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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • In any case this (the pic) is the dumb ape “A is bad, so I replace it with something by B, B is my friend, B won’t poison it” thought. For whatever reason stupid people always think it’s better to look at social context of something and not the actual thing.

    That’s the reason a lot of dumb bastards use Telegram for things that would have already gotten them in jail if law enforcement in their countries cared enough. They “trust” Telegram because of different roots than American\European corporate. By the way, due to these different roots probably some of more high-ranking dumb bastards who’ve been using Telegram are under control of some intelligence services via blackmail, or whatever.

    There are layers of defense and sane expectations of anything’s security. If you are afraid of US corporations and state, then using any downstream of a big FOSS project is not normal unless it’s done by some Chinese project with a lot of very qualified hands. Scratch anything based on Chromium and Firefox.

    If someone still remembers Cryptonomicon the book, and the rest of smart things Neal Stephenson wrote, people in these never trust tech they use. Neither do people doing secure things in real life. In the beginning of Cryptonomicon they are trying to create some electronic currency mapped to a real-life currency backed by a lot of gold yet to be found, in the end they blow up that gold with no conclusion, which may or may not symbolize exactly what I’m saying.

    That’s because it’s nonsense, someone else made magic paper to protect your letters and you just trust it? It’s really sad Rowling didn’t develop the idea enough in HP, not with Riddle’s diary, but with Snape’s spells (or any spells). I mean, she did in the fifth book, but that was a special connection, should have been something like recipes.

    By the way, it’s strange people rarely bring up HP as a book about computers. It really is. That’s the reason electronics don’t work in Hogwarts, world-building wise. There’s the usual outrage about terfs, bad emotional patterns, relationship between fate and logic, negative stereotypes of minorities manifested in characters, - but that’s not all those books are.

    And LOTR is usually brought up by wrong people, so is The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I often call my dad a stupid man, but without him I would never have read it), while they are relevant for any new mechanism, and when new tools arise, people sometimes make new mechanisms where they could do with old ones, for the lack of understanding of applying the old mechanisms with the new tools.

    That was a rant.



  • There are solutions. I’ve just read (diagonally) a paper on attacks on Kademlia. The solutions would be similar to what’s recommended there. The problems are in appearances different, but stem from no admission control for the network.

    All this tomfoolery about “oh horror, how do we solve this” is because bot farms and recommendation systems and ad networks have proven very convenient and profitable, nobody wants to scratch that ecosystem in favor of f2f services. So they want to remove one side of the coin, but leave the other.



  • seeing what can be done with the tech to make each person’s experience unique, with bespoke quests and dialogue.

    That being possible would be fundamentally a level up from what they are now. I’ve read a paper on this someone linked in a Lemmy thread a year or so ago.

    Maybe one day playing a game like Skyrim for 10 years doesn’t have to mean playing the same quests over and over.

    I think a more manual approach would work, of a world model like Crusader Kings has, with traits and ties and opinions and random events of NPCs between each other and towards the player, and that AI being used simply to rephrase and slightly adjust descriptions and sequences of events - then maybe.

    But consider how many NPCs that means and how many others they meet in their simulated lives, and how hard it would be to debug a story line to ensure that it’s always playable.

    An LLM is not, strictly speaking, necessary here, and if used, doesn’t make it easier.



  • I won’t read the article now, but

    arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance

    this is bullshit, a categorical statement.

    There are good processes and there are bad processes. Good processes are usually functional for people of (sensibly) different mindsets and mental conditions. Bad processes are usually “one size fits all” in one way or another.

    There are things a team can’t have, and there are things a talented individual can’t have.

    There’s also experience that covers holes one can’t plan for, yep.




  • I just took a short look at the JXTA specification ; JXTA is abandoned and this is the progress people are pursuing. So sad really.

    I mean, yes, comfort is good, yes, this is like a device from Asimov’s Foundation, but the problem is kinda solved by headphones already. And yes, it’s cool.

    (If someone doesn’t know what JXTA is - it’s Sun’s standard for p2p applications, of the “progress of the past that was left unfinished and forgotten” kind, and looking at ZFS, which is a similarly comprehensive thing for filesystems, I have no doubts the world would be better were it finished.)



  • I can’t believe you worked a B5 ref into a discussion, much less operational differences between Vorlon and Shadow.

    I’m technically not interested in any other kinds of discussions, but even explaining what this particular kind is takes work even from the closest people to me, so - compromises are to be made, weird posts are to be typed and sent.

    Major difference even in the analogy is that Shadows actively and destructively sought control and withheld info whereas Vorlons manipulated by parceling out cryptic messages.

    That’s the “planted gods for the lesser races”, “taught Minbari hyperspace travel”, “sent that Inquisitor guy with nice former hobbies” kind of Vorlons, right? Very cryptic.

    Removing filters from LLMs and training them on shitholes will have the expected result.

    I’m glad we don’t disagree.







  • Not necessarily, they train models on real world data, often of what people believe to be true, not what works, and those models are not yet able to perform experiments, register results and learn from them (what even a child does, even a dumb one), and real world is cruel, bigotry is not even the worst part of it, neither are anti-scientific beliefs. But unlike these models, the real world has more entropy.

    If you’ve seen Babylon V, the philosophy difference between Vorlons and Shadows was somewhere near this.

    One can say in philosophy blockchain is a Vorlon technology and LLMs are a Shadow technology (it’s funny, because technically it would be the other way around, one is kinda grassroots and the other is done by few groups with humongous amounts of data and computing resources), but ultimately they are both attempts to compensate what they see as wrong in the real world. Introducing new wrongs in their blind zones.

    (In some sense the reversal of alignment of Vorlons and Shadows, between philosophy and implementation, is right - you hide in technical traits of your tooling that which you can’t keep in your philosophy ; so “you’ll think what we tell you to think” works for Vorlons (or Democrats), but Republicans have to hide that inside tooling and mechanisms they prefer, while “power makes power” is something Democrats can’t just say, but can hide inside tooling they prefer or at least don’t fight too much. That’s why cryptocurrencies’ popularity came in one side’s ideological dominance time, and “AIs” in the others’. Maybe this is a word salad.)

    So, what I meant, - the degeneracy of such tools is the bias in his favor, there’s no need for anything else.