I just....

used git.

For what it's supposed to be used for.

LLAMA was [illegally] released into the public three years ago (to the day - March 3, 2023), and it's estimated that ten years of AI improvements happened in the subsequent 6 months. People were doing all sorts of things with LLMs that meta hadn't thought of, or didn't have time to develop. Such as text-to-audio, local LLM use, and automated manuscript generation.

All these attempts at monetizing the LLMs are, at the same time, holding back the progress of AI development. If OpenAI wants to leap ahead of the competition, they should put their language model online and see what the community comes up with.

I get it - training a LLM takes roughly $100 million for the initial dataset, and companies need to recoup this expense.

Still, I'm saddened that I can only use the system for purposes that the company approves of, and in ways that they have already thought of.

There's a lot of potential there, and we're not making good use of that.

"Apple's privacy standards"

Literally the only company I've ever dealt with professionally that utterly refuses to publish or provide a GDPR compliance statement.

Honestly, are people still buying this bullshit?

Yes, I'd like the "I" in "AI" to mean "Intelligence".

So where you do brute-force pattern matching, AI is useful.

Where it needs to think, it's worthless.

Gotcha.

If only we'd known this before...

Yes, because those are totally a real thing.

My ZX Spectrum booted in the time it took to flash the screen (less than 1 second I'd say).

If you had the Interface 2 it could boot directly into a game (via ROM chips that overrode the memory bus to present their data), so even faster.

Framework laptop.

Not long at all.

The restart/reboot is ridiculously fast.

Resume from suspend/hibernate is ridiculously fast.

The BIOS transferring to the bootloader? Seconds.

Honestly, it's like being in the year 2000 again. And my computer does what I say. Mostly because it's Linux.

I can say without fear of ambiguity or modesty that I am very much after reinventing the wheel. In fact, I've lost count over the number of wheels I've reinvented thus far, and I don't think I'm done yet.

I have a personal project where I'm building clones of 8 bit computers (Apple II, Commodore 64 and such. There's even a YouTube channel). It's an FPGA the gets loaded with a core containing a RiscV CPU (running a custom multitasking OS) and an 8 bit CPU running whatever the original computer did.

It takes about 40ms for the core to get loaded into the FPGA. From that point, it takes about 6ms until everything is initialized, the 32 bit OS gets loaded into memory, and the 8 bit computer gets put out of reset and begins its boot. The Apple II needs about 300ms to complete its startup routine, the vast majority of which is taken by issuing the "beep" it does when turned on.

The output is to an HDMI monitor. That takes around 3 seconds to sync on the image, which means that by the time any picture appears on screen, the computer has long finished boot. I'm seriously considering manually postponing the 8-bit startup just so the user has a chance to catch it happening.

As I said before elsewhere:

How are you going to detect anything but, say, a handful of well-known STLs? And then draw attention to those by banning them?

How are you then going to stop people doing the inevitable thing: Printing innocent-looking prints that can be broken down into useful parts for "banned" items?

People will literally take the latter as a challenge, and build weapons, etc. that use nothing more than standard replacement parts from other devices so you can say "Oh, that's just an X part from an innocent Y item", but when you combine them you make something banned.

How are they ever going to detect that? They're not.

It's going to be one of those laws they pin on you AFTER the police raid your illicit gun workshop to pin extra charges on you, and will require INTENTION rather than just the action itself.

But what will actually happen is this will quietly die a death somewhere because everyone realises that it's basically unenforceable.

You are not telling the whole story here.

I'm currently in the middle of a $15,000 purchase dispute with a Chinese vendor (for a CNC system). The device arrived non-functional, the merchant's customer service is wildly non-useful and time consuming, and after 3 months of dikking around I've decided to send it back.

I have clear E-mail evidence from the merchant acknowledging the problem, the CC company yanked back the payment and is forcing the merchant to issue an RMA for the device.

The credit card company isn't on my side, nor are they on the side of the merchant - they are on the side of honest transactions, and they police those transactions for me.

