• 8 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The PC I’m using as a little NAS usually draws around 75 watt. My jellyfin and general home server draws about 50 watt while idle but can jump up to 150 watt. Most of the components are very old. I know I could get the power usage down significantly by using newer components, but not sure if the electricity use outweighs the cost of sending them to the landfill and creating demand for more newer components to be manufactured.




  • Last time I looked it up and calculated it, these large models are trained on something like only 7x the tokens as the number of parameters they have. If you thought of it like compression, a 1:7 ratio for lossless text compression is perfectly possible.

    I think the models can still output a lot of stuff verbatim if you try to get them to, you just hit the guardrails they put in place. Seems to work fine for public domain stuff. E.g. “Give me the first 50 lines from Romeo and Juliette.” (albeit with a TOS warning, lol). “Give me the first few paragraphs of Dune.” seems to hit a guardrail, or maybe just forced through reinforcement learning.

    A preprint paper was released recently that detailed how to get around RL by controlling the first few tokens of a model’s output, showing the “unsafe” data is still in there.




  • Yeah, the company I was working at got bought out and then they layed the entire tech team and pretty much everyone else. Co-founded a business with coworkers, but it’s not bringing in any revenue and not sure it ever will bring in very much, so have been applying to jobs. Only got a few interviews, then ghosted afterwards. I’m guessing a part of it is I have a criminal charge pending, and the first thing you see on Google when you search my name and town is one of those mugshot websites. Maybe I should go into construction, lol.


  • Yeah, the criminal justice system in the U.S. causes immeasurable harm. From a probation system designed to keep you in the system, to kids-for-cash-like schemes that I’m convinced are more common than has been prosecuted, to coercive delay tactics. All of which I have personal experience with. I’ve currently been out on bail for 2 years, and someone else in my county has been in jail without trial for 5 years because he can’t afford bail. Not to mention the horrible conditions in many jails and prisons, slave labor, nearly complete lack of rehabilitation, and the system milking the incarcerated’s families for money. I can’t think of any other word to describe it than evil.








  • how are you going to set your hourly wage?

    As much as the market will bear, which is what my work is worth according to market principles. What’s just needed to expand operations or whatever only plays the role of setting a minimum price. You seem to keep arguing that people and businesses only charge what’s needed and no more; and very few people or businesses do that (those working for passion, like academic scientists and non-profits).

    Einstein may explain it better than me:

    The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.



  • I use GPT (4o, premium) a lot, and yes, I still sometimes experience source hallucinations. It also will sometimes hallucinate incorrect things not in the source. I get better results when I tell it not to browse. The large context of processing web pages seems to hurt its “performance.” I would never trust gen AI for a recipe. I usually just use Kagi to search for recipes and have it set to promote results from recipe sites I like.



  • I’ve known and know business people as well (not extremely wealthy; most have probably < $10M net worth). I don’t think I’ve ever met one that wasn’t trying to make the most money possible (for the businesses they had equity in, and for themselves). They certainly think of themselves as good people, and are interpersonally decent people, but the ideologies they adopt allow them to justify anti-social actions. They brag about being able to secure low-wage labor (third-world workers, unpaid internships, etc), and employing anti-consumer and predatory practices in their products. Anytime they do good, they either have ulterior motives, or it’s just nepotism. Every social interaction they have seems to have a transactional sub-text.

    I reject this notion that all businesses exist to exploit workers.

    Profit is literally the surplus value of the worker’s labor. The workers generate it, and the business appropriates it in whatever way the business owners see fit. This is exploitative, anti-democratic, and damaging to society, imo. Eventually, the owners may take a big payout by selling the company (whose value was generated by the workers), and possibly throw some crumbs to the workers, who may get laid off soon after.

    it’s striking how little government knows who is in need of what.

    Many of the problems with government is it’s beholden to the wealthy, imo. In regards to the U.S., I think the next administration will preside over an almost complete capture of government by oligarchs. I think we will become like Russia or East Asian oligarchies. I’m an anarcho-leaning leftist, so I don’t think large powerful governments are the answer either.

    This is what we should be having more conversations about. How is it that we have this powerful tool to speak our minds yet so many people are being ignored? Or voting against their own interests.

    Most media is controlled by the wealthy/corporations, who either purposely use it to advance their own interests (divide the working class, selective reporting, purposely biased algos, and spinning narratives), or are just damaging as a side-effect of pursuing profits. Honestly, at this point in time, I think most of it is purposeful, and not a side-effect. In “new media” the far-right seems to have an awful lot of money, to the point they’re doing theatrical releases of movies. It’s already came out that some far-right “new media” was directly funded by Russia (an oligarchal nation with ties to the wanna-be oligarchs of the upcoming administration).