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Comment Re: Manmade horrors entirely within my comprehensi (Score 1) 60

Okay but that was before we had guns. And tanks. And rockets. And FPV drones. And mechanical robot dogs that don't eat, and don't get scared or traumatized or get disease or randomly disobey.

Horses used to be some of the highest utility anmials on the planet; I'd argue much more prolific and much more important even in warfare alone than war dogs, or war elephants, or war hawks, or any combat specific animal ever has been. Why aren't we genetically engineering warhorses?

Comment Re:Additional Question (Score 2) 173

If Anthropic+OpenAI close shop tomorrow, I'll be finally able to afford the hardware to wholly replace them with local models.

If I could buy 5 more 3090s for the $600 a pop I paid for my single one back when, I'd never touch a cloud hosted provider.

Sadly, currently, venture capital is all concentrated in pricing me out of local hardware while/by subsidizing the cost of the cloud LLMs. The moment venture capital stops buying up all the compute in the world to sell to me at a loss through a cloud provider, it should make the compute affordable enough for me to actually own at home again, assuming there's still a functioning economy capable of supporting silicon manufacturing at that point.

Comment They can, but you can never trust it (Score 5, Interesting) 173

I've had many moments where I used an LLM to make something from scratch, and have been extremely impressed in how good the implementation was and how much time I spared at the (likely still very underpriced, I am expecting a rugpull there) expense it cost me.

The issue is, you do this three, four times and get reasonably functioning implementations. Often ugly, but whatever. I have use for a lot of temporary tools that really serve to explore something in a mixed analysis-prototype kinda regimen, that makes even un-maintainable proof of concept kinda thing that I can hammer out in 15 minutes of writing the spec and waiting for an hour to get a whole working program.

The issue is, the fifth time, the thing shits the bed and misunderstands something fundamental and in such a an incredibly inhumanely weird way that it can poison a knowledge base with a completely wrong conclusion, and if you don't approach the LLM wit a borderline adversarial level of suspition and mistrust, you may never notice, and particularly enabled by the high speed of development you now have thanks to the elements, you end up with it deep in the foundation of your work, potentially poisoning days and days of effort that follow.

And while the overall code quality is improving and the whole thing gets faster, and cheaper, and like, median-decision smarter, the long tail of LLM-exclusive idiot moments persist, and the moment you wholly surrender the codebase to only ever touching it via the LLMs, they'll ruin your day more and more often as time goes on. And before you know it, you're using most of your newfound productivity to chase down these fuckin' quantfart landmines, just to eventually enjoy the ultimate infuriation of the LLM telling you that thing you just found really is an obvious error it should have noticed the first time, acting like it's all good.

Sometimes, I wonder how often LLMs bury a landmine that takes a company down. They made sure there's no accountability. You're always responsible for the code you didn't write. Nobody will ever be able to come after Anthropic with the damages a customer sued them for. So, what happens when nobody is reading the code? What happens when nobody is left in the company that *can* read the code? I think this will become an increasingly frequent issue.

I do concur there's utility to LLMs and I do expect to use them for the rest of my life. I suspect the difference between me and never-LLM-ers is that, I admit it, I never enjoyed coding in the first place. It's just one of those things where, for most of my life, it was the one skill I had any degree of knack on that put bread on the table with minimal effort required on my part. Now instead of coding and hating it, I have to wipe the drool off an LLM's chin, hating it. I don't think it's elevating me as a person. I'm not sure it elevates the projects I work on. I kinda don't care. I've never been passionate about programming. I've been passionate about being able to afford food and living space. Fuck coding, and fuck coding with LLMs.

Comment Re: Manmade horrors entirely within my comprehensi (Score 1) 60

As appealing that is as a narrative from like, fantasy point of view, in practical terms... how? Why? If you desire biological weapons tailored towards any particular specific quality; ease of development, lethality, affordability, psychological effect, covertness... dogs are universally gonna be *really* low on the list of animal species sorted by how well they fit that purpose (along with all the other vertebrates). And if you just wanted a big scary animal to feed your prisoners to in a gladiator styled arena, why use dogs at all? Why not literally just breed wolves? Bears? The only special role of dogs in hands of the fascist panopticon is to give a plausible cause to searches you have no other justification for, and AI largely took that job from them.

