Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 24

LLMs are not "statistical models" (randomness only even comes into play in the final conversion from latent space to token space because latent space is high dimensional, token space is low dimension, you need a rounding mechanism, and a "noisy" rounding mechanism works best; what you're thinking of, by contrast, is Markov models). And you cannot just "get lucky and randomly solve an unsolved math problem"; that's not how any of this works.

Comment Re:Mathematician commentary included (Score 1) 24

Also, it's silly that people are acting like "all problems but this one were already in the literature". AI has solved a whole slew on Erdos problems, and only a fraction had anything to do with existing literature.

And even in "existing literature" examples, it's not "nobody ever thought to search before" as if all mathematicians are morons, or that mathematicians adore putting out Erdos problem solutions without claiming them, It's that nobody had ever thought to apply an obscure technique from a given piece of literature to said Erdos problem.

The simple fact is, AI has gotten much better at solving unsolved math problems than humans are. It's simply another field that it's taking over, the same way it has been taking over programming. One can debate how much is "clever insight" vs. "just chugging away at possibilities until it hits on ways to advance toward the goal", but ultimately, that's a distraction from the fact that: it's getting really good at solving math problems that humans have spent decades on without success.

Comment Re:Nobody admits it: supply chain attacks are EASY (Score 1) 31

Of course, I've always said that if you have untrusted users you are fucked. LPEs are a dime a dozen and can break anything, even VMware tenant separation.

The problem is, you're going to be opening connections outward, and you might be compromised that way. Say, through your browser. As long as LPE remains possible then that opens the door to owning your whole system, to say nothing of the damage they can do to your data even without one.

Comment Re:Nobody admits it: supply chain attacks are EASY (Score 1) 31

There's another way to mitigate this, and it's ideologically difficult for a lot of Open Source people to accept...

The big problem is not ideological.

but you'll have to diverge from the tried and true path. AI makes this much easier: instead of using $popular_thing_everyone_uses, you use something else - either COTS or roll-your-own. Yes, it might be bugs, and yes, they might be security bugs, but unless they're painfully obvious issues where you didn't do your due diligence, it's going to be a more obscure target which will require more targeted attacks.

Humans are vulnerable to making the same kinds of errors, and security is hard, so you're going to either be highly likely to make predictable errors that are going to be easy to find or you're going to need to pull in some libraries to handle security.

No, this doesn't solve anything and it's 100% "security through obscurity".

IOW it's not a useful suggestion, especially now that there are exciting new tools for finding vulnerabilities rapidly.

Comment Re:Another point for Firefox and against Google (Score 1) 48

I gave up on NoScript a long time ago. Too difficult to use. Too many broken sites.

I have to use Chromium to access a few sites which are important, like for paying certain bills. Those sites don't work in Firefox with or without noscript; even when I enable all scripts, they still don't work. Anything not critically important which doesn't work when I enable all the scripts I'm willing to enable, I just don't go to, and I'm better off.

Comment chips that don't exist for data centers that don't (Score 1) 65

The market is a wet dream of manufacturers, of course. Already knowing that for all the forseable future however much you can produce will be sold at very good prices - amazing.

Until the house of cards comes down. Most of the stuff ordered is, as someone put well into a meme, money that doesn't yet exist buying chips that don't yet exist for data centers that have not yet been built.

Comment Re:Right (Score 2) 48

Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Word can't even draw text while scrolling at speeds above a crawl because its rendering engine is such pathetic trash, so very much no. It also can't keep its UI drawing reliably if left running for a few days, even after windows are forced to refresh some elements won't draw until every window is closed (since they all run under one executable like it's the fucking 1980s because Microsoft doesn't trust their inter-process clipboard functionality to work correctly) and so on. Every part of office is hot garbage, and Word is absolutely not an exception.

Comment Re:Strange crossovers (Score 1) 115

Removing server features from workstations was a step ahead of the pack.

Into a hole.

It's an upgrade

It isn't.

Apple has all the money, they can afford to do both things and it's weird they haven't. Having a meaningful management system is a huge part of selling computers, to corporate and educational users. Back before all computers were on an IP network, when they didn't have security beyond antivirus, you could get away with not offering management.

Those who have demands closer to the old day workstation solutions are better served by other OS'es, but we're a blip on the consumer axis, not a norm.

Apple has a solid alternative to Windows for business use, if only they offered a full suite. They could be digging into that market. That's what NeXTStep really was supposed to be, a Macintosh-ish system for business use. Their prices were even more hallucinatory than Apple's at the time, which prevented any real adoption more than any lack of software, especially since they had very good compatibility with other environments (including, for example, a Netware client.) It's quite confusing what made them think they could get those kinds of dollars for a 68k when the PC was just getting fast. We can't ask Jobs now, though.

Comment Re:Question (Score 2) 56

It is no more "theft" than you are.

I'll never get over how many people I watch online complain about how they'll never use AI because "it's theft", and then post photoshops they made with pictures they don't own, when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many artists I've seen complain about how AI is theft, and then paint something with "inspiration images" sitting in front of them while they paint, with their painting effectively being a blended composite of their inspiration images - when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many writers I've seen write the exact same derivative stuff that they also read, down to the same phrasings at times, just packaged in a new plot with new characters, and yeah, same story.

Even a person who isn't *directly* copying things that they're literally looking at is still the sum of their experiences. And it's rather hard to say that the breadth of human experience is broader than an LLM (whose "breadth of experiences" is "the whole world's outputs"), outside of the things that relate directly to having a body in a way which a blind / deaf / quadraplegic / whatnot person wouldn't grasp well.

And on that latter note, most people underestimate how well e.g. the congenitally blind actually grasp colours and the like. They're far better at reasoning about colours - similar to the sighted - than they are at knowing what colours things are. One study I read for example asked about polar bear fur. A good fraction of the congenitally blind subjects answered that they didn't know what colour it was. When asked to guess, about half of them answered that it was white so that it could blend into the snow, while the other half wrongly guessed black, but did so on the assumption that they'd want to soak up light to help stay warm. And actually in reality, both are true - to an outside observer, the exterior scattering of visible light without pigment makes them look white, but it's also designed to trap non-visible light up against black skin to absorb it for warmth. A sighted person, just seeing "white fur" and not knowing the latter property, might not have thought to even consider that.

To a LLM, our bodily experiences are akin to a blind person asked about colour: only knowing for sure things that they've learned about them directly, but still quite adept at reasoning about them.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely."

Working...