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[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way — see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that it’s less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit we’re used to

but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what they’re doing doesn’t work; there’s power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

you’re right, I’m giving them way too much credit — the full thought is almost definitely “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes and replace them with their own repressive regimes, but this time with heroin and sex tourism”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

what if we made the large language model larger? it’s weird nobody has attempted this

[–] [email protected] 11 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (3 children)

also this is all horseshit so I know they haven’t thought this far ahead, but pushing a bit on the oracle problem, how do they think they solved these fundamental issues in their proposed design?

  • if verifying answers are correct is up to the miners, how do they prevent the miners from just generating any old bullshit using a much less expensive method than an LLM (a Markov chain say, or even just random characters or an empty string if nobody’s checking) and pocketing the tokens?
  • if verification is up to the requester, why would you ever mark an answer as correct? if you’re forced to pick one correct answer that gets your tokens, what’s stopping you from spinning up an adversarial miner that produces random answers and marking those as correct, ensuring you keep both your tokens and the other miners’ answers?
  • if answers are verified centrally… there’s no need for the miners or their models, just use whatever that central source of truth is.

and of course this is avoiding the elephant in the room: LLMs have no concept of truth, they just extrude plausible bullshit into a statistically likely shape. there’s no source of truth that can reliably distinguish bad LLM responses from good ones, and if you had one you’d probably be better off just using it instead of an LLM.

edit cause for some reason my brain can’t stop it with this fractally wrong shit: finally, if their plan is to just evenly distribute tokens across miners and return all answers: congrats on the “decentralized” network of /dev/urandom to string converters you weird fucks

another edit: I read the fucking spec and somehow it’s even stupider than any of the above. you can trivially just spend tokens to buy a majority of the validator slots for a subnet (which I guess in normal cultist lingo would be a subchain) and use that to kick out everyone else’s miners:

Only the top 64 validators, when ranked by their stake amount in any particular subnet, are considered to have a validator permit. Only these top 64 subnet validators with permits are considered active in the subnet.

a third edit, please help, my brain is melting: what does a non-adversarial validator even look like in this architecture? we can’t fucking verify LLM outputs like I said so… is this just multiple computers doing RAG and pretending that’s a good idea? is the idea that you run some kind of unbounded training algorithm and we also live in a universe where model overfitting doesn’t exist? help I am melting

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (6 children)

If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it’s money, some people would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain … The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.

it’s really rude of you to find and quote a paragraph designed to force me to take four shots in rapid succession in my ongoing crypto/AI drinking game!

How does Bittensor work? “When you have a question, you send it out to the network. Miners whose models are suited to answer your question will process it and send back a proposed answer.” The “miners” are rewarded with TAO tokens.

“what do you mean oracle problem? our new thing’s nothing but oracles, we just have to figure out a way to know they’re telling the truth!”

Bittensor is enormously proud to be decentralized, because that’s a concept that totally makes sense with AI models, right? “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes,” starts Bittensor’s introduction page.

meme stock cults and crypto scams both should maybe consider keeping pseudo-leftist jargon out of their fucking mouths

e: also, Bittensor? really?

 

we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

fucking imagine coming back to a place you’re not welcome with this “eeehhh you’re being a bit aggressive tbh” shit

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think your response is a bit aggressive TBH.

nah, an aggressive response is me telling you to fuck yourself as I ban you for a second(!) time for making these exact terrible fucking posts

I’ve saved many hours of work with it, in languages I don’t really even know.

maybe by next ban you’ll figure out why your PRs keep getting closed

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

congrats on asking jeeves

is it bad to be bad at a system designed for exploitation? maybe your grandma had a point

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

what’s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesn’t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all

people with nothing to hide are the worst people

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

maybe it was a mistake to lionize a corporate monopolist to the level where we ostracized people for not being “good” at using their trap of a product

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause that’s by far what’s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

(Currently writing some book-like text on the AI bubble, with minimal crypto. I also have some book-like text on smart city scams, which has rather more bitcoin in it.)

fuck yes

AWS’ suggested upgrade path is Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — which also does audit logs. So as usual, the answer to which database is: just use Postgres.

it’s amazing how often Postgres is the sane implementation for a database-shaped problem, including a search engine just waiting for a competent ranking algorithm and a crawler (yes I’ve considered doing this)

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.

all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.

I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.

here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.

 

this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

 

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

 

reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.

 

the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!

also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!

and as always, contributions are welcome.

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