There’s a difference between ‘language’ and ‘intelligence’ which is why so many people think that LLMs are intelligent despite not being so.

The thing is, you can’t train an LLM on math textbooks and expect it to understand math, because it isn’t reading or comprehending anything. AI doesn’t know that 2+2=4 because it’s doing math in the background, it understands that when presented with the string 2+2=, statistically, the next character should be 4. It can construct a paragraph similar to a math textbook around that equation that can do a decent job of explaining the concept, but only through a statistical analysis of sentence structure and vocabulary choice.

It’s why LLMs are so downright awful at legal work.

If ‘AI’ was actually intelligent, you should be able to feed it a few series of textbooks and all the case law since the US was founded, and it should be able to talk about legal precedent. But LLMs constantly hallucinate when trying to cite cases, because the LLM doesn’t actually understand the information it’s trained on. It just builds a statistical database of what legal writing looks like, and tries to mimic it. Same for code.

People think they’re ‘intelligent’ because they seem like they’re talking to us, and we’ve equated ‘ability to talk’ with ‘ability to understand’. And until now, that’s been a safe thing to assume.

Putting fiber in the ground is expensive. I work for an ISP, and we estimate fiber overbuild costs at $15/ft. So a mile of underground fiber costs about $79,200.

Imo, the main advantage to cast iron vs literally everything else is how you can abuse it as long as the one rule you follow is to clean it after use.

Teflon and other nonstick coatings are too easily damaged by things like scrubbing pads or metal utensils.

Cast iron don’t give a single fuck.

It took me getting arrested over some bullshit to get me out, then it was just time and therapy.

I can’t recommend a good therapist enough. Mine has helped me untangle lots of things, and I’m still getting better 5 years after the split.

Fire up Wireshark on a different machine and transfer a file between two other machines, you won’t see anything.

This is true, but only because we’ve replaced Ethernet hubs with switches.

An Ethernet hub was a dumber, cheaper device that imitated a switch, but with a fundamental difference: all connected devices were in the same collision domain.

I don’t know too much about WiFi but it probably does the same, it’s just a bridge to the same network.

Wireless communication has the same problem as Ethernet hubs, with no real solution like a switch though. Any wireless transmission involves an antenna, and transmitting is similar to standing in your yard with a bull horn to talk to your buddy two houses down. Anyone with an antenna can receive the wireless signal you send out. Period.

So some really smart people found ways to keep the stuff you send private, but anyone can sit nearby and capture data going through the air, it’s just not anything you can use because of the encryption.

“You mean if I delete data, then it’s gone? No matter what platform?”

It’s easy to post on a forum and say so.

Maybe you even are actually asking AI questions and researching whether or not it’s accurate.

Perhaps you really are the world’s most perfect person.

But even if that’s true, which I very seriously doubt, then you’re going to be the extreme minority. People will ask AI a question, and if they like the answers given, they’ll look no further. If they don’t like the answers given, they’ll ask the AI with different wording until they get the answer they want.

It’s a single data data point, nothing more, nothing less. But that single data point is evidence of using LLMs in their code generation.

Time will tell if this is a molehill or a mountain. When it comes to data privacy, given that it just takes one mistake and my data can be compromised, I’m going to be picky about who I park my data with.

I’m not necessarily immediately looking to jump ship, but I consider it a red flag that they’re using developer tools centered around using AI to generate code.

There it is. The bold-faced lie.

“I don’t blindly trust AI, I just ask it to summarize something, read the output, then read the source article too. Just to be sure the AI summarized it properly.”

Nobody is doing double the work. If you ask AI a question, it only gets a vibe check at best.

If you want to trade accuracy for speed, that’s your prerogative.

AI has its uses. Transcribing subtitles, searching images by description, things like that. But too many times, I’ve seen AI summaries that, if you read the article the AI cited, it can be flatly wrong on things.

What’s the point of a summary that doesn’t actually summarize the facts accurately?

Sure, but with all the mistakes I see LLMs making in places where professionals should be quality checking their work (lawyers, judges, internal company email summaries, etc) it gives me pause considering this is a privacy and security focused company.

It’s one thing for AI to hallucinate cases, and another entirely to forget there’s a difference between = and == when the AI bulk generates code. One slip up and my security and privacy could be compromised.

You’re welcome to buy in to the AI hype. I remember the dot com bubble.

There’s been evidence in their github repo that they’re using LLMs to code their tools now.

It’s making me reconsider using them.

Fucking same.

I deleted my main account once they first came out with the reddit recap, and deleted my replacement when they fucked RIF, never to return.

I still lurk without an account sometimes, but that’s all they’ll ever get out of me.

What I want is a way to answer the phone like a fax machine. Just press a button and the call gets answered and immediately starts playing that fax machine sound.

I’ll bet that would stop calls. Surely they have something that can tell if they’re calling a fax machine over and over.

Or hax

But that’s how dogwhistles work: they can hide behind a veil of plausible deniability.

And his refusal in the leadup to the 2020 election to denounce the Proud Boys.

“Stand Back and Stand By” isn’t the kind of thing you say to a group you want nothing at all to do with.

‘Bricked’ in this sense meaning not that you’d just trash your OS and need a reinstall, but that it could actually stop your computer from booting at all. So the system32 analogy doesn’t exactly fit.

It’s because some motherboards implement UEFI in a way that allows important variables to be overwritten by I/O processes. Executing sudo rm -rf /* would recursively go into the EFI parameters folder where the kernel mounts EFI variables and attempt to delete things. Some motherboards allowed these delete operations to remove things in the motherboard’s firmware it needs to complete POST, thus rendering the motherboard useless.

But that’s a problem with the motherboard, not with Linux or Windows. The same damage can be caused by Windows.

‘Brigading’ would be if pro-Linux communities were organizing to specifically target another community.

The fediverse is likely to attract the kinds of people interested in Linux in the first place, and all the negative attention that community attracts comes organically.

I talked with the user a bit in Linux_vs_Windows before they were booted from the community, and it’s my opinion that they just have a hate-boner going for Linux. It’s possible to have valid criticism of Linux, but they go way past legitimate and straight into obsession territory. They tend to post in that community daily. So their points aren’t exactly great (though sometimes they hit on a good meme) and they get the points they get naturally.

It’s not a conspiracy, their arguments just tend to be shit.

I work for an ISP in the southeast USA as a field technician and it’s dirty work sometimes. Fixing rodent damage to fiber connection boxes for businesses, placing temporary cables when underground lines get cut, working in dusty equipment closets, etc.

It’s not bad or hard work most days.