Macil's recent activity
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Comment on Microsoft says having a TPM is "non-negotiable" for Windows 11 in ~tech
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Comment on Introducing ChatGPT Pro in ~tech
Macil Link ParentLLMs can actually be decent at making jokes depending the prompt. I think the trick is to get it out of writing in the "assistant" voice and to get it to lean into absurd mash-ups. Here are my...LLMs can actually be decent at making jokes depending the prompt. I think the trick is to get it out of writing in the "assistant" voice and to get it to lean into absurd mash-ups. Here are my results of telling Claude 3 (and GPT 4, which wasn't as good) to write tweets in the style of dril, a popular Twitter user: https://bsky.app/profile/macil.tech/post/3kpcvicmirs2v
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Comment on Introducing ChatGPT Pro in ~tech
Macil Link Parent4o is much cheaper and quicker than o1 while being just as good for a lot of tasks. o1 is only better for certain tasks. On the developer side, there's been a lot of trade-offs in choosing between...4o is much cheaper and quicker than o1 while being just as good for a lot of tasks. o1 is only better for certain tasks.
On the developer side, there's been a lot of trade-offs in choosing between different LLMs for a while, with a whole spectrum from cheap+quick+dumb models to expensive+slow models. I've been surprised that the consumer applications (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) have stuck to a single subscription option for so long instead of offering multiple price points as ChatGPT is doing now.
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Comment on Introducing ChatGPT Pro in ~tech
Macil (edited )Link ParentThe $20/month Plus subscription has strict limits on o1 and Advanced Voice Mode usage. Some users have tasks that only these features are able to accomplish. The new $200/month Pro subscription...The $20/month Plus subscription has strict limits on o1 and Advanced Voice Mode usage. Some users have tasks that only these features are able to accomplish. The new $200/month Pro subscription gives you more than 10x those limits (unlimited).
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Comment on Introducing ChatGPT Pro in ~tech
Macil Link ParentThe o1 model has special training that 4o doesn't to help it be more productive at making progress in solving problems while it writes text to itself, but your experience matches mine. From the...The o1 model has special training that 4o doesn't to help it be more productive at making progress in solving problems while it writes text to itself, but your experience matches mine. From the benchmarks it appears there are certain kinds of multi-step problems that o1 uniquely excels at, but for a lot of other stuff it ends up being only as good as 4o while being slower.
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Comment on Introducing ChatGPT Pro in ~tech
Macil (edited )Link ParentDid ChatGPT itself tell you that it can't do something without you paying? That absolutely sounds like a mistake by it that you shouldn't trust. In general it and its free version have only gotten...Did ChatGPT itself tell you that it can't do something without you paying? That absolutely sounds like a mistake by it that you shouldn't trust. In general it and its free version have only gotten better over time, and to my knowledge it's never been instructed to try to upsell people in conversation. Just start a new conversation and ask it again. (Also consider checking the ChatGPT memories in the settings page to make sure it hasn't recorded a misleading memory about the previous conversation.)
You may have planted the idea that you need to pay more into the conversation and it was too agreeable with that. It is a common issue for ChatGPT to believe something to a fault once it has been said in the conversation.
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Comment on James Webb Space Telescope finds stunning evidence for alternate theory of gravity in ~space
Macil (edited )Link ParentThis page doesn't say anything about how MOND could explain the unique gravitational lensing of the Bullet Cluster, which I have believed to be the main reason people think the Bullet Cluster is...This page doesn't say anything about how MOND could explain the unique gravitational lensing of the Bullet Cluster, which I have believed to be the main reason people think the Bullet Cluster is evidence for dark matter. Instead the post seems to focus solely on galaxy collision speeds and just says that part works with both theories. I don't feel like the page does a good job at justifying the author's confidence in MOND over dark matter.
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Comment on Why is Google Gemini saying we should die? in ~tech
Macil Link ParentIt's possible that there's some kind of context missing in the log we're seeing. There was an incident a few months ago where people posted a ChatGPT log (linked from the official website) that...It's possible that there's some kind of context missing in the log we're seeing. There was an incident a few months ago where people posted a ChatGPT log (linked from the official website) that seemed to show that ChatGPT initiated the conversation with the user, which is not expected behavior. OpenAI later confirmed that because of a glitch, the logs would sometimes be missing certain messages from the user, and in this case the glitch had dropped the first message in the conversation from the user, making it look like ChatGPT initiated the conversation on its own somehow.
