reacharavindh

Indeed they're non-technical problems, but really blocking ones. As a user, I dont want to have my filesystem and Kernel have a possibility of going out of sync leading to an unusable system during a regular update.

The biggest attractor towards BcacheFS for me was the possibility of that cohesion. All the technical merits were a bonus as ZFS does already what I wish for. That factor went away with BcacheFS choosing to not get mainlined into Linux Kernel. Now we have two good filesystems outside the kernel :-(

My layman's understanding is that these models are very capable pattern matchers. When they need to do X, they go on a hunt for every pattern they could find and try to satisfy solving X. If that is not deemed good enough? make them dig harder and they take a different route to find patterns to solve X. Now, their arsenal is everything that they have been trained on(which is a lot!). This ability comes in extremely handy to apply existing techniques and patterns in ways we humans didn't quite think of.. because we are domain driven. A mathematical model about finding a good enough approximation of something at much lower cost is perhaps well understood in its applications in mathematics or whoever got to see those results. But, these LLMs, when pushed harder and harder might bring that to apply and solve an entirely different problem like for example, classifying whether some event is fraudulent. When it does such things, it _feels_ novel because it ended up using something we haven't thought of yet. But, it got there by brute force, stroke of luck, or some random path. I guess this is the reason why the frontier labs run those crazy swarms of AI agents to uncover all such paths turn them into chartered thinking vectors instead of random attempts.

I like to believe we humans still retain the ability to think completely outside the box and discover new phenomena and understanding aided by these pattern machines. In other words, these models are great at running combinations through patterns and we humans go one level higher and add those new patterns for them to accelerate us even more. We determine what to solve and the LLMs help us solve it faster.

Most important detail…. It was prior literature that documented the possibility of doing this and the systems fixed those vulnerabilities as well. The AI model probed their current infrastructure and found an unplugged but pre-documented(therefore on their training) hole.

This detail matters because the idea itself is not novel. LLMs did cleverly discover, filter and use the patterns.

Watch Greg Koah’s recent talk on AI discovered vulnerabilities in Linux kernel to understand the limitations of LLMs aided offensive security acts. It was a rational light for those who fear monger that AI will _just_ take over humanity and be intelligent in novel ways.

The larger threat still remains though - if any literature anywhere threw the scattered dots about techniques, issues, rough ideas etc that were not acted on yet.. these pattern machines are going to find them and use them to achieve their goals(if that were to break through). Just not in the sentient way folks assume based on news.

I understand why Google would run Gmail for free.. it’s signals for their ad machine even if they don’t literally push the contents of the emails themselves directly. I mean the metadata, connections etc is valuable for ads intelligence.

But I toss my otherwise public git repos on GitHub.. if they weren’t handing out for free, I’d have hosted them anywhere else publicly as well. What do they get by hosting my _private_ repos for free? Did they explicitly say anywhere that they are training models on code in private repos? That’ll be a dark pattern hard to miss out here on HN!

GitHub lets me create public and private repos.. with a free account.. how are they making money?! Why are they throwing hardware at this explosive growth of repos with LLMs?

I was thinking the economics of it the same way.. if the AI companies are burning debt and VC money to give me cheaper tokens why not take them for it? I can always rent a GPU server for those personal, private AI needs.. heck even run a decision model to route them to the rented GPU servers either on demand or scheduled for few hours in a day…

It doesn’t have to be black or white…

For my toy projects, adventures, learning exercises, and throwaway MVPs I will prefer the subscription plans… they are cheap for what they offer today.

N you please answer one thing for my peace of mind?

If I use a TV like the ones you’ve worked on, and never ever connect it to any WiFi network since the day I bought it, is there any way they still call home and pass their payload? Like searching for and connecting to an open WiFi network, some kind of relay through another device over Bluetooth or any other way I haven’t thought of yet?

It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(

Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…

The line has always been blurry..

Why use power tools(planer vs hand planes, power saw vs hand saws, saws instead of chisels etc) when you could do things by hand?

It’s all about which parts one enjoys doing by their own and which ones they’re willing to abstract away with a tool.

Some folks abstract away the whole process and just visit IKEA :-)

> a personal tendency to try and make it pixel perfect and because of that I sink way more time into it than I should.

Now that resonates too close to home...

May be I will come to the same conclusion as you after spending hours/days/weeks into trying out a bunch of things with CAD. Lets see... this rabbit hole feels worthy of jumping into.... (it will be different this time!)

Hey. This is very cool. I will definitely try this out this weekend for the projects I have in progress.