PendingKetchup's recent activity

  1. Comment on Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    Yeah, one thing ChatGPT has going for it is that it is in fact a product and not a pile of script glue. And you might not have the local power to run a model as big as you need. But it still might...

    Yeah, one thing ChatGPT has going for it is that it is in fact a product and not a pile of script glue. And you might not have the local power to run a model as big as you need.

    But it still might be worth looking for less-powerful options, or options that don't grant OpenAI so many rights to your text.

    4 votes
  2. Comment on Google Maps now shows the 'Gulf of America' for US users in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    I heard they pulled in an update to a government database they use for place names. But they seem to be making up facile process-based excuses like this to try and make people ignore that the net...

    I heard they pulled in an update to a government database they use for place names.

    But they seem to be making up facile process-based excuses like this to try and make people ignore that the net result is obviously wrong.

  3. Comment on Overwhelmed with the realm of data exploration (datalakes, AI, plus some c-level pressure) in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    Congratulations on your new research project! If you build this thing, you will be a top-tier AI researcher contributing meaningfully to advancing the state of the art in the field! Now go make...

    Congratulations on your new research project! If you build this thing, you will be a top-tier AI researcher contributing meaningfully to advancing the state of the art in the field!

    Now go make sure your bosses understand that.

    By combining things like LangChain and its tool use, DeepSeek and its chain of thought instincts, and RAG as you mentioned, and maybe giving it a page of text that explains how to do business strategy, or a pass of training on explanations of good and bad ideas in your problem domain along, with the database queries that fetch the evidence to support them, you might be able to make something.

    It's not clear that this is a better investment of time than if you just built the data analysis tools that would help a human answer these questions themselves. Especially since you mostly have to build those tools anyway to feed the AI. A model can just write SQL queries, but the easier the tools are to use the smarter the system is going to be.

    The sampler/framing code/driver logic is going to be where all the real work is, and it's going to be a lot of work. Have your boss read up on Williams syndrome and Broca's aphasia, because really with a language model you have a linguistics research project. Everyone involved needs a good understanding of how language is a special-purpose function of the human mind only loosely connected to the other parts of what one might call intelligence, and how a project like this amounts to "build the rest of the brain".

    5 votes
  4. Comment on Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    It's a live service provided by what (is? soon will be?) a for-profit (non-B?) corporation, which necessarily means it is designed to put the corporation's profits over the interests of the user....

    It's a live service provided by what (is? soon will be?) a for-profit (non-B?) corporation, which necessarily means it is designed to put the corporation's profits over the interests of the user.

    In this case that might look like an incentive to cultivate a dependence and then jack up the price, a lack of attention (or of drawing the user's attention) to problems with the output that are cheaper to pay damages over than to fix, or a standard enshittification where it finds people like advertisers or ad-targeting companies to sell the user out to.

    There's also the problem where people doubt they have clear title to their training data, but they use it anyway. And the way they jealously guard their position and hipocritically get mad every time somebody like maybe DeepSeek trains on data generated from their model.

    8 votes
  5. Comment on Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    I am going to come in with a rare no: do not use ChatGPT for proofreading. You should be able to do LLM-based proofreading with a much lighter, cheaper, and more efficient tool than the...

    I am going to come in with a rare no: do not use ChatGPT for proofreading.

    You should be able to do LLM-based proofreading with a much lighter, cheaper, and more efficient tool than the umpteen-billion-parameter, needs-more-GPUs-than-you-can-buy ChatGPT. Something that takes a tiny model and runs it over a few dozen tokens of context and lights up red or something when the text is highly improbable. You ought to be able to solve the problem pretty well with a few watts on a laptop, so the extra hardware and energy used by doing it with millitary-grade ChatGPT aren't justified and thus should not be used.

    Here's an example of local grammar checking on Mac with a 7B parameter model, with a bunch of Automator stuff to tie in to text boxes in apps, though I think it still uses Q&A and not the model's probabilities directly, which probably would be better.

    6 votes
  6. Comment on Framework 13 chassis available for $400 in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    Maybe try SteamOS on the Framework hardware first? Does the Deck have special power hardware to pull off its tricks or is it something any similar SoC lets you do if you hook up the right...

