Maybe this will prompt some people to learn to use Tor

For anyone who actually has a ChatGPT subscription and relies on it, there are lots of advantages to running open weights models instead, even if you don’t have the hardware for them yourself and need to go through some provider. The privacy angle I’m sure needs no explanation, but there’s also reliability to consider. With services like ChatGPT they change how it works in the background without telling you and without any real way to opt out, so if you have a workflow or even worse an application that uses its API, what worked in the past may not work the same in the future and you have zero control over it. For overall performance the closed models are still on top, but not by that much, open models are competitive and even stuff that will run on lower powered hardware is good enough for lots of things you might need it for. Personally I don’t need anything that won’t run on my 3090.

Not since college tbh, I really struggled with that compilers class, might give it another go at some point though and Chicken Scheme would be a natural choice

we were discussing a 2009 incident where a helicopter crash in Afghanistan had killed three DEA agents. Sitting in his own executive suite in the FBI offices, he told me how he’d sensed among the bureau’s leadership a certain professional jealousy in watching the reaction of the DEA after those tragic deaths.

“You know,” the agent said, “I always got the impression — not that the leadership wanted any of us individually to get hurt or killed — but that they kind of hoped the bureau would get bloodied at some point so that it would feel like the bureau had made a sacrifice for the war.”

I’ve returned to that conversation and theme watching public remarks in recent months by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Greg Bovino.

So they’re not really in danger of physical violence, but not for a lack of hope and effort by their bosses who do all they can to manufacture situations where one of them will get killed. Somehow this combination makes it seem extra pathetic to be an ice agent.

Damn I got ripped off

Talking about low level compilers seems like moving the goalposts, since they are way more well defined and vetted than the mass of software libraries and copy pasted StackOverflow functions a large segment of programming has been done with.

The fact they are being shown to users is jank (it’s a popup within the Mumble gui), the fact that the hosters ran into this problem is evidence that hosting Mumble is a big challenge because I am convinced they generally know what they are doing. The comparison here is Discord, for which neither the people running a channel or its users have problems like that.

The author’s point is that people already don’t understand what the programs they write do, because of all the layered abstraction. That’s still true whether or not you want to object to the semantics of calling the use of LLMs an abstraction layer.

Some years ago I did work rating robot surgery videos on amazon mturk for 25 cents each, despite having basically no idea what I was looking at, can’t help but wonder if any of that got used to train this sort of AI

Mumble still works but from what I can tell its software ecosystem seems to be decaying due to bots etc. not being updated and breaking changes in their dependencies, people can still get them to work if they really know what they’re doing but it’s difficult. It also has some quirks that make it confusing for people to use, I’m in a mumble server and any time anyone new joins someone has to explain to them that they need to go through the menus to “register” in order to join the main channel, even though this registration is entirely within the application and doesn’t require email authentication or anything. There’s also frequently SSL warnings and things like that.

If they’re doing it that way then it’s dumb for these to be questions about your life because the point of that is to make it things that people will definitely be able to remember, but realistically you’re only going to remember the answer in general, not necessarily the specific wording or how the answer was formatted.

In theory, could Putin have a political action committee in the US? If not, what prevents it?

Ok that does sound like a good deal, if it’s comparable to something sold new I’m guessing it at least has 8gb of ram, and therefore better than the other stuff available at that price. But yeah, still, I think there is just more supply than buyers in general. I was looking at stats on the sell through rate for a lot of cheaper used laptops the other week and it’s often extremely low.

$50 seems to be about what a large portion of used laptops on ebay go for, so whether that’s a good deal would depend on how nice a laptop it is

There is normally a large spread between retail and used price of consumer goods, especially if it’s not a hot commodity with a big resale market. The explanation in the comic is at least plausible; if someone got something as a gift, but they want cash instead, their only option could be to sell it at a significant discount. Same goes if they bought it themselves at some point but need to come up with money quickly.

I feel like maybe someone could convince people over the phone to give them access if they explained correctly that the fields have random strings and roughly how they are formatted, but claim to have forgotten what they are

Paywalled, and archive.is doesn’t seem to work for this site

I don’t trust either, they’re in cahoots

I agree that our current priority should certainly be to implement a government that can be trusted to regulate things effectively

I don’t, limiting the danger it poses to us and guaranteeing civil liberties should be a higher priority.

Still, the ultimate goal should be government action on this topic because we cannot solve the problem at an individual level. Some people can have better outcomes than others but there’s no level playing field without government intervention.

To me what a level playing field would look like for social media would be mostly about the government no longer doing harmful things that prevent such equal chances, enforcement of the DMCA in particular comes to mind. Exercising more control over who can use which parts of the internet and how, is obviously incredibly dangerous especially given that we know it is possible for a government like the current one to come to power.

Because he keeps being enough of an embarrassing idiot in public to write roast articles about that can attract people’s attention, I guess