Twice I've had my CC info stolen at a restaurant(*), the CC company detected fradulent purchases, and issued me a new card. A couple of times they incorrectly detected fraud, and a quick phone call sorted that out.

All of this is value added to using a credit card.

It's not *just* rent seeking on transactions, it's also providing a service: "peace of mind" in your purchases.

If anyone is interested, ask ChatGPT about the Fair Credit Reporting Act as regards to dispute resolution. If you receive a defective product, you have 60 days from the statement (not the purchase, but the statement) to initiate a dispute, and there are several "states" the dispute can be in, such as "vendor is working with the customer to resolve the issue".

It's not just rent seeking, the extra 5% CC fee for the purchase is for "peace of mind".

(*) Don't let the CC out of your sight. If the waitress takes the CC away from your table, she can easily write down the number and security code before bringing it back.

I'll eat it.

Plenty of people will eat it.

That's not the problem.

The problem is: Why would I pay more for something worse than just cheap meat?

It's the PRICE that needs to change. I'll eat synth-meat if it's half the price of normal meat, and doesn't result in malnutrition if I eat a lot of it, no problem at all.

It's only when you treat datacentres or AI as something special that the problems start.

It's just another app, why does that mean they get free reign on polluting rivers, or first dibs on power provision, or are able to override planning laws that have been in place for a hundred years? It's nonsense.

It's not AI that's causing those problems. It's people literally corrupting the law for quick profit, as always.

If there's no power / permission / water for a new hospital? Guess what? We shouldn't be authorising that for a datacentre in the same place either.

The more you look, the more you'll find "wrong". It doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong, because we just don't look at healthy people and then leave something that looks "wrong" untreated.

It's why the House-style diagnostics of rare conditions is so complex and specialist, because everywhere you look you'll find something wrong and you have no idea if that's a symptom, a quirk, or nothing at all.

It's part of why cancer diagnoses went through the roof. Because we started routinely screening for cancers. Of course, that's a good idea, and early intervention in critical. But there's no real ethical way of knowing how many of those interventions were entirely unnecessary. But cancer-detection goes through the roof, so why aren't we doing anything to treat this rampant epidemic of cancer, so we treat every minor case, and actually... all we're doing is finding more things that we think we need to "fix" in everyone we look at.

The most dangerous things are conditions that need to be treated before symptoms present. Because what happens is we perform surgeries and treatments - we have to - but we have no idea what would have happened if it hadn't. For everything else, we just wait until the patient bothers to say "Oh, and I've been having trouble with my shoulder". Because without symptoms, most things aren't really that important.

It's the symptomless STDs, cancers, etc.that turn deadly before we can find them that are the most dangerous conditions, and not only kill us but actually force us to take risks to detect and treat them because we just can't take the chance.

I have to say, that I'm fortunate enough that I live my life by symptoms alone and things work out for me. If something were to hurt or change significantly and unexpectedly, I'd be going to my doctor. But otherwise I don't bother. My immune system bats just about anything away. I don't have any long-term conditions. I'm on no medication whatsoever. Hell, doctors just keep de-registering me because I don't use their services often enough (last time was for a COVID vaccine and I had to sign up with a new doctor just to do that).

But I'm sure that if I went to a doctor and made enough of a fuss, and especially if I got to that "hospital full of specialist diagnosticians" stage, I'd discover that I have a bunch of stuff wrong with me. We're biological animals under physical and mental stress, ageing enormously compared to our historical cousins, in a horrible, stressful environment (toxins, dangers, repetitive movements, physical strain, etc.), with easy access to grotesquely unhealthy food, pollutants, toxins, etc. in our daily lives. Of course there will be variations and things wrong.

But we can't stop looking because of that. We just have to learn when things need treatment and don't. And that's on the medical community to realise. Maybe if certain places didn't hold them liable for EVERY TINY LAPSE, they'd be able to get some science done on that.