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Comment Re:Local AI (Score 2) 39

There are multiple good reasons to run local AI. Guard rails may be the most obvious, but perhaps not the most important. Other reasons include not putting your prompts in the cloud for glowies to collect, not having to deal with a model rugpull, never hitting usage limits (although they're replaced by the speed limit of your hardware), and being able to fine tune a model to not even have the guard rails in the first place. If you find something you love as much as some people loved ChatGPT 4o, you can run it forever and nobody can take away that access. You can talk about unethical schemes (as I frequently do, when writing fiction or worldbuilding an RPG campaign) and not worry about a knock on the door from a government official that thinks you *actually* want to dump ricin in the municipal water supply, or microwave your neighbor from the other side of the wall. Refusals are easier to work around in most cases than trying to anticipate cases where your efforts might be interpreted as something much more serious than they actually are.

Comment Re:Does this end them sooner, or is it irrelevant? (Score 1) 38

There seem to be some critical complexity thresholds that must be met to achieve various types of emergent complexity. Just looking at Gemma 4 alone, going from E2B to E4B to 12B just seems to get confused a bit less and know a bit more. Then somehow, going to 26B-A4B gains a very clear ability to hold more complex associations and concepts in mind. 31B is better still, and enough so that I almost want to classify 26B-A4B with the toy models (E2B, E4B, 12B), but letting 26B-A4B do a lot of reasoning seems to help considerably. 26BB-A4B with Medium reasoning effort competes with 31B using no reasoning at all. However, 31B with reasoning enabled just seems qualitatively different again. It's no longer just a stochastic parrot and a knowledge base, but it actually seems to be able to work through many problems with multiple steps, where the best 26B-A4B can do is recite what the steps of the solution are. Just like an engine, there is no substitute for displacement (or parameters in this case) but you can bolt on turbos and the like to get around *some* of the shortcomings of a smaller cylinder such that it becomes less obvious.

Comment Backups, people. (Score 1) 106

When are users going to learn that any data they only have one copy of, they're just one error (human or electronic) from having zero copies of?

Would you turn your laptop over to an intern and expect they'll never fuck it up? Because we're basically doing the same thing when we hand the keys to an Agent. The only reasonable move is to never operate on the only copy of anything, if you can possibly avoid it.

Comment "Unaware" just means latency. (Score 1) 42

The "unaware" problem is largely because the target is actively trying to anticipate and dodge, and it takes a fraction of a second to track and recalculate... by which time the target has already moved again. First they had to figure out how to target and attack. They did this. Then they had to figure out how to dodge and anticipate incoming attacks. They did this. Human combatants would (with practice) learn to compensate for this as well, which is when it really helps to anticipate what evasive maneuvers the opponent has at their disposal. The robots are still figuring this part out. But humans have the same problem, both physics and the speed of information processing mean our movements will always be "behind the curve". We deal with it by guessing where the curve is pointing, and sometimes being wrong, because going for the apparent target will *always* be wrong unless you're fighting a fence post.

Comment Re:Chinese models = Chinese Guardrails? (Score 1) 162

It could matter, if your planning requires operating at an international level, and the AI conveniently neglects to mention that outsiders practically never win court cases in China. Or even if it just has an allergy to talking about June 4, 1989 (which has showed up in the real world). The choice of using another culture's AI to avoid the biases of your own culture has merit, but it also means you won't have a lifetime of experience with the biases it *does* have.

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