The irony is Google properties are more locked down than ever. When I use a commercial VPN I get ReCAPTCHA’ed half of the time doing every single Google search; and can’t use YouTube in Incognito sometimes, “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”.
There's also the newer push against what they're calling "model distillation," where their models get prompted in some specific ways to try and extract the behaviour, which, coming from a limited background in machine learning broadly but especially the stuff that's happened since transformers came onto the scene, doesn't seem like something that could be productively done at any useful scale.
Put it like this: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is useful with hundreds of examples, and LLM distillation is basically the same thing.
I used to report quite a number of political/ideological-only accounts to mods through email. They're explicitly against the single purpose account rule. They usually got banned or at least warned.
Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes.
I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)
I feel attacked as a Stanford/Princeton graduate. Yes, there are pieces of shit among the graduates, especially among the legacy admissions, but you can’t write off all of us by association.
I was checking Trump approval ratings yesterday. I didn’t have high hopes but I thought it had to be under 35% at this point (I think in a sane country it has to be <10% or at least <20% after the nonstop madness dropping everyday). But nope, every poll places him at >40% approval or ever so slightly below 40%. To me that’s definitive confirmation that “it’s on Trump and his cronies, not the American people” is nonsense. It’s on at least 40% of American people. They weren’t blindsided by false promises, they want this.
Exactly. The Trump Show is primarily a media production. Bombing Iranians is a special effect that happens to get people killed. Dead Iranians won't be on camera. The media backers, Fox and now CBS and Paramount (the Weiss empire), will support this and make sure the American people like the war. Americans enjoy their propaganda, it tells them they're the white heroes.
This they say they don’t like. The qualifiers tell you they’re totally fine with mass surveillance of Palestinians, or anyone else really, otherwise they could have said “mass surveillance”.
> fully autonomous weapons
And they’re pretty obviously fine with killing machines using their AI as long as they’re not fully autonomous (at the moment, they say the tech is not there yet).
All things considered they’re still a bit better than their competitors, I suppose.
Yes, startups, recruiting platforms, and students/“researchers” with stupid surveys for their worthless “research” spam me all the time by scraping the email from GitHub. I immediately trash the first two categories; I send a sternly-worded reply to the third category.
Society already funds a lot of scientific research. Some of that funding currently goes to private pockets like Wolfram Research, who license out their proprietary tech under expensive and highly limiting licenses (they're licensed per CPU core, Oracle style), so that scientists can do scientific computing.
As a former Mathematica user, a good part of the core functionality is great and ahead of open source, the rest and especially a lot of me-too functionality added over the years is mediocre at best and beaten by open source, while the ecosystem around it is basically nonexistent thanks to the closed nature, so anything not blessed by Wolfram Research is painful. In open source, say Python, people constantly try to outdo each other in performance, DX, etc.; and whatever you need there's likely one or more libraries for it, which you can inspect to decide for yourself or even extend yourself. With Wolfram, you get what you get in the form of binary blobs.
I would love to see institutions pooling resources to advance open source scientific computing, so that it finally crosses the threshold of open and better (from the current open and sometimes better).
Isn't plugging Wolfram algorithms into LLMs basically their current solution for the DX problem?
As far as society funding research, while I'm quite sympathetic to this view, Wolfram also puts in a significant amount of private dollars into the operationalization of their systems. My guess is there's a whole range of algorithms that aren't prominent enough to publish a paper on nor economically lucrative enough to build a company on that Wolfram products sell.
That said I do think LLM coding agents offer a great way forward to implement more papers on a FOSS manner.
Academic institutions have internal IP scouting monitoring every lab for monetizable research.
On top of that, and often competing with the former, professors are constantly exploring (heavily subsidized with public grants and staffed with free grad students) spin-offs to funnel any commercial potential of their research into their own or their buddie's pockets. It's just like in politics with revolving doors and plushy 'speaking engagements' or 'board seats' galore.
It’s hard to distribute equipment, food and shelter at zero marginal cost. It’s easy to distribute software at zero marginal cost. So let’s start there.
No one is stopping you. Build it, then distribute it. You will find that as long as people need to pay for their living, there is no post-scarcity world in any domain, especially not the digital one.
Academic institutions already pay salaries whether they fund open source development or Wolfram Research, so not sure what you’re trying to argue. People haven’t been starving while doing research in the open.
But academic institutions didn’t produce Mathematica. The point is simple: a lot of useful software like Mathematica has not been open-source for a reason. It is not about distribution being free; it is about production being expensive.
Some form of Mathematica has been open for a long time, in the form of Sage etc. There's no reason why academic institutions can't pool more money to develop these further.
Sage is a nice effort, but it isn't Mathematica. I use Mathematica, I don't use Sage. Academic institutions had almost 40 years to "pool more money", yet there is nothing that rivals Mathematica. The reason is simple: open-source doesn't pay well enough.
I used TikTok and also never came across a meme like that. Or maybe I did once or twice, I just quickly swiped away (or if something I’m not interested in is shown repeatedly I click not interested and it’s gone at least for a long time). If you’re shown the same meme from 20 different people chances are you just kept watching them, maybe with disapproval, but your device can’t read your brainwaves yet so the service just thinks you’re super interested.
And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
>And YouTube also had those stupid challenges with everyone doing the same stupid shit before TikTok even existed.
And before the transistor, we had flagpole sitters[0] and dance marathons[1] and dozens of other memes, just in the 20th century.
This kind of thing is nothing new, and has been going on for as long we've been us. Now this is accessible to a larger and more varied audience, not just those who are nearby.
I looked at all the AI signatures and they’re all phrases I use in my very human writing. If you’re anti-AI generated content then stop posting clearly marked AI dross like this I guess.
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