jvalencia

I've been writing my own, out of curiosity, with gemma4. I've been surprised how far I'm getting.

There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.

Multimodal models are trained knowing how to understand encoded images. It really is magic. Base64 image data is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that represents image bytes as a printable ASCII string, formatted as data:[<mediatype>][;base64],<data>. We think of llms as only good at text, but any structured data is predictable. As long as it can be turned into an N dimensional vector that represents a complex idea in the LLM hidden weights, the output of the model treats that essentially like text. With sufficient training data, it understands the text in what to us looks like noise.

These sound like security nightmares.

How does security and isolation work? If someone else's account is compromised, how do I know I won't be? If instant is compromised, how do I know I won't be?

When a political party controls the science, you end up with say, Trump pushing one set of results, and Biden pushing another. It then becomes either pick the science that agrees with your politics, or throw up your hands in frustration. The average reader probably won't be able to dig into the fundamentals of the research and pull out the salient results, nor are they guaranteed it isn't policy pushed through overstated claims. It really undermines good science. It also falls back on the researchers who push science based on politics as well, so it isn't just the politicians.

Every few days I would log on. I was only 10-14 years old. It spread by word of mouth, and I just happened to have access to my dad's computer that had a modem. I'd hop on and play tradewars or similar. There were forums, mostly about hacking/pirating content. The forums were not too distant from what reddit feels like. As a young kid, it was also the only place where unfiltered information could be found, like how to make a bomb or how to get around copy protections. A lot of friends I had at the time where starting to do more serious file sharing, though the bandwidth kept that pretty limited.

Google for nonprofits is extremely generous. It's really not that bad in the end, and you only set it up once for a lot of benefit.

The trial and error was fueled by capitalism, trying to get the best product possible.

If it goes into a codified state system, it's regulated, resulting in a lack of motivation to take risks to make it better.

-ish. I often keep md files around and after a successful task. I ask Codex to write the important bits down. Then, when I come around to a similar task in the future, I have it start at the md file. It's like context that grows and is very localized. It helps when I'm going through multiple repos at multiple levels.

I think that's not wrong. Same principle, different sin... it looks like gambling, or the occult, or...

As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble).

The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)

Sure, but let's say you do EKS, you set it up once and then it's mostly done, including security, etc. You set up your own, then you upgrade every 6 months manually.... this is a cascading cost.

This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost. The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity. A business owner who hyper-optimizes for every contract is unlikely to be focusing on growing their business, even if their business is more efficient on paper.

Missed a link?