ignirtoq

Amazon is using their own hosting. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. Or did I miss the joke?

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.

Vibe coding anything more complicated than the most trivial example toy app creates a mountain of security vulnerabilities. Every company that fires human software developers and actually deploys applications entirely written by AI will have their systems hacked immediately. They will either close up shop, hire more software security experts than the number of developers they fired just to keep up with the garbage AI-generated code, or try to hire all of the software developers back.

Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.

The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.

I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

Why are they… why are they having autocomplete recommend medical treatment? There are specialized AI algorithms that already exist for that purpose that do it far better (though still not well enough to even assist real doctors, much less replace them).

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.

I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.

I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!

What’s the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.

The open availability of cutting-edge models creates a multiplier effect, enabling startups, researchers, and developers to build upon sophisticated AI technology without massive capital expenditure. This has accelerated China’s AI capabilities at a pace that has shocked Western observers.

Didn’t a Google engineer put out a white paper about this around the time Facebook’s original LLM weights leaked? They compared the rate of development of corporate AI groups to the open source community and found there was no possible way the corporate model could keep up if there were even a small investment in the open development model. The open source community was solving in weeks open problems the big companies couldn’t solve in years. I guess China was paying attention.

It’s not disingenuous. There’s multiple definitions of “offline” being used here, and just because some people aren’t using yours doesn’t mean they’re ignorant or arguing in bad faith.

Your definition of “offline” is encompassing just the executable code. So under that definition, sure, it’s offline. But I wouldn’t call an application “offline” if it requires an internet connection for any core feature of the application. And I call saving my document a core feature of a word processor. Since I wouldn’t call it “offline” I’m not sure what I would call it, but something closer to “local” or “native” to distinguish it from a cloud based application with a browser or other frontend.

I’m sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it’s really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There’s no substance here, just a rant.

The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn’t actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we’re starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.

Are you sure the answer you’re getting from AI about the weight of ginger is right? Before AI I would trust the answer from a smart speaker. Now I don’t trust anything any AI produces that should be fact-based. (Turning on lights and TV I would trust because I can see the results myself.)

As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content

This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.

The human fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1-3%, depending on how you count cases. From what I’ve seen reported, the human fatality rate of this strain of bird flu is closer to 50%.

(Lots of “ifs” coming) If this starts to spread human-to-human, if it spreads as easily as COVID, and if we don’t lock down and this becomes endemic like COVID, COVID will look like a walk in the park compared to what this will do. I’m crossing my fingers that COVID was in that mortality sweet spot where it was bad enough to cause a lot of deaths but not quite bad enough to make officials make people angry with actually taking care of the problem. 50% mortality should be comfortably on the side of “deal with it at all cost.”

If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two. Any suggestion otherwise is either ignorant or a bad faith argument.

But I think Putin knows this fact of economical imbalance, as he’s doing a superb job undercutting Western support of Ukraine through subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting. If he truly believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.

I remember you saying that that was exactly the plan, so that they could bleed the western economies to death right there at the eastern border of Ukraine

The economies? I could see the argument for Russia bleeding Western political support for Ukraine, but it’s just fantasy (or propaganda) to suggest a single economy the size of Russia could bleed the combined economies of all Western countries to death.