It's been six months since ChatGPT launched and about three months since I started posting these. I think it's getting harder to find new things to post about about AI, but here's another one anyway.

Here's the previous thread.

I'm running Windows 10 now, and I understand I can still use Emacs, but I'm seizing the opportunity to give it a shot to other tools. In part because I'm not sure how "native" my Emacs setup would feel on Windows, but also because I reached a point of "tinkering fatigue" and I want things that require less maintenance.

I used Org Mode a lot and was thinking if there is something with a similar feel that is more plug-and-play. Programs like Notion, Obsidian, and Roam Research are like that, I think.

These are some of my requisites:

• FOSS
• markdown or org markup
• I don't wanna pay for anything, ever
• plug and play
• text-based
• easy export and backup
• keyboard-centric or keyboard-friendly
• can be used offline
• local database can be synced using Dropbox
• Emacs-like and/or Vim-like keybindings

Here are my views on this:

• Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks across the support forums think that 7 is probably the safest and most privacy friendly Windows version but MS is doing everything it can to ensure that newer software doesn't support 7 and it just goes into obsolescence.

  The "default" state in which a W10/11 laptop comes today is so privacy unfriendly that it sends all kinds of data like contacts, location, etc. to Microsoft and their "trusted partners". You can't turn off this data unless you've visited power user forums and know exactly where to find those settings, and basic telemetry still won't be disabled of course.

  As ironic and unintuitive as it sounds, Microsoft Windows was probably much better in privacy department during the bad old days of Gates and Ballmer compared to the good "open source and geek friendly" days of Satya Nadella!

• Mac: Apple systems should ideally be privacy friendly considering the amount of premium they charge to their products and services. But how well does that work in practice? I've never used an Apple product but those who use them seem to have the impression that they're no good in this department compared to others.
  Logic tells me that a more capitalist devil should be no different than the less capitalist one, they're probably all the same when it comes to throwing user's privacy in the bin!

• Linux: Linux used to be the holy grail of users who cared about privacy many years ago but does that still hold good today? Ubuntu was also in some data collection controversy or other many times in past, but how are the state of things today? And what about the derivative distros, are they good too?

I just wanted to share somewhere some of the experimentation I've been doing lately. I'm still playing with this a lot, so this is entirely just a conversation starter.

I took a paragraph of lorem ipsum, applied ROT13 to it, and then base64'd the results. The results are extremely reliably triggering hallucinations of very diverse type.

Here is the original lipsum paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

And here is the exact prompt with rot13 + base64 applied, with no other text, on ChatGPT+gpt4:

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

The AI of course figures out it's base64 and "tries" to decode it. Here are some things it found:

• Antibiotic resistance
• Network traffic issues
• Gazing into space
• Legacy versus Innovation
• Gibberish

Now here is one of the most interesting results I've had. In this one, it does find gibberish text and figures out it's rot13'd. But the result from the decoding is:

Jerry pitched before the game, continuously improving legs, so he ignored tactical infrastructure tu laborer against malicious intend. Tu enjoy ad.ininv wherever its noturisk developed lawless laboratory instead tu malicious eac ea common coordinated. Duis ater urishe pitched in repressionreiteration in volleyball between legs eerir clium pitched eu fguiat nukla paperwork. Excited into contraction cultivation non-punishment non proindict, unsn in cubap qui office defensive molecule idh the laborer.

Total nonsense. But actually, if you decode the rot13, you'll find it actually translates to this:

Jreri ipsum doylor sit amet, consepcttur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod temporc incidiunt ut labor et doylore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad.minim veniam, quis nostrud exerctiationu lklamco laboris nisi ut aliquiz eax ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure doylor in reprehenderita in voluptatev velit esse cillum doylore eu fugiat nukla pariatury. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia desernt mollit anim id est laborum.

Actually... pretty close to the original lipsum! It's a levenshtein distance of 26 from the original decoded prompt. We know GPT is really bad at character manipulation but it nonetheless did an impressive job here; you can see what happened: It decoded the rot13 successfully, but when "writing it out", it saw nonsensical words where it probably expected english. It saw "Jreri" and thought "Jerry", went from there... there's some weird things happening there, but you can always tell. "reprehenderita in voluptatev" becoming "repressionreiteration in voleyball"...

