I couldn't find any of his books in any of the local libraries and I haven't used Coursera in some years... I did look over the course summary and couldn't figure out the basis of your recommendation. I'd guess something about leverage? But I don't believe in alchemy and I think the stock market has become completely detached from reality. Right now "legal tender" seems to be on the verge of "legal fiction" status.

Mod parent funny, but I'd like to know the kanji reference for "Shrine-Fork". Perhaps someone's name? The closing bit about the fox perhaps suggests an inari shrine?

The new prime minister's name consists of two kanji. The first one usually means "tall" or "expensive" and the second is generally for a "market". But that's not how people think about names? When I asked a Japanese person if it was from a market for expensive stuff or perhaps for high quality merchandise the response was "The name means nothing." (Previous prime minister was "rock break[er]".)

Related reading? Just finished It's Okay Not to Look for the Meaning of Life by Jikisai Minami. Also have the Japanese original version here, but can't input Japanese in Slashdot and the title is not even close to a direct translation...

As a native speaker of English, if I'm talking to someone else who speaks English, then I expect a one-minute message will take one minute to transmit with 100% comprehension.

Relying on my Japanese, it will take two or three minutes and comprehension will drop to about 80%. Largely depends on how well we both understand the context around the topic.

If it's a three-way session with a human translator who doesn't know the topic of the conversation, then best case is 10 minutes and lucky to get 60%.

But when you try an AI translator you should plan for half an hour and you are lucky if you get 40% of the message across.

As it applies to Mozilla, I've abandoned hope, but I'll throw out a question for the so-called wisdom of Slashdot's crowds. Lately I'm seeing freezes in Firefox. Workaround is to exit Firefox completely. CPU usage will remain very high for several minutes, but it will eventually terminate, though I usually lose my patience and just nuke it from the Task Manager. I've been unable to can the other side of the bug, the cause, but I suspect it's related to YouTube ads. Only one machine shows the problem, but I have not seen it on other Windows machines, on (Ubuntu) Linux machines, on Android smartphones, or on my lowly Chromebook, but I don't listen to many videos on any of those machines... Meanwhile, Mozilla has started nagging me to try new features that I did NOT offer to pay for. Nor was I asked what I wanted. Actually several of the new features sound like things I would pay for to make them go away.

'nuff said.

I'm quoting you against the apparent censor mods, though I think you should have made it clear that your concern is with misplaced priorities. But maybe I'm giving you too much benefit of the doubt in relation to the FP rush?

Most of the years I lived in Texas I owned a revolver... But I bought it for work. Can you believe that there was a time when you had to get some training before you could become a Private Commissioned Security Officer? Fuzzy recollection is that the instructor was a state trooper. DPS? Too long ago for me to remember the details, but I think it was only for open carry and I was supposed to have my registration with me at any such time (though I'm sure that was never checked).

No idea what AC or you are talking about. First guess would be something about eugenics?

So here's my attempted joke:

Human beings have intrinsic value. They aren't equal on any dimension, but we aren't qualified to go around judging each other using such terms as "better" or "worse".

The computer science perspective might be to call them all equivalent to UTMs. But a Biblical perspective might be to say that the "image of gawd" is also a UTM.

So how'd you like to buy an infinite tape? Or maybe you want a twelve-pack of them?

Good post and deserved to be FP.

My fantasy matchmaking website would have a business model aligned with long-term success in relationships. There would a nontrivial registration fee to establish bona fides and filter out the sock puppets. Additional payments would be based on value received from the website and should be related to income, partly to help confirm claims of personal wealth. But I've never heard of a relationship-oriented website where the website derives income from one-year anniversaries of marriage... Or even bonus payments for helpful relationship advice that may have saved a relationship.

If the market model is just sex, there are various alternatives. At least I've heard and read about them, though as a long time user of Slashdot of course I would have no relevant personal experiences.

Can't figure out your focus, but it may have something to do with virtual money (such as recursive futures). The vacuous Subject you inherited and propagated didn't help at all. Care to clarify your points? Or at least your main point? Maybe something about fiat currencies, old or new?

If you didn't actually want it, then it's a waste of money at any price--but that sure won't stop Amazon from trying to manipulate you into buying a dozen.

Out of my antipathy for Amazon now I feel like I should consider buying something at one of the other websites mentioned there. Oh wait, Shein is a spammer. Forget that one. But maybe Temu is worth a look?

Specific anecdote about my last online purchase from Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Market as translated into English). One specific feature that was most important to me, but I couldn't spot it in the product specifications. However the review summary claimed it was there. Suspicious as I am, I also checked some of the detailed reviews to try to check for sure. But when it arrived, the darn thing was missing the critical feature. Giving the merchandise and the shop lowish reviews scarcely seems helpful or fair given that Rakuten should get most of the blame...

I think there are a number of factors that are destroying retail stores. There are solution approaches, but not with the big boys (especially Amazon) standing in the way. Especially effective to bribe the politicians to keep rigging the rules of the games ever more in their favor. Solution space? "Sorry, we can't get there from here."

Thanks for clarifying. But I hope I didn't give the bastards any fresh ideas... Next thing you know they'll be including a suicide bomb inside it to go all the way beyond software-based bricking.

Whoops.

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

Okay, and you deserve the funny mod, but no one seems to have realized it must be a dead man switch. If the robovac fails to contact its masters within some time limit, then it is ordered (at a deep level) to kill itself.

(Couldn't find this obvious comment in the discussion branch, but I can's see or search All from here...)

Propagation of the vacuous Subject unrelated to your actual topic. The original AC accomplished its goal of poisoning the discussion, but the vacuous Subject can be used for any form of sock puppet food.

So my Subject is partly a joke but mostly a forced bridge trying to reach the actual story. Yeah, I actually think the Democrats should have invoked the 25th on Biden just to prove it can work. Maybe that would have scared the YOB into running for Switzerland before he could continue demolishing the so-called "people's house"?

Veering wildly back to the topic of the actual story, me thinks too many astronomers don't yet know what they are talking about, but the real problem is the collapse of journalism. Even scientific research has to be converted into some kind of controversy or horse race in hopes of getting more eyeballs...

"Is there a 25th Amendment for journalists?"

FTFM

I propose yet another dimension of comparison for the various genAIs: Which tells the best jokes?

Give each of them a link to a Slashdot story and ask for a funny joke. But I would be certain to make it clear such a joke was not my fault were I to actually post it back to Slashdot...

(Sorry, but I'm too tired just now to do so much "work". Partly because I've been too busy measuring the LLMs on such dimensions as most insincere apologies, lamest sycophancy, and peaks of fury for stupid, verbose, and irrelevant answers. There are supposed to be some dimensions for positive results, but so far those have to be measured with infinitesimal or imaginary numbers.)

Perhaps the inevitable conclusion of the FP? Not that I can disagree, but I sure wish I could see solutions to the kind of thinking that believes "Those people deserve to starve to death if they can't buy bread. Being so poor is a capital crime!" No excuses allowed.

And the "Pro-Life" people love this even when innocent children are being starved to death? Mostly Africa first, where the people don't even count as human beings, but now coming to America...

So here's my joke: A fake Tesla logo. But look close and it's a starved child on a cross. Of course I'm only joking. But I'm also sure no sane insurance company would issue a policy to cover a Tesla unless the parking space has surveillance cameras to detect anyone playing funny games with the hood ornament...