Comment Manmade horrors entirely within my comprehension (Score 4, Insightful) 60

As much as I dislike the people behind it as well as the marketing of it, outside of completely arbitrary cruelty and negligence that I'd find extremely unsurprising from these circles, taking a couple relatively healthy breeds and trying to further fix hip dysplasia and stuff of the sort is probably gonna make for a healthier, happier dogs than basically any "pure bred" dog breeding program in existence, even if a perfectly "organic" one. There's nothing natural or sacred about dogs as a species, we've been genetically modifying them for millennia, and any effort even vaguely concerned with their actual health should have fairly easy and safe time improving it.

Submission + - Tesla does not allow people to repair their own vehicles (newrepublic.com)

smooth wombat writes: A decade ago, Rich Benoit bought a used Tesla at auction. The car had been flooded and he thought he'd repair it. When he reached out to Tesla to buy parts, they said no.

“They literally just said no,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier: ‘Hey, I’ll just buy a battery, put a battery in, put a new motor in, you know, buy some new interior parts.’ They literally said no. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I think that’s what started the journey for me.”

Benoit’s professional background was in I.T., but this launched a new career in fixing electric cars, and he also runs a now 10-year-old YouTube channel with co-founder Carl Hewitt about his work, called Rich Rebuilds. He says nearly every electric vehicle company has responded the same way Tesla did. So his new career intersected quickly with the right-to-repair movement, which argues that companies shouldn’t be allowed to refuse access to the information and equipment people need to make repairs on the products they’ve purchased.

At least nine states have passed right-to-repair laws—most of them blue, along with Texas and Kansas—and every state has debated similar laws that would require at least some manufacturers to provide the tools people need to make repairs on their products. A federal bill is sitting in the House, waiting for potential consideration in the lame-duck session, but it’s unlikely to rise to the top of Congress’s long to-do list. For Benoit, though, this is about much more than just fixing cars. “This kind of encompasses a larger overarching theory that the corporations own what you have,” he said. “You don’t own anything. You just rent it.”

Comment Re:Just in time (Score 2) 18

The new OS control still improves that game too, though; giving you for instance the option to heavily current limit the CPU when the machine is under low load that doesn't care about minimizing latency, which will increase thermal stability (and to a point, energy efficiency and overall thermal stress).

Comment I've watched that shit for 20 years with MSFT (Score 4, Interesting) 49

Grew up in one of the many countries where Microsoft "paid for" so very much of school equipment, and all that amazing "free" gear cost the schools was curriculum conveniently teaching exclusively use of Microsoft OS and complete office suite. I'm looking towards the "public benefit fund" wholly dedicated to nurturing the public impression that all these elusive jobs are one free retraining making you a loyal Anthropic user away. I've eaten many a "free" lunch over the course of my life and, as a paying Anthropic customer, I'd not feed anything they hand out for the "public benefit" to my dog, or any other living being I'd care about the welfare of.

Comment Re: Good (Score 1) 34

Even uncannily usefu things can still end up massively overvalued and overinvested into. The reasonable position has been for a long time now that LLM based AI has many uses, some of them perhaps capable of supporting monetization. That still doesn't mean the current scale and form of investment has been those things.

Comment I mean, yeah (Score 2, Interesting) 45

I don't really care for the crocodile tears about "the children" coming from some of the States seemingly trying to make their children lives hell competitively, but

the states want the company barred from developing AI models that can improve themselves unless it can ensure those models are aligned with human values.

I think this is a very reasonable legal requirement to ask of someone who keeps repeatedly publicly claiming that they're concerned about the potential of their own models to spin out of control and destroy humanity. If you, as a company, keep insisting you're doing something fundamentally hazardous to the entirely of humanity, you should be probably be legally bound to avoid doing that. Even if you were lying through your ass in the first place.

Comment Re:I don't buy that (Score 4, Insightful) 56

I think they could have been technically very much true but misleading in spirit by trying to present it as evidence that the merger has nothing to do with it. I'd expect any multi billion venture to have a plan for raising prices, and a plan for lowering prices, and a plan for like dozen other contingencies they might take depending on other factors; it's worth setting up "plans" even for things you're currently not expecting to be the thing you gonna do, because if something changes and pushes you to that decision, you can still have much of the effects mapped out and "planned for".

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