turnstile

Haven’t heard of it before, looks to be made by Cloudflare. Cloudflare don’t seem to be a totally awful company, but that’s always just one CEO-change away.

Their web site sounds promising, saying “Turnstile can generate multiple types of non-intrusive challenges to verify users are human, all without showing visitors a puzzle.” and “Unlike CAPTCHA options, Turnstile never harvests data for ad retargeting.”

So how do they make money from this?

I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.

You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.

It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.

compatibility layer upon layer

I can understand the sentiment, but don’t ignore the real advantages to the proton/wine way of doing things.

For instance, some old games won’t run on modern Windows but will run on Linux under proton/wine.

It’s also just a lot easier for game companies to target a single platform i.e. Windows. When Valve first released their Steam machines, a few AA games were released natively. For several of those, the native builds no longer work and you now need to run the Windows version under proton/wine.

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)

You think if people who publish their work publicly didn’t research things like this, they would just never be discovered?

At least this way, we all know about the possibility, and further research can be done to see what can mitigate it.

well obviously it won’t, that’s why you need ethical output restrictions

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

In case you haven’t seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn’t unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as “analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome”.

They also don’t provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they’ve seen, rather than genuinely working them out.

I think it’s an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - “Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware” yadda yadda

But that’s not how sentience works. We don’t have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don’t start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we’ve finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents’ new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.

So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.

I think they mean that ARM became dominant by widely licencing its RISC architecture to pretty much anyone. This startup wants to make RISC V designs and licence them to various chip manufacturers - so they won’t be in the business of making chips themselves, just the design.

But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.

Yes you’re right, sorry I went off on a tangent about the reasons for the intense negativity in the Lemmyverse about LLMs. I’ve been using lemmy for four years, and definitely don’t think there has ever been any positive feelings towards LLMs here, especially as ChatGPT’s arrival predates the first surge of users on Lemmy (and the subsequent appearance of all the instances we see today). On reddit, yes, and there are still many people there who still think OpenAI is great.

I think it’s another example of “internet bubbles” - people with similar views tend to congregate together and this is particularly true on the internet, when going elsewhere is always just a mouse-click away.

When ChatGPT first launched, Lemmy was still pretty much a ghost town, and it did cause a lot of optimistic excitement e.g. on reddit. Lemmy got a big surge in numbers when reddit did its infamous API changes - enshittification driven by spez’s and other reddit executives’ insatiable lust to exploit the site for more and more money.

Perhaps for this reason, people on Lemmy are more averse to the enshittification trend and generally exploitive nature of large tech companies. I think this is what people on Lemmy object to - tech companies’ concentration of power and profits by ripping off the general public - not so much the concept of LLMs themselves, but the fact they could easily be used to further inequality in society.