• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • Bookshop.org just recently added ebooks, and I believe they have a UK store, for anyone trying to buy ebooks in a more ethical way. It allows you to select a local bookstore of your choosing and support them when you purchase books. They take a small fee to cover their warehousing and shipping I think, but pass along a lot of the profit (80%) to the local bookstore. They’re a certified b corp and their bylaws say they can’t sell to a major retailer (eg amazon).


  • Maybe. I’d say it’s more corporate for Sonos to try to develop yet another closed wireless audio sync protocol just to force users to sign in through their app so they can data scrape you. In the absence of a true open wireless sync protocol (maybe there is one and I’m unaware, in which case I’d like to be educated!) I’d rather them use a more widely adopted protocol than roll their own.

    Edit: I think maybe I misunderstood the comment I replied to and they were agreeing with this statement in general.






  • I don’t believe this is quite right. They’re capable of following instructions that aren’t in their data but appear like things which were (that is, it can probabilistically interpolate between what it has seen in training and what you prompted it with — this is why prompting can be so important). Chain of thought is essentially automated prompt engineering; if it’s seen a similar process (eg from an online help forum or study materials) it can emulate that process with different keywords and phrases. The models themselves however are not able to perform a is to b therefore b is to a, arguably the cornerstone of symbolic reasoning. This is in part because it has no state model or true grounding, only probabilities you could observe a token given some context. So even with chain of thought, it is not reasoning, it’s just doing very fancy interpolation of the words and phrases used in the initial prompt to generate a prompt that is probably going to give a better answer, not because of reasoning, but because of a stochastic process.




  • While this is true, algorithmic feeds virtually guarantee that echo chambers exist within a platform already. Fascists won’t leave YouTube because they feel it’s “too woke” or offering varying viewpoints, they’ll leave because the people they already watch there tell them to go to the other service. So I think it’s possible Elon attracts the fascists, destroys YouTube’s ability to monetize that part of their algorithm, and consequently have to improve service for others to try and ensure other fringe echo chambers don’t follow suit.



  • They don’t, but with quantization and distillation, as well as fancy use of fast ssd storage (they published a paper on this exact topic last year), you can get a really decent model to work on device. People are already doing this with things like OpenHermes and Mistral (given, 7B models, but I could easily see Apple doubling ram and optimizing models with the research paper I mentioned above, and getting 40B models running entirely locally). If the start of the network is good, a 40B model could take care of a vast majority of user Siri queries without ever reaching out to the server.

    For what it’s worth, according to their wwdc note, they’re basically trying to do this.




  • Almost. If you own a share of a company, you own a share of something fungible, namely literal company property or IP. Even if the company went bankrupt, you own a sliver of their real product (real estate, computers, patented processes). So while you may be speculating on the wealth associated with the company, it is not a scam in the sense that it isn’t a non fungible entity. The sole value of crypto currency is in its speculative value, it is not tied in theory or in practice to something of perceptibly equal realized value. A dividend is just giving you return on profit made from realized assets (aforementioned real estate or other company property or processes), but the stock itself is intrinsically tied to the literal ownership of those profit generating assets.