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When considering the widely discussed ethical issues with generative AI (unrestrained energy use contributing to climate change, theft of creative work, perpetuation of biases, etc.), I wonder if there's a meaningful difference between current-generation models like GPT-4O that can generate image descriptions on top of everything else LLMs do, and earlier, more specialized vision models used in things like the Microsoft Office apps and Microsoft's Seeing AI app.
in reply to Matt Campbell

In other words, if I were to take a stance on not using the former kind of model for ethical reasons, then to be consistent, would I also have to refuse to use the latter (but earlier) kind of model?
in reply to Matt Campbell

The fact that the latter runs on my phone with decent performance, and the former does not, would suggest that there are differences. Whether or not the latter's initial training exhibits some of the same problems as generative models, I don't know, but it's one of the many reasons that just referencing generative models as "AI" is lazy and harmful.

For instance, I read an article yesterday about a publisher updating their copyright statements to include the text:

"No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems ..."

The lack of nuance immediately made me wonder if I would be violating those conditions if, through my legitimate and unintended actions, any part of the work ever came into contact with any machine learning technologies, e.g. those used for OCR.



If you want a job in the moisturizer industry, the best advice I can give is to apply daily.


Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool. I gave him a glass of water.


11 Best Free and Open Source Firewall Tools lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_l…


At a protest in SF, blind Uber and Lyft users claim the companies aren't doing enough to prevent drivers from turning away passengers with visual impairments (Wired)

wired.com/story/protestors-say…
techmeme.com/241020/p7#a241020…





good morning

Anon: “A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.”





I really like Drew's framework here dividing current AI use-cases into Gods (human replacement, which I think of as still mostly science fiction), Interns (assistants you delegate closely-reviewed tasks to, which is most of how I use LLMs today) and Cogs (smaller tools that can more reliably serve a single purpose, like Whisper for transcription) - more of my own notes on this here: simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/20/…
note.computer/@dbreunig/113330…
in reply to Simon Willison

You sure you linked to the right song? Have you gone through the kind of existential crisis portrayed in that song? I always saw you as being cautiously optimistic about AI, that it can be a useful tool if used well, but not making us redundant.

@forrestbrazeal

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt @forrestbrazeal oh I absolutely went through these 5 stages of grief, but I've been firmly in the 5th step for over a year at this point
in reply to Simon Willison

@forrestbrazeal I don't think I ever actually felt the anger. And I feel kind of guilty about that, because of course some people have decided to stop there and fight against AI, and they have such moral certainty about it.
in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt @forrestbrazeal I've not felt the anger personally, because I've been releasing open source code for 20+ years so I already default to "I want people to be able to reuse my work as much as possible" - but I absolutely understand the people who ARE angry

If I was an artist and someone trained Stable Diffusion on my work without my permission and then started competing with me for commissions that used my own personal style I think I'd feel very differently about this all

in reply to Simon Willison

@matt @forrestbrazeal I don’t feel like I am stuck in step 4, but I can’t get to step 5 because I do very much believe that (at least in their current incarnation) AI is very much going away. I am worried about the collateral damage that this particular dead tree is going to cause when it smashes into the rest of the ecosystem. E.g.: nvidia currently has a market cap of 11% of GDP, which I do not think is sustainable. But who on earth is going to get a positive ROI on ChatGPT at $20/mo?
in reply to Glyph

@glyph @matt @forrestbrazeal I expect there's going to be a substantial AI crash, but I don't think (most of) the tools I'm using right now will become unavailable to me - especially since I can run Llama 70B on my own laptop now
in reply to Simon Willison

About running models locally, I've experimented with that, but large context windows take up lots of RAM, right? Like, isn't it O(n^2) where n is the number of tokens? Or do you not depend on large context windows?

@glyph

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt while I agree that the models you are using locally will not go away, I am also skeptical that they will receive much in the way of maintenance once the commercial bubble has burst. Nobody is getting paid when you run a model on your laptop locally, and training them still requires a zillion hours of GPU time and a corpus in the petabytes
in reply to Glyph

@glyph Yeah. Today I went down a rabbit hole looking into what it would take to reproducibly, deterministically build some video assets for a little side project I did. It reminded me of how some hard-core free software folks, particularly the GNU Guix developers, have been working on bootstrapping a whole OS with minimal dependence on existing binaries. We're never getting that for these big models.

@simon

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt @glyph the models I can run in my laptop today are leagues ahead of the models I ran on the exact same hardware a year ago - improvements in that space have been significant

This new trick from Microsoft looks like it could be a huge leap forward too - I've not dug into it properly yet though github.com/microsoft/BitNet




What a journey this is. Take a listen, preferably with headphones. youtu.be/WrxJKj71c9o?si=0OmZNa…
in reply to Jakob Rosin

Really cool. Thanks for sharing! I felt they overdid panning though! :)
in reply to victor tsaran

@vick21 I think the original was broadcast through multiple speakers in a conference hall, so thats wy panning happened so much.


On this day seven years ago I got A FRICKING GOLD MEDAL for my work on #curl. Real. Proper. Gold. From the hands of the Swedish king.

