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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2020

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  • The merits are real. I do understand the deep mistrust people have for tech companies, but there’s far too much throwing out of the baby with the bath water.

    As a solo developer, LLMs are a game-changer. They’ve allowed me to make amazing progress on some of my own projects that I’ve been stuck on for ages.

    But it’s not just technical subjects that benefit from LLMs. ChatGPT has been a great travel guide for me. I uploaded a pic of some architecture in Berlin and it went into the history of it, I asked it about some damage to an old church in Spain - turned out to be from the Spanish civil war, where revolutionaries had been mowed down by Franco’s firing squads.

    Just today, I was getting help from an LLM for an email to a Portuguese removals company. I sent my message in English with a Portuguese translation, but the guy just replied back with a single sentence in broken English:

    “Yes a can , need tho mow m3 you need delivery after e gif the price”

    The first bit is pretty obviously “Yes I can” but I couldn’t really be sure what he was trying to say with the rest of it. So I asked ChatGPT who responded:

    It seems he’s saying he can handle the delivery but needs to know the total volume (in cubic meters) of your items before he can provide a price. Here’s how I’d interpret it:

    “Yes, I can [do the delivery]. I need to know the [volume] in m³ for delivery, and then I’ll give you the price.”

    Thanks to LLMs, I’m able to accomplish so many things that would have previously taken multiple internet searches and way more effort.






  • It models only use of language

    This phrase, so casually deployed, is doing some seriously heavy lifting. Lanuage is by no means a trivial thing for a computer to meaningfully interpret, and the fact that LLMs do it so well is way more impressive than a casual observer might think.

    If you look at earlier procedural attempts to interpret language programmatically, you will see that time and again, the developers get stopped in their tracks because in order to understand a sentence, you need to understand the universe - or at the least a particular corner of it. For example, given the sentence “The stolen painting was found by a tree”, you need to know what a tree is in order to interpret this correctly.

    You can’t really use language *unless* you have a model of the universe.






  • What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.





  • I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

    I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I’ve not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it’s made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.


  • Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

    Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.



  • I find your comment interesting because you are implying that some people believe being stupid or clever is a permanent unchangeable state. Presumably one is born as either one or the other?

    I would say that some ways of thinking are stupid. In particular when one does not challenge one’s assumptions. It’s possible to build a whole world of stupid on top of bad assumptions. If someone’s entire worldview is built in this way - a whole load of bad assumptions held together with poor logic and wishful thinking - I don’t think they’re even living in the real world any more, they’re living in a fantasy land.


  • lightstream@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are folks so anti-capitalist?
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    1 year ago

    Capitalism requires coercion to function. The ‘incentive’ is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter.

    You’re thinking of nature. It’s nature that does that.

    And it’s what we humans are fighting against, the natural order of things. Nature doesn’t care about the weak, it doesn’t care about justice. We’re in a battle to design and build systems that we can install on top of nature and which do provide those things. There is still much to be done, but over the course of human history we have accomplished a lot and we are in a better place today than we have ever been.

    The term capitalism has become a meme, conveying little meaning, just a word we can invoke to rally others in a brief cathartic moment of finger pointing and doom-saying. If it’s what you want to do then fine, go ahead and when you finish, wash your hands and clear your mind, then come back and help think of positive steps forward we can make as a society.


  • It’s worth mentioning that the word bilingual has different meanings in US English and in British English.

    For native British speakers, someone who is bilingual is someone who speaks two languages at a native level, while the accepted US meaning is someone who can speak two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

    With the British definition, it’s pretty clear whether someone is bilingual or not. Most people are not, and it’s almost impossible for an adult to become bilingual later in life. Generally it only happens when someone has two parents each with a different mother tongue.

    The US meaning is much wider than the British one, and I guess it’s the meaning you’re intending with your question. It basically comes down to the definition of fluent. It’s completely possible to be fluent in a language while still having a foreign accent and still making the occasional grammar mistake. My personal definition of fluency is when you are able to talk to native speakers on pretty much any subject without serious misunderstandings. You don’t need to know every word you may encounter, as you can simply ask the other person what a word means just as native speakers do all the time.