CodexArcanum

LLMS don't "hallucinate" they generate a stochastic sequence of plausible tokens that, in context when read by a human, are a false statement or nonsensical.

They also dont have an internal world model. Well I don't think so, but the debate is far from settled. "Experts" like the cofounders of various AI companies (whose livelihood depends on selling these things) seem to believe that. Others do not.

https://aiguide.substack.com/p/llms-and-world-models-part-1

https://yosefk.com/blog/llms-arent-world-models.html

Please elaborate on the measures taken to protect and warn civilians, or which specific military objectives the children hurt by those exploding pagers were in the close vicinity of.

I learned debugging (with the VS IDE and .NET tools) on my first job. School never taught me anything about debugging. Certainly not how to use the tools, but more critically never taught me: how to use binary divide techniques to track down which change caused a bug, how to use deductive reasoning to narrow down what can't be the problem, and even how to carefully read error messages to pinpoint the issue.

Schools teach theory, and sometimes they teach some versions of practical job skills. But it's pretty hard for a for-profit educational institution to make good decisions regarding education when students are the product and for-profit businesses are the actual customers. You end up maximizing recruiters' ideas of what makes a good worker and makes them marketable products, rather than what other working people have experienced as being important job skills. People say software devs need stronger unions but what we really need is to bring back guilds.

It's a silly that you list "please" as fluff. That critical word changes a demand into a request, which is very powerful.

"Hand me that." An order, a directive, as one might issue to a servant.

"Hand me that, please?" A question, a request, a favor, as you might ask of someone you respect.

Seems like a fine point, I guess, but this article exists mainly as a Trojan horse for that nerd-sniping "encryption by proxy" link. You go "Never heard of that, what is it?" And click and surprise! It's the thing they're selling to you!

Which is, hilariously, send us your data and we'll encrypt it for you! Very secure, much privacy.

I always feel like I should be doing more with Pharo. I love smalltalks and there's something really fun and playful about working with it, even those with a more "professional" shine on them like Pharo. I've been experimenting with Godot recently and I feel like there's a lot of that spirit in modern gamedev, where the tool is written in itself and gives you all of the same parts to play and build with.

I guess I don't really know what my usecase for Pharo is, like what niche is it filling? Maybe I need to build my next web...thing with it and see how it works out?

100% my thoughts as well.

I don't really like the latter parts of the article where he begins suggesting that we need to contextually tag all data so the provenance of generated items can be assessed.

Somehow, I don't think forcing attribution and tracking on all the world's data is a good idea. Or, you know, possible.

Like, he outlines this nightmare scenario of terrorists using torture deepfakes to threaten people, then wants to pretend that terrorists will be so kind as to mark their videos as AI-produced?

Like the top comment said, the problem is corporations and capital. All the rest of this is more and more smoke to cover up the very real, human-powered destruction of the open web, free information, and privacy.

I see we're rebranding SOA/microservices again.

I did enjoy reading the preview book for EventStorming, seems like a decent format for getting stakeholders involved in the design process and capturing business details. I'm pretty sure you can also do this with an org-mode doc and emailing the right questions to the right people, but discovery is hard and having a big post-it note brain storm with 30 people does sound like more fun!

I don't know, I feel like tech people are regularly amazed that other people can describe the events, processes, and data needs of their jobs if you just ask them. Likewise I grant that many people are poorly onboarded and end up "faking it to make it" in their careers. I've seen similar "people lighting up as they finally understand what the company does" moments through the use of literally any form of high-level modeling of the business. People are starved for context at most jobs.

There's a theory on how the universe is structured that instead of space-time being like a uniform grid, a Cartesian space, that space-time is made up of nodes which are linked together. I guess kind of like a voronoi diagram in 4 dimensions. I wish I could remember the name of those theories.

If space-time is packed together in most places, then it might resemble a grid to us. This model works in a lot of interesting ways too: wormholes are just links between two otherwise unconnected regions, the curvature of ST can vary depending on the region, and time can flow at varying rates depending on how "dense with time" an area is.

One thing I like about it is that Planck units kind of just represent a minimal distance between nodes (indeed, the connections between nodes defines "distance" and "duration") and everything else just falls out of the geometry of this ST graph.

Wow, I had never considered this! Although, as "UnFleshedOne" points out, that would imply a fixed geometry (not necessarily a grid) wouldn't it? We don't know that angles are limited within a "Planck volume," so they could be continuous (not that anything else seems to be!)

If this were true though, I'd think it would give us a fascinating tool!

Since (B|Z)DDs are basically just fancy DAGs, I wonder what the relationship between them and other automata is like? Like can some of these techniques be applied with regexps to make something truly monstrous?

The problem of the cult of the free is a microcosm of the larger global struggle against capitalism. Who will (or rather, can) build an open and secure browser?

Obviously, a corporation (like Google, MS, Apple, etc) can't be trusted because they have too many conflicting interests. The MS monopoly lawsuit was about browsers; how people connect to the internet is a big huge deal and there's a lot of money and power to be gained if you become top-dog in that space.

Just ask Google, whose dominance of the browser space with Chrome has massively shaped the way to web works today, making it much friendlier to invasive DRM, micropayment schemes, invasive advertising, and many other consumer exploiting features.

So you need an independent source for a browser, but browsers are big and very complicated and need strong security and on and on. It's neither easy nor cheap, but why would the average person want to pay for an independent browser when MS, Apple, and Google will all give you a great browser "for free?"

There is no real answer to this under our current economic model. Donations and fund-raising are patches on a broken system, usually requiring additional support from advertisers, corporate donations, influencing foundations, and so on. If the money isn't coming from consumers buying or donating, then it's coming from someone with money and a vested interest that their money is buying influence for.

