure language models will fail in that way, because they've never had even the rudiments of legal instruction. They know the word "jurisdiction", but they have no inkling of why it might be relevant to their current task.

In a word, they're being given tasks they're neither trained nor designed to do.

I wonder how hard it is to give them that training. Maybe the results in six months time will be different.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

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Re: Let Me See How I Can Put This ...

More like "Our tireless quality assurance team has remedied some potential issues that have been highlighted by recent adverse press coverage. We remain proud of our safety record and encourage all our customers' passengers to remember that these planes are American, dammit, and the best you can buy."

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

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Re: "allowing their works to be used in AI models - as long as they get compensated for that"

No, because it would be just as wrongs if it was humans who did the same thing that computers do.

But humans do that. All the time. And have been doing it for... at least a couple of centuries, now, ever since "free press" became a thing.

Long before people even talked about "AI", let alone "LLMs", churnalists would read each other's work, make just enough modifications to file off the serial numbers and regurgitate it. And that was legal, and always has been. And it still is. Reputable newspapers at least have the decency to credit their sources, but believe me, not everyone does.

Why, exactly, is it worse when a machine does this?