DefederateLemmyMl

  • Gen𝕏
  • Engineer ⚙
  • Techie 💻
  • Self hoster 🖧
  • Linux user 🐧
  • Ukraine supporter 🇺🇦
  • Pro science 💉
  • Dutch speaker
  • 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle





  • The laws can absolutely be written such that companies are required to suspend service to any suspected child without requiring ID to use the service.

    The laws shouldn’t focus on “harming children” so much, but on “harming humans”.

    The big tech companies should be held responsible for the actual damage they are inflicting upon society, and their methods to artificially inflate “engagement” (or whatever the hell they call it) should be held to scrutiny. Whether or not the damage is inflicted upon an underage person or an adult, is merely a distraction.

    Those assholes would love it if we all had to identify ourselves and prove our age, if it means they get to keep inflicting their shit upon us.




  • Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

    Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

    For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

    My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

    I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.




  • I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as “WE HAVE AI NOW!”, and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that’s what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn’t help either.

    And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … so people assume it is a duck, but they don’t realize that it’s a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.


  • LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

    Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

    The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn’t quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program’s behavior a bit erratic, so that’s why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I’m paraphrasing): oh to do “this specific thing” you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

    So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough… the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn’t exist.

    Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn’t a valid one. This one wasn’t completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.


  • every service will get your ID or photo

    To be fair, that’s not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn’t get your identity.

    Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

    I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.