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bastien2

122 karma · joined May 30, 2024

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bastien2··on The data that powers AI is disappearing fast
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bastien2··on The data that powers AI is disappearing fast
There is yet to actually be a use case for chatbots that isn't profit-motivated.

The entire effort to find a problem for them to solve has meant ecological harms at a scale that makes crypto mining seem trivial.

The data required has copyright and other commercial use restrictions on it. Much of the data being overtly restricted was never available for harvest to start with.

Given these facts, bringing and end to the LLMs an snaping techbros out of their latest delusion is a good thing.

bastien2··on Proton Mail Adds an Open-Source AI Writing Assistant to Take on Gmail
Oh come on, Proton, you're supposed to be better than this. Chatbots are proven privacy-violation engines. If you're going to act like Google, there's zero reason to pay for your services.
bastien2··on TinyPod – Apple Watch case with scroll wheel
Oh look, carcinisation for Apple products.

ipodisation: the tendency for non-iPod Apple products to evolve iPod-like features over time.

bastien2··on I am starting an AI+Education company
Chatbots can't teach critical thought or ethics. They need to be able to understand language and bias first, and that's an as yet unsolved problem.

Until a chatbot is provably correct and ethical in its output, it must not be used to teach.

Case in point: the slop image attached to the announcement has the typical malformed hands and ghoulish faces problems.

bastien2··on Annual pre-pay and marketing budgets
This smacks of the infinite growth fallacy.
bastien2··on Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do. (2019)
That really is the solution: stop misusing phone numbers as secure channels.
bastien2··on Goldman Sachs: AI Is overhyped, expensive, and unreliable
Just remember: the only reason they threw a trillion dollars at genAI is because they thought they could lay off their entire creative staff
bastien2··on Apple Vision Pro U.S. Sales Are All but Dead, Market Analysts Say
It's more that VR/AR is a high-cost solution still in search of a problem that makes it profitable.

So far the only market for VR is niche entertainment. VRC is fun, but VR games have been arounds for decades and never gotten past novelty.

AR has value as an accessibility tool because it can get around the high cost of some infrastructure changes. But like all accessibility tools, profit-focused eyeballs see it as a small, low-margin market. Enabling human rights is not considered profit.

bastien2··on Intuit to Cut 10% of Employees in Latest Round of Tech Layoffs
AI is the last thing you want involved in accounting. Book-keeping and tax preparation are exercises in precision at a very high level of semantic knowledge. You have to understand why money flows through a company. These are skills the chatbots are proven incapable of demonstrating. Moreover, the parts that can and should be automated already have been for the last 15 or so years, with automatic transaction importing and prefiltering tools (none of which used chatbots).

The average business owner is usually overwhelmed with the backend of running a business by the time they come to me. If a client told me they used accounting software with AI features, the first thing I'd do is fully audit their books and review any filings done using chatbot-affected records.

bastien2··on Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com
This just in: Google Spyware has features accessible only to Google.
bastien2··on Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers
We've been here before. OE firmware needs to be assumed hostile and either replaced with open source aftermarket firmware, or the device sequestered in a subnet with no internet access.
bastien2··on Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers
There is vendor-side infrastructure to receive the information. This wasn't a lapse in planning/testing. This was intentional.

Stop giving corporations the benefit of the doubt.

bastien2··on No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
Except that doesn't work in the real world, where encrypted and authenticated boot disks are increasingly common.

So you'll need a significant amount of code that isn't the permanently-resident kernel that has enough device support to access keys and decrypt and authenticate what holds the kernel that will launch the OS.

IOW, you'll just have to reinvent a bootloader anyway.

Or you can address the problems with GRUB, extend it to do what you need, and avoid doing the traditional linux folly of Yet Another Unnecessary Reinvention.

Or was systemd vendor lock-in not enough for your shareholders?

bastien2··on For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free
Unfortunately they did it by switching to natural gas instead of the massive sustainable buildout they needed. Good job on reducing thorium and uranium emissions, at least.
bastien2··on Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Geometric Perspective
You can't "enhance" from zero. LLMs by design are not capable of reason.

We can observe LLM-like behaviour in humans: all those reactionaries who just parrot whatever catchphrases mass media programmed into them. LLMs are just the computer version of that uncle who thinks Fox News is true and is the reason your nieces have to wear long pants at family gatherings.

He doesn't understand the catchphrases he parrots any more than the chatbots do.

Actual AI will require a kind of modelling that as yet does not exist.

bastien2··on 7-Eleven is reinventing its food business to be more Japanese [video]
I am so here for bringing konbini life to the U.S.
bastien2··on Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch
Higher frames rates are good, when you actually get more frames. But motion smoothing is a fraud. It interpolates additional frames. In order to make things look consistent, it has to apply addition filtering to the original frames. The result is you get less information overall, not more.

Even worse, it tends to ruin production values when it's a film with a DoP who knows how to exploit the characteristics of film.

It's like interlaced video. Yeah, you motion that looks like 50 or 60 fps, but the actual information is still only 25 or 30 fps, and it's degraded due to the effects of interlacing.

Motion smoothing is this century's interlacing, and in a few decades we'll have archivists running video through a motion desmoothing counterpart to QTGMC.

bastien2··on Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch
The latest in a long line of utterly stupid decisions by Roku demonstrating their lack of competency.

Why anyone willingly choses Roku anymore is beyond me.

bastien2··on Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" using GPT-4o
The irony of using a chatbot to gain insight into the current problems with the job market
bastien2··on HB100 Doppler Radar Module Teardown
"delve"
bastien2··on How to generate realistic people in Stable Diffusion
only a prompter would think that looks realistic
bastien2··on MTV news website goes dark, archives pulled offline
Exactly why piracy is and always has been at the core of historical preservation
bastien2··on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
Well this definitely won't get exploited at all or lead to new strict limits on what Harfbuzz/WASM can do
bastien2··on In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings (2019)
They're bad for cars, so the establishment is decrying them as ruining America. I went two years with nothing more than a carshare membership when I lived in a 5+1 because I was three blocks from a grocery store and that three blocks had every type of restaurant I frequent. As soon as I moved back into a "traditional" American residential neighborhood, I needed a car again.
bastien2··on Will We Run Out of Data? Limits of LLM Scaling Based on Human-Generated Data
That's because humans learn in stages of growing complexity and semantic depth, and LLMs don't.

The chatbots do what infant humans do: mimic what it "sees" until it gets the pattern consistently matching what it saw without any capacity to understand what it is doing.

Once humans have that part done, whole new layers of semantic learning kick in and create the critical analyses we perceive as "intelligence".

LLMs, as a consequence of their design, lack those deeper layers. They are not artificially intelligent at all. Rather, they're the latest iteration of what centuries ago gave us steam-powered songbirds.

bastien2··on French court orders Google, Cloudflare, Cisco to poison DNS to stop piracy
A great example of why you should be running your own validating recursor instead of relying on a third party
bastien2··on What If We Recaption Billions of Web Images with LLaMA-3?
Only if you have actual humans reviewing the output while being paid livable wages (i.e., you don't get to use digital sweatshops for this).

But considering Google has had over a decade to get autogenerated captioning right and they consistently fail at it, I doubt any slopshop is going to produce worthwhile output.

bastien2··on Firefox 127
Still haven't fixed the white flash
bastien2··on Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?
You don't. You use a full-text indexer and normal search tools. A chatbot is only going to decrease the integrity of query results.