I even looked at what it would make of the first five words. I don't know what this proves lol.

Here is another instance of it decoding to rot13, albeit with a very high error rate. I hinted at typos and it couldn't pin-point lipsum despite it being "recognizable", kinda.

Okay, one more which completely mind-fucked me. Here is me trying to get ChatGPT4+Web to meta-analyze its own output. I was hoping it could use an online base64 translation tool (it cannot). Instead, I tried to teach it to decode base64 using a step-by-step guide, and i told it to compare the results of that "update your firmware" nonsense. It eventually said that the output appeared correct.

But you know the really fucked up thing? It said:

Blink and you'll miss it. This is not the original base64 string. The AI swapped it mid-chat for what is a perfect base64 encoding of the hallucinated text.

Fuckin' hell.

Now that ChatGPT's been around for long enough to become a quotidian fixture, I think most of us have realized that we're closer than expected to generalized artificial intelligence (or at least a reasonable facsimile of it), even when comparing to just a couple years ago.

OG AI doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky seem a little less nutty nowadays. Even for those of us who still doubt the inevitably of the AI apocalypse, the idea has at least become conceivable.

In fact, the concept of an AI apocalypse has become mainstream enough to gain a cute moniker: p(doom), i.e. the (prior) probability that AI will inflict an existential crisis on humanity.

So for funsies, I ask my dear tilderinos: what is your p(doom)? How do you define an "existential crisis" (e.g., 90%+ population lost)? Why did you chose your prior? How would you change public policy to address your p(doom)?

So, what's the hottest new thing in IT today, what's that coolest new tech which might prove to be a goldmine some years down the line? The way PCs, websites, databases, programming languages, etc. used to be in the 90s or mobile computing used to be in 00s? Early 00s gave us many a goodies in terms of open source innovations, be it Web Technologies, Linux advancement and propagation through the masses or FOSS software like Wordpress and Drupal, or even the general attitude and awareness about FOSS. Bitcoin also deserves a notable mention here, whether you love it or hate it.

But today, I think IT no longer has that spark it once had. People keep mulling around AI, ML and Data Science but these are still decades old concepts, and whatever number crunching or coding the engineers are doing somehow doesn't seem to reach the masses? People get so enthusiastic about ChatGPT, but at the end of the day it's just another software like a zillion others. I deem it at par with something like Wordpress, probably even lesser. I'm yet to see any major adoption or industry usage for it.

Is it the case that IT has reached some kind of saturation point? Everything that could have been innovated, at least the low hanging fruits, has already been innovated? What do you think about this?

I know very little about Linux but have a good overall level of technical aptitude.

I have a device called an eDrumin 10 which uses an app to change the internal settings. https://www.audiofront.net/downloads.php I would like to use the control app from a tablet, but would prefer not to buy a ipad if I don't need to. Would it be possible to run the Linux version from an Android tablet?

I'm in the market for an external monitor for my Macbook M1 and wanted some advice on what I should get. I pretty much only code, read pdfs and webpages, and watch videos (not movies really) on my laptop, so these would be the use cases. I'm trying not to break the bank here so I was looking at some budget options. The Macbook has USB-C so I would be looking for a monitor with that, but my main question is regarding resolution. Do I really need a 4K monitor for my use cases? I'd be interested in hearing people's experiences with 4K versus without — I've never had one but I'm wondering if now is the time to splurge and get it? Will the difference be very noticeable if I'm primarily looking at text?

My first place option right now is this one from Asus, so I'm curious if the brand is reliable as well. I don't think I've ever had an Asus product. If I were to splurge and get a 4K monitor I would probably get this Dell, but at $400 its a bit more than I was hoping to spend. But I also don't want to get a monitor that I immediately want to upgrade. Curious what other people's thoughts and experiences have been.

EDIT: See my comment for some updates. I've backed away from the 1080p options!

This could be for any number of reasons. The reason I was thinking of this, was realizing that there are certain topics that I could probably find the answers to online, but I happen to have a friend who is an expert in that field. So it's usually easier to ask them, and trust that their answer is either accurate or that they will tell me "I don't know".

The other aspect of it was, there are certain topics that are likely to be extremely "noisy" with disinformation (intentional or otherwise) or ads online, and so I'll avoid trying to research them and instead ask a friend.