    Maybe try SteamOS on the Framework hardware first? Does the Deck have special power hardware to pull off its tricks or is it something any similar SoC lets you do if you hook up the right calibration factors and UI?

  7. Comment on Can I turn a closed Windows 11 laptop on and off? in ~comp

    PendingKetchup
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    You can get USB keyboards that have power buttons on them which the computer's firmware might support. You can also sometimes do a key combo on the keyboard if the computer supports it. So there's...

    You can get USB keyboards that have power buttons on them which the computer's firmware might support. You can also sometimes do a key combo on the keyboard if the computer supports it. So there's probably a way to turn it on when it's closed, but you need to check in the firmware to see what that laptop supports.

    And you also might need to change the Windows power settings to not just immediately sleep when the lid is closed.

    5 votes
  8. Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    I don't actually think a teacher ought to quit just because their job now contains computers. It is often better to stay and fight than to bail. I wanted to start a conversation about the...

    I don't actually think a teacher ought to quit just because their job now contains computers. It is often better to stay and fight than to bail. I wanted to start a conversation about the rhetorical move and why bailing (or even fighting to the point where it creates a Problem) should more often be considered a legitimate option that people should be assumed to have by default.

  9. Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    One thing that a lot of the old stuff had in common is that it was built by individuals or small groups. The online games that are lootbox casino-fests are also made by teams of thousands. No one...

    One thing that a lot of the old stuff had in common is that it was built by individuals or small groups. The online games that are lootbox casino-fests are also made by teams of thousands. No one artist would make something with such little respect for its audience.

    So there is something you can do about it besides look for alternatives: you can construct alternatives. There's that guy trying to build ActivityPub competitors to Instagram, TikTok, and now I hear Tumblr, all at the same time. Will every quixotic project like this succeed? Of course not. But are you capable of, say, publishing a number of high-quality book reviews? Joining a webring about one of your hobbies? Drawing a scribble in MS Paint? Absolutely.

    The worst thing about the current Internet is it silences users. If you're posting things fishing for likes and re-whatevers, and scrolling through an infinite number of other posts with more of each than you seem to get, you stop talking.

    27 votes
  10. Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    Do the people who are so constrained that they cannot take essentially any action need to feature in the discourse as prominently as they do? And when they do feature, should they be placed like...

    Do the people who are so constrained that they cannot take essentially any action need to feature in the discourse as prominently as they do? And when they do feature, should they be placed like this as a sort of rebuttal or necessary caveat to proposals that people do things? Or do they belong in the other conversational turn, as evidence that things must be done?

    One can also say: You don't need to be a teacher. You can Just Walk Out and do something else instead. This is a risk for anyone to do, and for some people that risk would be so great that they could not rationally, or even irrationally-but-sanely, choose that course of action. This is additional evidence that all those who can, should, in order to damage whatever system is causing the problem that motivates people to leave.

    The civil rights fight involved a lot of boycotting busses by those least well-positioned to do so. It actually worked really well.

    If, say, network effects are trapping the sex workers on Twitter, the correct response seems less like acknowledging that some people can't quit Twitter as if "people who can't quit Twitter" are themselves a minoritized group, and more like advocating that people quit Twitter even harder.

    10 votes
  11. Comment on What's your take on capital and corporal punishment? in ~talk

    PendingKetchup
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    Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency...
    • Exemplary

    Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency that you have now, what would have had to have happened to you?

    People don't generally take up shop lifting or drug dealing for fun or over other plausible options for what they could be doing. Armed robbery is not a good time for anyone involved. These are things people do for lack of alternatives. The world is getting worse for the people committing the crimes, and leaving them with no good legitimate options.

    Punishments in general make this problem worse. If you were struggling to make rent with your bad job before you went to prison, when you get out you now have no house and no job to make rent with. Is a person you cut the hand off of more or less likely to get a job than they were before? Is threatening to maybe break the arm of someone who will not eat or who cannot advance unless they do the thing you do not like actually going to change behavior?

    (Also, among adults, punishments as a concept are inappropriate. The state is not your real dad.)

