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Comment Global (Score 1) 94

We are a GLOBAL economy that is based on information. Call it Post Industrial. Information moves at the speed of light.

Pretending we Americans live in a giant castle surrounded by a huge Moat (aka Oceans) isn't going to protect us from what is happening elsewhere. Offshoring is going to kill our economy.

We have a dying generation who still sees the economy as post WWII, because that is the world we grew up in (Last of the boomers here).

We had better get used to it. Build things better, faster, cheaper.

Comment Re:Reminder that you are the product (Score 3, Informative) 26

"We're midflight in our data licensing deals and still learning, but what we have seen is that Reddit data is highly cited and valued"

In case anyone has any misconceptions, its "Reddit data", not "Reddit's users contributions" or "community" or any other words people use to convince themselves they are part of something important,

Reddit gains an irrevocable, sub-licensable, royalty-free license for user-created content posted on its site. So while the term "Reddit data" is somewhat inaccurate, it is a passable approximation of the truth. The more correct term would be "Data that Reddit has irrevocable, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to". But where's the fun in saying that? :-)

"Reddit data" does obscure the fact that the Reddit user retains full copyright ownership of their comments. So if a user wished to, they could independently license their content to GOOG, AMZN, META, MSFT et al. Theoretically, all the other users in a Reddit thread could make same decision, cutting Reddit out of the licensing loop entirely.

But the logistics of organising this are onerous. Even if a few crucial users in a thread refuse to license content, there will be 'gaps' and intelligibility and utility for AI training will suffer.

But if replies briefly quote the specific content they are responding to (as I am doing here), the context becomes much more clear. In that case, individual comments become much more intelligible and useful. Legally speaking, there should be no problem here because brief quotations fall under fair use.

Concievably, GOOG and other browsers manufacturers could offer to store your user-generated content in a browser repository ("keep a record what you wrote", like Windows Recall) or in the cloud, with the option of licensing the content to GOOG. They could also generate AI-summaries of the context you were responding to.

Comment Why the US? (Score 1) 255

Why don't they strike their beloved South Korean home market with these "value-strengthening" ads first? :-/

Does it violate an unspoken social contract the Korean people have with their chaebols?

A few weeks ago, my 2 year-old Samsung 'The Frame' TV proposed new TOS to me. I think I rejected it... :-\

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Your first assumption is correct, my usual ingredient panels are in English. Allergens are helpfully highlighed.

Yes, I occasionally point my phone at English ingredient panels - but only to blow up minute fonts, not interpret their information.

(No, I am not willing to learn Korean - I have an AI for that. Even if I did learn, a little knowledge can be a dangerous. Say I recognized Korean representations for milk and cheese and whey. But then missed the significance of the Korean word for sodium caseinate)

Comment Re: Or... (Score 1) 159

I guess I should clarify. In addition to "just the W2" there's also a monthly, quarterly, or yearly payroll tax report that goes to the IRS, along with a whopping large check for the withholding, as part of normal payroll processing. Different companies do different reporting standards, of course. But they're getting the data a lot more often than you think, just from the money paid in *during* the year, before the return is filed for.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Anybody else using mailchimp?

14 years ago I picked mailchimp because it could read RSS feeds from my Knights of Columbus blog and send out daily digests.

We had a small form in an iframe allowing people to sign up to get the digests.

This year, something broke in the "detect a human" code for that small form, and I am getting hundreds of thousands of signups of the form "valid email address" "gibberish first name" "gibberish last name" and I can't figure out why.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Looks like I have set off your LLM allergy. Or is it simply an Altman allergy? Well, there's no accounting for taste.

Yes, I have a learning difficulty, you insensitive oddity! I don't understand that things like whey and sodium caseinate derive from milk if the entire ingredient panel is in Korean. And have you ever seen the *amount* of ingredients in Korean processed food? Pages! Your typical 'Whole Foods' product it is not.

  So ... I just tell the AI my allergy, take a picture and have it sort everything out and give me a yea/no answer. And move on to the next product. I could lovingly decipher Hangul or/and brush-up on food chemistry. But I don't like unnecessary cruelty, especially on myself.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

:-) Different strokes for different folks. My 3-year old $200 Android phone does nothing of that sort you experience with the default camera app. Moreover, I don't have to interpret "denatured whey protein" as pertinent to my diary allergy -- the AI picks it up and warns me.

My experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
summarize documents
research diseases, medication and side-effects
review CT scan images for issues of concern
generate tour itineraries
translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
explain code
generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Like you, I have more own interest in my experience than OpenAI's or other AI vendor claims. And my experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

  1. generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
  2. summarize documents
  3. research diseases, medication and side-effects
  4. review CT scan images for issues of concern
  5. generate tour itineraries
  6. translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
  7. explain code
  8. generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
  9. generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Yes, LLM AIs tend to behave like a skilled, over-confident intern, whose work is useful but must be double-checked. Call it slop if you want, but its useful slop. It got me past the initial inertial friction with VBA for my test analysis project. I had to correct flaws in code structure and parsing strategy. But it ended my 20-year procrastination. Now I have a 1000-line VBA codebase that I am familiar with enough to reuse in other projects.

You ask how does "checking multiple slop hallucinations against each other" help? Comparing two hallucinations will cause the "disagree" alert to light up, won't it? It's not like the two AIs are coordinating via seance.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

I was in Bali, Indonesia earlier on, and OpenAI translated to Balinese. Also, OpenAI claims it can translate Turkmenistani food labels. And Google indicate Turkmenistan seems to be catching up in food labelling standards. Entities in the world move ahead of the pigeon holes we slot them in :)

Of course AI makes mistakes. That's why you must exercise your judgement. Also, use multiple AI to check each other's work where important.

Yes, 20 years. What can I say? I really hate VBA. They made me employee of the month after I turned it in.

If AI can translate between me to VBA, Balinese and Korean, what else could I call it but general purpose?

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