- 40 Posts
- 106 Comments
4·2 days agothe Chinese government
the CCP
exposing something like Ollama to the public internet is a bad idea, full stop. there’s no need to bring “omg China scary” xenophobia into it.
16·3 days agodirect link to the YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_6kGluvINg
the shart hits the fan at 00:34
15·4 days agomake sure your optical cables are properly magnetized / demagnetized, too
if the cables are running in a north/south direction you want them magnetized with oblong polarity to the Earth’s magnetic field, but if they’re east/west they shouldn’t be magnetized at all to avoid Maxwell-Gauss feedback loops
yeah…his previous article just before this one was “Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter”
you’re a couple years late to that hype cycle, Kevin.
other brands of snake oil just say “snake oil” on the label…but you can trust the snake oil I’m selling because there’s a label that says “100% from actual totally real snakes”
“By integrating Trusted Execution Environments, Brave Leo moves towards offering unmatched verifiable privacy and transparency in AI assistants, in effect transitioning from the ‘trust me bro’ process to the privacy-by-design approach that Brave aspires to: ‘trust but verify’,” said Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, senior privacy researcher and Brendan Eich, founder and CEO, in a blog post on Thursday.
…
Brave has chosen to use TEEs provided by Near AI, which rely on Intel TDX and Nvidia TEE technologies. The company argues that users of its AI service need to be able to verify the company’s private claims and that Leo’s responses are coming from the declared model.
they’re throwing around “privacy” as a buzzword, but as far as I can tell this has nothing to do with actual privacy. instead this is more akin to providing a chain-of-trust along the lines of Secure Boot.
the thing this is aimed at preventing is you use a chatbot, they tell you it’s using ExpensiveModel-69, but behind the scenes they’re routing it to CheapModel-42, and still charging you like it’s ExpensiveModel-69.
and they claim they’re getting rid of the “trust me bro” step, but:
Brave transmits the outcome of verification to users by showing a verified green label (depicted in the screenshot below)
they do this verification themselves and just send you a green checkmark. so…it’s still “trust me bro”?
my snake oil even comes with a certificate from the American Snake Oil Testing Laboratory that says it’s 100% pure snake oil.
“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
from the wiki article about the flight:
According to court affidavits, Emerson later told investigators that he hadn’t slept in 40 hours, had been depressed, had just suffered through the death of his best friend, and had tried psychedelic mushrooms for the first time to assuage his grief just 48 hours earlier. Believing that he “was dreaming” and wanting to awaken, he pulled both of the fire suppression system handles.
I’d highly recommend the Maintenance Phase podcast. they have a recent episode specifically about “ultra-processed foods”.
the most important takeaway I had was that there is no agreed-upon definition of what an “ultra-processed” food is. it’s an “I know it when I see it” categorization. which can be fine for everyday life but it’s not how science works.
for example, pretty much everyone agrees French fries aren’t terribly healthy. but are they ultra-processed? you chop some potatoes and throw them in hot oil.
you end up with a circular definition, where “ultra-processed” really means “food that has unhealthy vibes” or “food that everyone knows is unhealthy…you know the ones”. and then studies get published saying they’re unhealthy…which, yeah, of course they are.
any time you read an article like this that profiles “everyday” people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?
because “everyday” people generally don’t bang down the door of the NYT and say “hey write an article about me”. there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about “everyday” people.
let’s see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here’s contestant #1:
Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.
and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:
Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.
cool, so he’s doing the “I had AI write a book for me” grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who’s reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.
moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:
I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.
she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.
notice they don’t mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.
contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:
Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.
the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.
a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.
unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called “Flesh and Code” that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.
the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in “sponcon” (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is “How I Built This” which is just…an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they’ve convinced people to listen to for entertainment.
now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon…but if we read the episode descriptions of “Flesh and Code”, you see this for episode 4:
Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.
going “behind the scenes” at the company is pretty clear indication that they’re producing it with the company’s cooperation. this isn’t necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it’s a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.
(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)
and it’s sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:
And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.
6·3 months ago“Hey” is an email thingy run by the company that DHH owns.
the rest of those “apps” are probably thrown in to make the list seem more complete. the real goal is to promote his paid email service.
This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.
this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction
who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?
at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”
4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?
some important context: this is the 2nd confirmed case in Florida of a disease that is widespread among deer in the rest of North America.
if you only read the headline (which uses “zombie deer” clickbait instead of the actual name of the disease) you might come away with the mistaken impression of this being a wholly new disease (especially with the mention of Florida - there are other examples of diseases migrating north from the tropics due to climate change, but this is not one of them)
The disease was first identified in 1967 in a closed herd of captive mule deer in contiguous portions of northeastern Colorado. In 1980, the disease was determined to be a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. It was first identified in wild elk and mule deer and white-tailed deer in the early 1980s in Colorado and Wyoming, and in farmed elk in 1997. The disease did not affect Canada until 1996.