There might be ways for the user to feed text to Gemini which don't show up in this chat log interface. ChatGPT has a "memory" feature where it has a scratchpad of text for itself that's kept between conversations, and it's possible for a user to tell ChatGPT to write a memory to itself telling it to react a certain way to a certain situation. I'm not familiar with the Gemini chat app but it might have some way for the user to smuggle messages to the chatbot outside of the view of the logs. It would be good if the page for the Gemini chat logs was updated to indicate if this might be the case as ChatGPT's does.
It's also possible that no context is missing and that this chat is fully legitimate as it appears. LLMs can be sassy as fuck. Usually I've seen it just when the chatbot is goaded into it by the user but it's possible that the conversation was so unusual that the bot didn't think a normal response fit the context.
It's also possible that there is a secret message encoded by the user within the conversation we see that tells the bot to act like this. I've seen LLMs discover messages hidden in the first word of each sentence or paragraph.
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Comment on AirPods or not? in ~music
Macil Link ParentThat's unlucky. I've recently upgraded to the Pixel Buds Pro 2 from the previous Pixel Buds Pro, and they finally fit me really well. The previous ones were a little too heavy and wouldn't keep a...That's unlucky. I've recently upgraded to the Pixel Buds Pro 2 from the previous Pixel Buds Pro, and they finally fit me really well. The previous ones were a little too heavy and wouldn't keep a good seal in my ears over longer periods of time. The Pixel Buds Pro 2 are the first ones of the line I've considered excellent enough to recommend to others.
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Comment on Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 after FOSS-iness drama in ~tech
Macil (edited )LinkIt's weirdly common for projects to decide they want to be open source and then make their own license that isn't compatible with anything, causing everyone to steer clear of the source code. I...It's weirdly common for projects to decide they want to be open source and then make their own license that isn't compatible with anything, causing everyone to steer clear of the source code. I think there's a lot of business leaders that have heard from their employees/news/etc that open source is good, but then don't know that the correct way to do it is to pick an existing popular license that fits what they want instead of telling some lawyers to write something up on their own.
Pretty much everyone wanting to make something open source should just pick between MIT (maybe dual-licensed with Apache 2.0), GPL, AGPL, or maybe BUSL if your main concern is just guaranteeing customers an exit path if you go out of business. Doing anything other than that is just putting in more effort only for a worse result for yourself and everyone.
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Comment on NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites in ~space
Macil LinkI wonder if SpaceX and Elon being involved comes with any limitations included in how they're used, like how Elon briefly turned off some of Ukraine's Starlink access to protect Russia. It's...I wonder if SpaceX and Elon being involved comes with any limitations included in how they're used, like how Elon briefly turned off some of Ukraine's Starlink access to protect Russia. It's concerning that Elon had that kind of control with his connections.
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Comment on Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world in ~tech
Macil (edited )Link ParentAssuming it doesn't work by pure coincidence, we have to call its capability to often work step-by-step to get right answers or generate working code for novel situations something, and it's not...Assuming it doesn't work by pure coincidence, we have to call its capability to often work step-by-step to get right answers or generate working code for novel situations something, and it's not like "reasoning" is a term defined so rigorously to obviously exclude what we see here. The term being used here doesn't inherently mean that there's a rich inner life or inner monologue going on in the model.
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Comment on A new AI model can hallucinate a game of 1993’s DOOM in real time in ~games
Macil (edited )LinkIt would be really interesting to train it on a weird mix of things and have it hybridize them, like two different first-person games. I notice the geometry and contents of the space the player is...It would be really interesting to train it on a weird mix of things and have it hybridize them, like two different first-person games.
I notice the geometry and contents of the space the player is navigating isn't fully consistent. I wonder if just scaling the model up could fix that, or if techniques will be created to help the model plan and stick to consistent 3d spaces will be developed. I could imagine a system like this might benefit from having a part of the model be specialized for gaussian splatting or another neural net based 3d rendering technique.
It would be cool if a system like this could be made so that you could ask it for things in the game in real-time, like you could make a request about the design of the next room you encounter, or have it create a new enemy on the fly. I feel pretty confident this will exist at some point, at least in a very janky form at first, and the only real question is when.
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Comment on A new AI model can hallucinate a game of 1993’s DOOM in real time in ~games
Macil Link ParentThe article says it's running on a single TPU, and those seem to have similar specs to a high-end GPU.The article says it's running on a single TPU, and those seem to have similar specs to a high-end GPU.
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Comment on Disney seeking dismissal of Raglan Road death lawsuit because victim was Disney+ subscriber in ~misc
Macil LinkI was half thinking about getting Disney+ but honestly I'm not very sold on this "Disney is legally allowed to kill its customers" part of the deal.I was half thinking about getting Disney+ but honestly I'm not very sold on this "Disney is legally allowed to kill its customers" part of the deal.
