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spadufed

52 karma · joined November 1, 2023

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spadufed··on The False Promise of Digital Public Squares Was Always a Scam
I'm pretty bullish on fediverse-like concepts in the long term even if US social becomes a dystopian hellscape.
spadufed··on Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
In the modern world, chips are how you fight wars.
spadufed··on Yagrad – 100 SLOC autograd engine with complex numbers and fixed DAG
What are some common examples of complex numbers in these sorts of applications?
spadufed··on Amazon is adopter Matter as open standard for video casting
Amazon, one of the founders of Matter, is the first to add support for Matter casting, a feature of the Matter smart home standard that allows you to control TVs and streaming devices straight from a connected app. At CES this week, Amazon announced that Matter casting support is coming to its Prime Video app so that you can cast content to Amazon hardware devices.
spadufed··on AI is owned by Big Tech
Any effort to change this has to be centered around open, crowd-sourced datasets.
spadufed··on Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster
So we have an admission that folks were putting other people's names on the lists?
spadufed··on 'A-team' of math proves a critical link between addition and sets
If anybody's interested in learning more about Lean, he's been posting his experiences with the project over at @tao@mathstodon.xyz
spadufed··on Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice
> Is there some sense in which this isn't obvious to the point of triviality?

This is maybe a pedantic "yes", but is also extremely relevant to the outstanding performance we see in tasks like programming. The issue is primarily the size of the correct output space (that is, the output space we are trying to model) and how that relates to the number of parameters. Basically, there is a fixed upper bound on the amount of complexity that can be encoded by a given number of parameters (obvious in principle, but we're starting to get some theory about how this works). Simple systems or rather systems with simple rules may be below that upper bound, and correctness is achievable. For more complex systems (relative to parameters) it will still learn an approximation, but error is guaranteed.

I am speculating now, but I seriously suspect the size of the space of not only one or more human language but also every fact that we would want to encode into one of these models is far too big a space for correctness to ever be possible without RAG. At least without some massive pooling of compute, which long term may not be out of the question but likely never intended for individual use.

If you're interested, I highly recommend checking out some of the recent work around monosemanticity for what fleshing out the relationship between model-size and complexity looks like in the near term.

spadufed··on Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI [video]
Folks should be incredibly skeptical of videos like this. The major players working to capitalize on this technology have demonstrated time and again a complete willingness to lie to us about the capabilities of their models. It's become almost a requirement to appear competitive.
spadufed··on Common Voice
Crowdsourced datasets like this and the ones produced by the OpenAssistant project could easily become the ONLY way to build foundational models if the courts decide that what OpenAI and co are doing is not Fair-Use. I don't think I would call this scenario unlikely, either.
spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
I mean, asking them to plop their cli docker setup into a yaml file isn't exactly a difficult task. I think it's probably more correct to consider docker-compose an integral part of docker rather than a superfluous abstraction layer.
spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
They absolutely do not. This is more of a state of the ecosystem sort of problem. I think a lot of developers were wary of getting into how some of the more esoteric AP objects should work. It's important to note too that while we have a standard in the form of AP a lot of the decisions about norms for these less common message types simply have not been made, but we are definitely moving in that direction as more services add AP integration.
spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
I haven't seen anybody else talk about what the experience of following somebody from another service is like on the user-end.

Following pixelfed accounts from Mastodon is actually fairly straightforward. You simply see them as a tweetlike message with an image attached. One caveat there is that Mastodon does not allow for as many attached images as pixelfed, and I believe will simply drop any images after a certain point (I want to say max size is 4).

Following a peertube account or channel (you can do either) will show a post whenever new videos are uploaded. You can find the OP on mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@jeena@tube.jeena.net. One neat bit of functionality is that if you put all of your peertube follows into a single list, you've basically got a chronological subscribed page (a la youtube). Also take note that comments can be left on either the peertube site or from within mastodon.

spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
I think what you're describing IS activitypub. The major issue is that each implementor has a preferred message type and only basic functionality of the others. I've posted this elsewhere in the thread, but Lemmy top-level posts are implemented as Pages and communities are implemented as Groups. Currently Mastodon has implemented both but with limited functionality. There is a rework of Groups that is listed as in-progress on the roadmap (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).

I think the way we ended up in this situation is that there are quite a few types of messages in the AP protocol, and up until recently the up and coming ones were seeing pretty limited use. Without another service to test against, I can understand why a lot of fediverse developers have opted to kick that can down the road. That said, we are definitely in the era of determining the defacto use case for each of these message abstractions, and I suspect that will be a slow process and involve a lot of back and forth between projects.

spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
To expand on this a little the two services make use of different well-defined objects in the AP standard. Lemmy communities are Groups in AP and top level posts are implemented as Pages (rather than Notes). As it stands Mastodon only has basic support for these two but a rework of Groups is listed on the roadmap as in-progress (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).
spadufed··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
That's because it's a pretty silly way to look at things in a world of docker compose.
spadufed··on How to tackle unreliability of coding assistants
This is the way forward imo. Particularly as we've started to flesh out the relationship between model size and true context reliability. We've found that raw context-window size is not representative of what the model can actually consistently recall, but we've also found the recall is consistently reliable out to a point. I suspect more robust theoretical models around superposition will move us a long way towards understanding the limits of context reliability rather than what would currently be an experimental approach.
spadufed··on Neil Gaiman on the future of the internet
This also brings to mind the concept of federated search. Frequently brought up as a thought experiment, but it's a shame it's not discussed more seriously.
spadufed··on Noninvasive theta-burst stimulation enhances skill learning
I do wonder how this may be different between things like physical or musical skills vs something more academic.
spadufed··on Show HN: AI Garage Sale – Haggle with AI to buy real products
Very cool concept but the cost given by the AI seems to be different from what you're tool is picking up. For example, I've gotten it down to $20 on an item but the interface is showing $24.
spadufed··on Linexjlin/GPTs: leaked prompts of GPTs
On the other hand, they're bringing a large chunk of the newly minted market of thin wrappers around ChatGPT inhouse. At this point this is an outsized portion of the "AI" ecosystem but has always been just low-hanging fruit for OpenAI. They've been saying as much themselves for quite a while now.
spadufed··on Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI
> charitable mission of the nonprofit of which they are the board

This exactly. Folks have completely forgotten that Altman and Co have largely bastardized the vision of OpenAI for sport and profit. It's very possible that this is part of a larger attempt to return to the stated mission of the organization. An outcome that is undoubtedly better for humanity.

spadufed··on YouTube's ad blocker crackdown is getting harder to dodge
I've been saying for forever that things like creator coops and PeerTube are a match made in heaven. A major barrier right now is that services like Nebula are rolling their own software and without interoperability the lack of any sort of discovery algorithm is a clear failing. With interoperability, however, things could return to a place where word of mouth across a distributed set of social networks is a reasonable way to build an audience. Long term I think the return of content discovery algorithms are inevitable but in the form of open and tweakable algorithms where engagement does not necessarily mean ad views.