The Internet was built on public money from university grants and military funding. But the internet was stolen from the public decades ago and sold to big capital. Until we fix that, Mozilla is just another in a long line of past and future downsizings as the corporate world continues to pillage and privatize the Internet.

I mean, yes? If you're going to offer a feature that officially marks accounts that have proven their identity, then you need to revoke that marker when the identity changes. If that seems overly complicated, maybe the idea of officially verified accounts is problematic and complicated in other unaddressed ways?

He points out below that he was caught because another student overheard him discussing it and ratted on him. I feel like a real hacker wouldn't make a bunch of untested assumptions about situations they have no context for.

If only there was some way for people to live decently while working on anything they wanted to. Like, if there was some Universal way they could meet their Basic needs without having to devote all their energy towards extracting an Income out of for-profit companies or contract-for-hire schemes. Wow, then maybe there would be millions of people interested in computers who could work on all kinds of projects!

Ah, that's good to know! That's a fun fact about byuu helping with the FPGA SNES that they built as well, really interesting! Thanks for the knowledge share!

One thing I've been thinking about lately with emulation: why can't we replicate and use the original hardware more easily?

There's lots of knockoff console replicas out there, so it seems like the chips can still be manufactured. Wouldn't it be fairly cheap to build a board/chip that contained either the original chip designs from classic computers/consoles, or hardware-level emulated chips? Seems like you could stuff several of those retro chips onto a single expansion board. Then emulation software could tap into this "emulation expansion board" to make use of the real chips. Is this all crazy talk or does any of that make some sense?

I believe a lot of this thinking arises from our perception of time and history. We often perceive the past only as "things that happened" and forget about all the things that could have happened. There was an article posted recently about "near-miss" analysis of events that almost-happen which discussed something very similar.

On my browser at least there's a pair of arrows to rotate the grid so different equations will be "upright".

A while back I wrote a little Rust library that does exactly what you say: parses a regex to use as a text generator. It was a lot of fun, and really gives you an appreciation for just how much bigger than ASCII matching the regex world can be! Writing a constraint-based solver that uses the generator library sounds like an amusing project as well!

Link: https://github.com/CryptArchy/regex_generate

I've been very intrigued by their efforts for some time now. Last time I read about NYC Mesh, it sent me down a rabbit hole of research into mesh networks and what it takes to found an ISP. I'd love to replicate their efforts in NOLA, but the legal and technical hurdles are tricky!

When I had looked into it, these resources had been helpful for research:

Wireless Networking in the Developing world -- http://wndw.net/ -- A useful guidebook on the tech needed for large scale community mesh networks

Guifi.net -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net -- A huge wireless mesh in Spain, there's a linked economic report in the references that's very good but may be unavailable at the moment. It may have been, or be contained within, "The Cook Report on Internet Protocol" Volume XX1, No, 12 & XXII, No 1 March April 2013 ISSN 1071 - 6327. The report is very long and covers quite a bit of the social and technical challenges faced by Guifi.net

Wow, seeing this posted really took me back! I, too, was obcessed with Ithkuil when I was in school. I thought it was just the best idea, to construct a dense, powerful, (dare I say) "perfect" language. Too bad I never actually got fluent in it, but then I saw a few years ago that he'd rebooted it as a new language. Conlangs and language design in general is a lot of fun, I'm glad to see he's still doing it.

I find this sort of thing fascinating both for what it means about our own consciousness, but also what it means for emergent consciousnesses. We're not sure when a dying brain stops being conscious; and we're not sure when a once-dead brain that's revived starts being conscious again. Why do we think we'd have any idea when an artificial brain awakens to consciousness?

I feel like the same ethical concerns raised in the article about accidentally reviving a person into a sensory-deprivation nightmare could also apply to accidentally generating a thinking being that can only express itself though shopping recommendations.

We're a long ways off yet from a comprehensive ethics of universal consciousness.

I "love" how many comments are one person praising pandoc for helping them in some workflow, and then commenters ripping into them for not using some other tool. I wonder if there's a corollary to some internet rule that the more generally useful a tool is, the more detractors will push for other tools to be used? It would help explain why programming language discussions get so contentious.

Pandoc is seriously a great tool! I love the way it's designed and have found it useful off and on over the years. Truly marvelous for making information available in any needed format.

I hate to be "that guy" but take a look at Rust if you haven't. It's pretty close to C but incorporates a lot of functional-style type magic. Your particular example is very explicitly supported by the `Result` type (which is an error-specific version of Haskell's `Either` type). It also has some syntax sugar and macro usage to make working with error types pretty simple.

I think this is one of the better explanations of why "enlightenment" in any field is so hard to get to, so hard to explain, yet so compulsively appealing to talk about. The framing around the joke really makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm tempted to share your writing on my other social channels! Excellently done!

"Blockchain" is a data structure, a pretty well defined one. The buzzword is basically a synonym for "distributed (, decentralized?) system." Buzzwords arr usually annoying and misused. Object-Oriented Programming as practiced isn't really what was intended by the term. Memes with cat pictures are only vaguely a subset of Dawkins' memes. "The Cloud," ugh, let's not even.

I've played a fair amount of D&D, but I've always enjoyed other RPGs quite a bit more. There's a huge variety of games out there covering every genre and playstyles ranging from the densest exercises in tactical spreadsheet juggling to storytelling fare so light it's more like improv than gaming. My tastes lean much more towards the latter. Try looking up the FATE Core system, there's a lot less dice and rules but just as much fun and adventure.

I've been considering building something very similar myself! I hope it turns out well, and do write a post about it!