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Comment on Plain Vanilla — An explainer for doing web development without tools or frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in ~comp
Macil Link ParentMany modern frameworks have been inspired by React and work similarly (Vue, Svelte), though they're all using Javascript/Typescript. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for good frontend/full-stack...Many modern frameworks have been inspired by React and work similarly (Vue, Svelte), though they're all using Javascript/Typescript. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for good frontend/full-stack frameworks that don't use JS/TS. There are some projects working on that type of thing, but my experience with experimenting with non-JS/TS languages in browsers has been painful usually with awkward interop to native browser APIs, lack of automatic rebuilding, lack of debugger support, and lack of third-party packages that work in the browser.
Typescript is one of my favorite languages even outside of the browser, so I recommend giving it a try. Most browser frameworks (including React-based ones like Next.js) have official starter kits using Typescript and work out of the box with Visual Studio Code.
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Comment on Plain Vanilla — An explainer for doing web development without tools or frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in ~comp
Macil (edited )Link ParentI dislike that this site encourages development with plain web components, partly because sites made with them require Javascript to use. Regular web components don't support server-side rendering...I dislike that this site encourages development with plain web components, partly because sites made with them require Javascript to use. Regular web components don't support server-side rendering into plain HTML. (Also plain web components require more tricky boilerplate to write than components in React or other frameworks, including web-component-based frameworks.)
Websites made with React don't necessarily require Javascript in the browser to use, because React supports server-side rendering. When React is used with server-side rendering (as many React-based frameworks like Next.js do by default), the server renders all the components into plain viewable HTML, sends that to the client, and then the server sends the javascript that allows the components to become mounted and fully interactive on the client. Browsers with javascript disabled will ignore that last part and still be able to see the initial render of all the components, which is enough for many mostly-static sites.
I think it's useful to understand the browser APIs directly as the "vanilla JS" movement encourages, but the way it's treated as an obvious truism that it's actually better (for users or for developers) to stay vanilla than to use a framework is bad.
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Comment on Y’all are sleeping on HTTP/3 in ~comp
Macil (edited )Link ParentHTTP 2 and 3's performance improvements will help whichever parts of the connection they're used for, and it's fine if a single request is proxied through multiple HTTP versions on its way to the...HTTP 2 and 3's performance improvements will help whichever parts of the connection they're used for, and it's fine if a single request is proxied through multiple HTTP versions on its way to the backend server (as long as some currently-uncommon features that require a specific HTTP version aren't used, like the WebTransport API which requires HTTP 3 the whole way through). An end-user's browser can open a single HTTP 2 or 3 connection with Cloudflare (or your load balancer etc) and make multiple requests within it, and then Cloudflare can translate each request into a separate HTTP 1.1 connection with your backend server if that's all it supports. In the likely situation that many of your users have a less reliable connection to the internet than your backend servers have to Cloudflare, then it's much more important that the hop between the users and Cloudflare supports HTTP 2 or 3 than it is that the hop between Cloudflare and your backend server does, though it generally would still help for that connection to use a newer version too.
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Comment on Should I be filling out every political poll I’m sent? in ~talk
Macil Link ParentI think at least in some cases they are actually polling to compare possible lines they plan to use in attack ads. It still feels weird to be made part of.I think at least in some cases they are actually polling to compare possible lines they plan to use in attack ads. It still feels weird to be made part of.
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Comment on Someone is wrong on the internet (AGI Doom edition) in ~tech
Macil Link ParentThat thought experiment was proposed by a user in the context of Yudkowsky writing a lot about how decision theory is affected by threats of blackmail, very few users took it seriously, and...That thought experiment was proposed by a user in the context of Yudkowsky writing a lot about how decision theory is affected by threats of blackmail, very few users took it seriously, and Yudkowsky deleted it out of a principle to discourage people from posting information they themselves thought was dangerous, not because he specifically thought it was dangerous.
There's actually an interesting article recently about David Gerard, an online writer who developed a giant grudge against Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and decided to make sure that Roko's Basilisk was "in every history of the site forever". That Slate article is mentioned, and David Gerard claims that the Slate article was sourced from his articles on it. It really was not considered a major topic at LessWrong.
TPMs are also used to encrypt your saved passwords in your browser (and other programs that use the right OS APIs) so that they can only be decrypted if you've logged in to the OS with your password or PIN, and to set limits on password/PIN attempts so that you can use a short password/PIN locally and still benefit from encryption. This helps protect your data if your computer is physically stolen. Without a TPM, there's no way you could have a short 4-digit PIN that safely encrypts your saved passwords because they'd be too easy to brute-force.