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Comment Most People Have No Idea (Score 3, Insightful) 152

I've observed high memory usage is always described as "bloat" even if they have no idea how it's actually being used. For example, Chrome/Firefox is going to keep a lot of cache in RAM. And why not? If it's available, use it for something! Unused memory is wasted memory. If there is memory pressure, the memory should be released for use, that is the important part, and Chrome/Firefox should both be doing this AFAIK. Windows itself does this as well, and if you check Task Manager you'll note it describes "Available RAM" probably because of this basic misunderstanding. RAM used for OS cache is included in this number! If you dig into Performance you can find the true Free RAM. But that number doesn't matter.

Comment Re:What's the problem? (Score 1) 169

The problem I have with that idea is that, at least for Americans who allegedly have Free Speech protections, where exactly do they get those protections? IMO if a private forum is used for public discourse, even if it is owned and operated privately, users should have at least some protections against being locked out of that platform for speech the private owner does not like if it would impact their ability to speak publicly.

Comment Re:This is why we use "agents" instead of "LLM's" (Score 1) 120

Yeah I have used Semantic Kernel to code AI in .NET and I did not give it the capability to tell the current date and time but it would be a 5 minute fix to do so since getting the current time is trivial. The bigger problem would be ensuring the offline server the AI runs on has its clock set correctly.

Comment Nope (Score 1) 120

Any modern AI model can be provided "tools" that it can use to perform various tasks or retrieve various information. The current date and time is easy to do. I can't say why the author and/or ChatGPT seems to have trouble but you can easily set up a tool to return the current date and time, instruct the AI "this will return the current date and time" and then if the user asks for it the AI will automatically leverage the tool. It's possible ChatGPT just has a lot of tools at its disposal and is getting confused about which one it should use (for example, searching online for the current date time) or perhaps OpenAI wants ChatGPT to use a less specific online search tool which can also return the current date/time when asked but sometimes ChatGPT doesn't quite search for the right thing. As someone who has leveraged AI you can provide specific tools but I expect OpenAI wants to provide far more scope to tool functionality in ChatGPT, so may provide more general tools like web search, which may cause problems.

Comment Re:I'm in two minds about this (Score 3, Informative) 20

This all boils down to a company trying to quash speech they don't like. There's really no other way to interpret this. They posted unlisted but public videos instead of making them private if they really wanted them private. They intentionally posted them on a publicly accessible website intending them for consumption by potential customers. When students started spreading this page and videos to warn about the capabilities of the company's product, the company immediately moved to try to suppress this speech by removing the videos, and then sued when it didn't work. They lied to the judge about the videos being publicly viewable (though Hanlon's Razor suggests this could have been their own incompetence in not understanding YouTube) and then lied about their lying when caught.

Comment Re:Already an option for 'advanced users' (Score 3, Interesting) 36

The problem is that alternate app stores would have had to verify all their apps with Google which defeats the purpose of being alternate. This move would allow them to actually exist again as they currently do, but it does raise the question of how this will be different from the current method of allowing alternate app stores to install apps, which has already existed in android for quite some time.

Comment Re:Working in the late '90s to early '00s (Score 1) 181

* After booting and opening all your "workworse apps", you would call a script that would request 85% to 90% of the total RAM of the machine, forcing everything to SWAP. Afterwards, slowly, things would come back from swap, but only the really usefull stuff, all the flaff (codepaths seldomly used, if at all) stayed on the swap. Made a huge difference on Win2000 and XP, less so on latter editions, as the memory manager was slowly refined.

Such software was available from the 90s or even earlier and was ALWAYS a scam. It was always made for the "look your free RAM number went up" selling point while ignoring the fact that such software forces Windows to dump cache to free the required space, or as you said swap things to disk. Your PC would run slower as cache was rebuilt, and things pulled back from swap as you needed them, and in the end you would just slow down your PC for nothing. Having extra data in RAM hurts nothing. Normal use of RAM would see seldom used data in memory you're concerned about swapped anyway when needed without needing to violently reorganize RAM and swap. There's a reason why MS saw these products being sold over years if not decades and chose not to integrate the behavior into Windows themselves. As you said memory management has improved and it has done so without needing to integrate this behavior. What MS has done is deemphasize "Free RAM" in Task Manager which these apps boosted and emphasized "Available RAM" which includes both free RAM and Windows cache. I've always assumed this was done in response to these types of "tools" to better emphasized how RAM is actually treated by the system.

Plenty of info online, tried to find a good video or something, all the ones I'm seeing are about different memory scams.

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