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/10/20…

#curl

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

can he hug or is he one of those guys who hit you in the back repeatedly just to let everyone know they are heterosexual?


Just yesterday, I saw a boost of someone suggesting "grand theft autocomplete" as an apt phrase for describing what large language models (such as ChatGPT and Claude) do. But now I can't remember who said it. The phrase doesn't yet seem to be common enough to yield a useful result when doing a DuckDuckGo search for it.
in reply to Matt Campbell

I'm pretty sure it originated from @johl here: mastodon.xyz/@johl/11205983391…


We compared smart ring heart rate data with smartwatches, and the results may surprise you (...Instead, it's the Amazfit Helio Ring that won the hardware accuracy contest. And since Amazfit recently discounted it to $199 and made its pricey subscriptions free, the Helio Ring has become more appealing.
On the other hand, the Helio Ring has unresolved problems like the limited number of sizes (three), short battery life (four days), and lack of automatic workout detection.) androidcentral.com/wearables/s…


Kámo na mňa niečo lezie... celý deň ma bolia predlaktia, pravý kľúčny kĺb na nohe a absolútne nič necítim, ani trávu ani voňavku a mám pocit že na mňa ide teplota. To nič, ráno som fit.

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

looks like the CFP is not open yet.

I wonder if something #AlpineLinux or #k0s/#kubernetes would be of interest for this event



In 5 Tagen startet die 5. Staffel #StarTrek Lower Decks 🙌🥳

Hier zur Feier des Tages das Staffel 1-Poster. 🖖☺️



in reply to Shay

I ate the discord sound as part of my breakfast, sorry. If it sounds muffled or quieter, it's just cause it's coming from inside my stomach for everyone else now.
in reply to Shay

Yeah I’m not a fan. The incoming call one is fun though.
in reply to Shay

I checked in settings to see if they changed it lol
in reply to aaron

@fireborn I think that sound is only temporary for the season. Cuz if you remember they change it for Christmas, too
in reply to Shay

The sooner they get rid of the message sound the better haha.


Elgg: Set Up a Social Networking Platform on Ubuntu linuxtoday.com/blog/elgg-set-u…


#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today brings you 17 updated and one long-awaited added apps:

* Fossify Camera: your light-weight camera app from the Fossify collection 🥳 and it got the 🛡️ (i.e. it is reproducible), yay!

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps and #reproducibleBuilds with the #IzzyOnDroid repo :awesome:



Bluesky: i love this game!!!! so i drew some fanart for it (kinda nsfw)

Mastodon: [Spoiler Warning/Opinion] I love this game! So I wrote an updated graphics driver to deliver better realtime lighting on levels 4 through 8

Threads: Our worst fears have come true. Noah left us. Yes, in the afternoon

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When I first played #stardewvalley I was overwhelmed by all the tasks you had to do. It felt like the opposite of a #cozygame is there something out there that has the same look and feel but doesn't have the huge list of todos you gotta do?
in reply to Erion

@erion I just remember feeling overwhelmed at the time I started playing it with not knowing what was the best way to go, and having a big list of quests and stuff. I guess for me I didn't take them as optional but wanted to play the game in some min max way. Perhaps I should revisit it as a sort of village sandbox.
in reply to Triptych 🌱

If you do, you will have a great time. When people experience the game for the first time, it's common to have 6-7 saves until you figure out what works for you. Just take it easy for the first few tries, and one day when you are familiar with everything, focus on maxing out things. You will have a great time.


I’m never going to forgive people who bought a new Tesla in the past year.


PRODUCTS I WANT APPLE TO SELL ME (but they won't):

An iPad Mini only instead of iPadOS it runs NewtonOS. Software updated to make use of the bluetooth and wifi stacks and USB-C port.

Comes with an Apple Pencil, of course.

C'mon. Wouldn't that be the most freakishly powerful Newton ever?

in reply to Charlie Stross

As someone who worked on the Newton (and the eMate) I can appreciate your enthusiasm. The Newton was designed from the ground up to be a content creation machine, not a content consumption machine so things like text editing and inking were better thought out.

Of course, it's also held back by it's old-school scrolling model, which I'd think could be updated to support touch (vs pen).

The code base is a privacy nightmare (no protections on any user data!) Sadly, I doubt it would easy



Does anyone else's table have these horrible sharp pieces of the material that jut out underneath it? Scooted the wrong way at breakfast this morning and now I have a scratch on my knee to rival the worst ones I've gotten from cats.
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki Oh that does sound cluttery and easy to run into. I think I have seen those actually, occasionally my mom would use them for blankets that were too big to go in the dryer.
in reply to Malia Suhr

oh yeah, I literally have some of these on mine right now. And yes, I've ran into it, many, many times, and gotten bruises in the meantime


Pi-Apps: The Unofficial but Definitely Better App Store for Raspberry Pi lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_l…


Do you ever think about how much time is spent just watching stuff? It's been quite the week, so I've turned to one of my comfort shows, the Goldbergs. As I was pondering all the things I still need to do, I suddenly realized just how much of my life I've spent watching it. If each episode is around 20 minutes and there are usually 24 episodes in a season, then in the last 3 1/2 days, I've watched approximately 24 straight hours of the Goldbergs. If you count the first time I saw it, there are 10 seasons, so I'm thinking that puts me around 3 1/2 days just for that run. If you count the spinoff series schooled and add it all up, I'm looking at almost a week straight of Goldbergs. And then I started to wonder how long I've spent watching We're alive, with all my rewatches, and I should probably stop now.
in reply to Malia Suhr

If you add social media, hn, youtube, podcasts, technical docs that I didn't strictly need to read for the problem at hand but that were too interesting to pass up... I don't wanna see these stats, I would probably cry.