    I think you are applying the terrible social welfare system statistics to the wrong model. People aren't weirdly lazy, causing use of the social welfare system, and also weirdly evil, causing a lot of crime. People are poor, which causes both use of the social welfare system (which is what it's for), and also crime (because it doesn't properly solve the problem).

    To implement social decency back into a deprived area, stop depriving the area.

    15 votes
  12. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    But in your example you postulated that what Business H is doing is making a genuine claim, and that that claim is received by the shop, and that that claim is fraudulent, as givens. It's trivial...

    But in your example you postulated that what Business H is doing is making a genuine claim, and that that claim is received by the shop, and that that claim is fraudulent, as givens. It's trivial to figure out why that's fraud, because I can just point to where it says that in your premises.

    I am trying to figure out why I disagree with you about whether those premises describe the situation here.

    Say it doesn' t benefit me. If I send you a referral link in which I have embedded some unrelated third party's referral code I found, and get you to click it, am I lying to the shop by making a statement that that third party referred you to them instead of me?

    I don't think so; I don't think these codes carry the same sort of "I am saying this and I believe it to be true" pragmatic content as you would get from writing out "I was referred by so-and-so" in English. As I understand it, referrer=123 is a command to set the value of a query parameter, not a statement of fact about the physical world. A link to a product on a shop's web site is fundamentally a name, not something that can be true or false when spoken or transmitted. At least the way I see it.

    But if you see it as a statement of fact, and Honey's browser code as acting as them instead of as the user, then Honey would indeed be telling lies to shops.

  13. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    I guess this makes sense if you thing there is a set level of capability beyond which you don't really want more improvements (or you don't have the data to drive them), and it isn't just "how...

    I guess this makes sense if you thing there is a set level of capability beyond which you don't really want more improvements (or you don't have the data to drive them), and it isn't just "how much vram will Nvidia sell me before they start raising the price to performance curve to tell me to stop". Maybe I need a model equivalent to Llama 3 70b for some reason but the same sort of thing at what was previously 405b's capability level won't help?

    I guess I don't really understand what people think they're going to do with these in general, so I think the same vague hype-based justifications can be used to sell models of arbitrary power as a thing worth buying for some reason.

    1 vote
  14. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    Why should the news that NVIDIA's products are able to be used more effectively make them less valuable? Do we think people are likely to prefer "good-enough" models and that we are already there...

    Why should the news that NVIDIA's products are able to be used more effectively make them less valuable? Do we think people are likely to prefer "good-enough" models and that we are already there with current hardware?

    If one 5090 or whatever can now replace an OpenAI subscription, I feel like people then would want it more.

    8 votes
  15. Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    What do you think is the nature of understanding?

    What do you think is the nature of understanding?

  16. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    I just don't have the same intuition that this obviously counts as theft that you seem to have, I think because I don't really feel like the referral money properly belongs to anyone in advance.

    I just don't have the same intuition that this obviously counts as theft that you seem to have, I think because I don't really feel like the referral money properly belongs to anyone in advance.

  17. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    My understanding of civil liability is that it still has to have some kind of basis in a law prohibiting or requiring something. If we sign a contract and I promise to deliver 100 widgets by...

    My understanding of civil liability is that it still has to have some kind of basis in a law prohibiting or requiring something. If we sign a contract and I promise to deliver 100 widgets by Tuesday and don't provide them until Friday, and you lose out on a big sale because of it, that's not a crime and there's no possible way for it to result in me going to jail. But it does create civil liability, and you could sue me for damages, because somewhere there's a law on the books (or maybe in a precedent-setting decision, or part of the Restatement of Torts that is somehow incorporated into the set of active laws by reference) that says that breach of contract is a thing people aren't allowed to do.

    Whereas if I make your widget delivery late because I was driving to work and formed part of a traffic jam, not because I breached a contract, I don't have to worry about being civilly liable for those consequences because there's no law against being stuck in traffic.

    And if I make your widget delivery late by robbing the truck driver, I am in criminal trouble for the robbery and in civil trouble for its knock-on effects.

  18. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    I would actually quite like businesses to not be allowed to arbitrarily harm third parties. Then we'd have legal tools to address things like climate change: by emitting CO2, which wasn't actually...