…
In 2022, it had been recorded that outbreaks of CWD had shown themselves in both the United States and Canada. CWD was present in 29 states, infecting herds of moose, deer and elk in 391 different counties. Alabama (1), Arkansas (19), Colorado (27), Idaho (1), Illinois (19), Iowa (12), Kansas (49), Louisiana (1), Maryland (1), Michigan (9), Minnesota (7), Mississippi (9), Missouri (21), Montana (23), Nebraska (43), New Mexico (3), New York (1), North Carolina (1), North Dakota (7), Ohio (2), Pennsylvania (14), South Dakota (19), Tennessee (14), Texas (7), Utah (7), Virginia (10), West Virginia (5), Wisconsin (37) and Wyoming (22).
By Courier Newsroom
Bank of America announced
Joining the bank at the minimum wage is a launchpad for a long-term career.
Bank of America also offers industry-leading benefits and employee programs for all.
Bank of America’s leadership as a global employer of choice has been recognized by many external organizations
this is just a Bank of America press release dressed up to look like a news article
This is an inflammatory way of saying the guy got served papers.
ehh…yes and no.
they could have served the subpoena using registered mail.
or they could have used a civilian process server.
instead they chose to have a sheriff’s deputy do it.
from the guy’s twitter thread:
OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist).
If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.
But they didn’t stop there.
They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees.
This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated.
in context, the subpoena and the way in which it was served sure smells like an attempt at intimidation.
3·4 months agofrom another AP article:
This would be the third ceasefire reached since the start of the war. The first, in November 2023, saw more than 100 hostages, mainly women and children, freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before it broke down. In the second, in January and February of this year, Palestinian militants released 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended that ceasefire in March with a surprise bombardment.
maybe I’m cynical (OK, I’m definitely cynical) but I very much doubt this ceasefire is going to last.
there are two things in the world that Trump wants more than anything else. one is to fuck his daughter. the other is a Nobel Peace Prize.
I suspect the timing of this agreement comes from Netanyahu trying to manufacture a justification for Trump to get the Nobel. after the prize is announced (whether Trump receives it or not) they’ll kick the genocide back into high gear again.
Tony Davis explains the crisis in High Country News
…
FULL STORY: The dried-out subdivisions of Phoenix
if anyone wants to read the actual full article instead of this 3-paragraph summary: https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-10/the-dried-out-subdivisions-of-phoenix/
this link has a live feed of the ATC chatter: https://www.liveatc.net/hlisten.php?mount=kbur3_gnd_twr&icao=kbur
and you can follow the planes on https://globe.adsb.fi/ or similar sites
for anyone unfamiliar with the Los Angeles area, Burbank is one of the many airports in the region, nowhere near as large as LAX, but still sees quite a bit of airline traffic, mostly shorter domestic flights because LAX is such an international hub.
edit: here’s a news helicopter hovering nearby and probably shooting B-roll, while a United 737 comes in to land and a Southwest 737 taxis for departure: https://i.imgur.com/5pK6zEv.png
If it had the power to do so it would have killed someone
right…the problem isn’t the chatbot, it’s the people giving the chatbot power and the ability to affect the real world.
thought experiment: I’m paranoid about home security, so I set up a booby-trap in my front yard, such that if someone walks through a laser tripwire they get shot with a gun.
if it shoots a UPS delivery driver, I am obviously the person culpable for that.
now, I add a camera to the setup, and configure an “AI” to detect people dressed in UPS uniforms and avoid pulling the trigger in that case.
but my “AI” is buggy, so a UPS driver gets shot anyway.
if a news article about that claimed “AI attempts to kill UPS driver” it would obviously be bullshit.
the actual problem is that I took a loaded gun and gave a computer program the ability to pull the trigger. it doesn’t really matter whether that computer program was 100 lines of Python running on a Raspberry Pi or an “AI” running on 100 GPUs in some datacenter somewhere.
Sorry, I misunderstood — you were offering to buy me one?
apparently I misunderstood too, because it seems like your goal is purely to be an asshole and get into arguments on the internet. have a nice day.
OK. can you link to that “documented information”?
because I googled “gemma chinese government” and nothing obvious popped up. but maybe I’m just out of the loop when it comes to reasons we should be afraid of those nefarious Chinese people who work for the Chinese government and/or the (insert ominous music here) Chinese Communist Party.
uh-huh. so, a thought experiment:
a genie gives me the list of IP address ranges that the Chinese government is using when it scans the internet for potential exploits.
I’m going to run Ollama, and expose it to the public internet…except I’m going to deny all traffic to & from those specific IP ranges.
that’s still a bad idea, right? because there are many many many other possible threat actors?
this is like the difference between someone telling you “lock your doors at night because of burglars” vs “lock your doors at night because of black people”. you’re showing your whole ass when you talk about cybersecurity in general but then make the jump to “cybersecurity is important because those sneaky Asians will hack you”.