In Wales, if you want a bwca or bwbachod (a goblin who cleans your home), then leave out a cup of cream each night (or better yet, a cup of ale). However, bwcas hate teetotalers. If you refuse to drink alcohol, they may kick you or throw your plates at you.
🎨 Tony DiTerlizzi

#FolkloreSunday #OfDarkandMacabre #31DaysofHaunting #31DaysofHalloween #Superstitiology #Mythology #Folklore #Celtic #CelticMythology #Wales #WelshMythology #Fairy #Goblin




I did not wish to change password managers. What's a decent password manager that's free software, and has a usable Firefox extension that works on both desktop & mobile?

Preferably one that is self-hostable, or where the database is easy to sync between Desktop and stock, non-rooted Android.

Bonus points if it is able to store additional custom fields, credit card data, and can generate TOTP codes too.

Is it KeepassXC, or is there something else? Last time I used KeepassXC (arguably, a good couple of years ago), the browser autofill was kinda flaky.

in reply to Erion

Hahaha. You always exercise it. But also, multiplatform, probably nothing is that accessible or pretty easy to setup.
in reply to Мира🇧🇬🇭🇺

I wouldn't mind the tinkering, knowing that things will be better, but right now everything looks worse than just waiting and hoping that they get their act together.


Произошол мем

Если клиент openconnect подключается к серверу через IPv6, то IPv6 он не настраивает

А если через IPv4, то настраивает

Ватафак



Ide mi urvať predlaktia a neviem z čoho.. a toto tie zádery sú prekliatie.
in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Pozor na to, z takových záděr často vznikají plísně, antibakteriální mýdlo ale dost pomůže.
in reply to Josef Zettl alias Princezna

@Zettl_josef ono to hlavne bolí pri každom dotyku a kontakte s vodou. Hlavne to mám z vetexu a jarovej vody čo stále utieram stoly, nemá sa to kedy zahojiť lebo "stále" robím.
in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Tak to nezávidím.
Chce to hodně promastit, ideálně nějaký krém s kakaovým máslem, makadamovým olejem. Ale dobrý je i samotný olivový olej, nebo sádlo to je TOP.
No a před prací doporučuji promazat vazelínou, ta vytvoří tenký film, který chvilku vydrží i ten Jar.
Doporučovat rukavice je předpokládám zbytečné.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Josef Zettl alias Princezna

vazelínu nemôžem lebo je mastná a nemôžem nosiť mastné poháre/príbory, potrebujem krém ktorý sa hneď vstřebá, mám tip Ulipolitio alebo Neutrogenu.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Ten první neznám, ale Neutrogena je prakticky vazelína.
Tak aspoň na noc namazat něčím výživným, ta Neutrogena chrání, ale nehojí.
in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Musí to mít ve složení to, co jsem psal třeba kakaové máslo makadamový olej, olivový olej, nebo klidně použít to sádlo.
Pokud se bavíme o krému z drogerie, tak doporučuji tento: rossmann.cz/krem-na-ruce-s-oli…

Obsahuje jak kakaové máslo, tak olivový olej, vstřebává se rychle.



How to Install Google Chrome on Arch Linux lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_l…


Ongoing discussion, but it looks like Bitwarden may be starting to make moves towards no longer being open source:

github.com/bitwarden/clients/i…

Previous issues opened against the SDK have been met with replies that suggest they have no intention of reconsidering the licensing decision:

github.com/bitwarden/sdk/issue…

reshared this

in reply to Erion

@erion @tootbrute well here it is. Guess what? The world isn't ending. github.com/bitwarden/clients/i…

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to chx

Well, that's disappointing. I was really looking forward to the chaos of the only usable password manager slowly becoming proprietary. The FSF should be proud, GPL has fixed a "bug."


Zajtra idem s cyklistom na pivo nech načerpám nejaké múdra.


Huch - ICE pünktlich und freundliches, tiefenentspanntes Zugpersonal. daran könnte ich mich wirklich gewöhnen.

Hoffentlich bleibt es so...

in reply to Molly

@DerMolly @Bubu das halte ich für ein Gerücht, ich habe ein Talent fürs Erwischen von Desaster bei der Bahn...
in reply to Dickenhobelix

@DerMolly Ich glaube so viel Talent braucht man dafür grade nicht mal unbedingt.

(Erstmal Fahrgastrechteformular für die Hinreise ausgefüllt...)