    I would actually quite like businesses to not be allowed to arbitrarily harm third parties. Then we'd have legal tools to address things like climate change: by emitting CO2, which wasn't actually forbidden, you damaged the environment and therefore have to pay to clean it up.

    As far as I know we don't actually run the legal system like that: you are only responsible for the negative effects of your actions if you did at least one forbidden thing. If you poke someone with an eggshell skull without permission and it kills them, you get in trouble. If you greet them and it turns out they had eggshell eardrums and their head explodes from this, my understanding is that you don't.

    A pure consequentialist legal system where you are in trouble whenever anything you do causes problems for anyone else is a system in which you can never determine that you are safe to do something, especially something unusual where all the results can't be known in advance. Nor can you do things like out-compete a rival firm so they lose sales or go out of business. I don't think that that would be a much better model of actual ethics. It's wrong to by many apparently fine steps destroy the climate, or starve someone, and it's wrong to walk into someone's house and steal a million dollars from them, but I don't think it's wrong to, by many apparently fine steps, cause you to have a million dollars and someone else not.

  19. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
    Link Parent
    If Honey is going to the shops and saying "we were responsible for sending those users to your shop, please dispense the payout," they are absolutely doing fraud. If they are saying "those users...

    If Honey is going to the shops and saying "we were responsible for sending those users to your shop, please dispense the payout," they are absolutely doing fraud.

    If they are saying "those users made purchases using affiliate coupon codes issued to us", they are telling the truth. That did actually happen.

    Which one they're really doing for a given shop is going to depend heavily on the particular terms of that shop's affiliate program contracts. Which programs are set up as abstracted code-for-cash games, and which are set up as "by sending us a message with your code via a user's browser, you assert that you actually convinced the user to come to our shop and didn't just open a popup or some other nonsense"?

    Lying to a business associate is fraudulent, while smart-ass strategies in formalized abstract systems are acceptable, even when they negatively impact others.

    I have been assuming that Honey, as a relatively large outfit, actually had their lawyers read those affiliate program contracts that were one of their major sources of revenue, and that they didn't just blatantly ignore them. (If they did just not follow them, I would have expected the stores to be suing them, not the other affiliates. Presumably we will have the stores as witnesses: if your legal complaint is "You lied to Tina who paid you instead of me", one might expect Tina's opinion to matter quite a bit.)

  20. Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech

    PendingKetchup
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    How can we measure the difference between a system that is fundamentally incapable of understanding but presents a 50% convincing illusion of understanding, and one that is fundamentally capable...

    How can we measure the difference between a system that is fundamentally incapable of understanding but presents a 50% convincing illusion of understanding, and one that is fundamentally capable of understanding but has a 50% strength capacity to do it?

    To me, there's no difference between understanding an idea and the ability to apply it to other ideas. There are a lot of ideas you can take and hand to an LLM and make it bang them against other ideas and tell you what happens. It's not always completely accurate, but to me that's disputing the accuracy of an understanding rather than the existence. (And to some extent the samplers guarantee it will always make mistakes at some frequency, because it's always rolling for the next word. You try generating accurate text by ranking words and then hearing back which one you actually said.)

    I asked Mixstral 8x7b about banging a cat and a cactus together, and I got back a complaint that that was a bad idea, as "Cats and cacti are both living things that can experience pain and distress". Then I asked about a car and a carpet, and I was informed that "it's unlikely that a carpet would cause any significant damage to a car, as cars are designed to be much more durable than household items like carpets".

    Does a system that alleges that cacti can feel pain have as good an understanding of cacti as you or I do? No. But I don't understand how a system that can take two ideas and bang them together and, more often than not, approximate the right answer, is well-described as having actual zero "understanding" of any of the ideas in question. It's so much better than the null model that there's a qualitative difference.

    I also think that you can deduce from first principles using language, either natural language or more formal symbolic systems. You might need to bolt on some grammar constraints and maybe a calculator, but I could see an LLM forming the core of a system that you could point at and say "This is capable of deduction from first principles". After all, the GOFAI Lisp machines could do deduction, they just lacked direction in terms of what was worth deducing and when the formal model importantly diverged from the real world. A language model can provide a common-sense-in-a-box and a collection of biases to steer a theorem prover.

    2 votes