karmickoala

What worries me about the current generation of models is privacy. In another comment, I tried to draw the line where models start to worry me regarding it. Discussing it with whimsicalism, we noticed that it's not the generative aspect either; model size is probably the main factor. For instance, a larger encoder could make its embedding transform almost lossless and thus more prone to data leakage again, although a decoder-like makes it more susceptible.

But it's not only that. Model size, for instance, also plays a role. Will modern BERT keep their lossy compression nature? Or could there be a privacy risk as well?

Thus, what are the characteristics of privacy-aware models? So far: discriminative vs. generative, model size, and lossy transforms (related to size). Perhaps looking at pre-2020 models could help to narrow other necessary attributes.

Which I get it, they indeed can use LLMs to improve the previous traditional ML pipeline. However I believe bundling these options together shouldn't be legal and I never expected Google to employ dark patterns like this. When I subscribed, these features were provided by traditional ML, perhaps some BERT-like encoder architecture at most, however now I cannot keep that previous functionality if I don't wish to grant LLMs access to my data.

And I did not speak out

Because I was not an artist

Sure, there are similarities, but while we're figuring out a FOSS solution that will run on your machine and we'll have access to more than the weights, the abstraction ladder isn't as equivalent as we think they are.

Thank you for your replies, I'll muse over this discussion as well.

> From a legal-representation-POV, obviously you want a bigBAD asshole representing you (it's just how the game works).

This one I cannot think of a counterexample right now. It does seem necessary.

I forgot to address that you mentioned explicitly that assholes are pushing our society forward and they are assholes because they care about their work. Be careful to not conflate expertise and assholeness. As I mentioned in my comment, assholeness is a disguise; it's not a necessary condition to be excellent in your field. It may help one to achieve their own goals sometimes --- which in general revolves around getting more money to the highest bidder and themselves. They care so much about their work that sometimes they have a huge blindspot that prevents them from seeing the tragedy of the commons right in front of them (per Upton Sinclair's law). No, it's not expertise, it's lack of character. They are simply unaligned with what's good for society vs. what would bring them more money. Steve Jobs was an expert in some fields, but he needed Steve Wozniak. Wozniak is a great counterpoint to Jobs expert-assholeness: he was an expert (a programmer's programmer), cared about his work, and for all accounts, was kind and ethical. As an example of just an asshole, there's Martin Shrkeli and several other politicians that fit the bill --- just assholes, not experts, pushing their own goals.

Those should not be ideals we strive for; you can excel without sacrificing social niceties and we should strive for intellectual humility. As one gets better in their respective fields (specially in ours that is always changing so fast), one should try to keep its ego in check. There is a saying in my country: "No one is so big that they cannot learn, nor so small that they cannot teach."¹

The problem with "know-it-all assholes" is that most think they are always talking to someone below them and their expertise carry on to all other fields². Their pride may prevent them from admitting from learning from even the most ignorant of beings.

As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong (specially if there was anytime that came from someone that surprised them). If they fail to recollect many stories, I fear you're only hearing one part of the story and you'll never know it yourself. Steve Jobs himself used to do that: people would bring ideas to him that he would dismiss. A week later, he would come back with the idea presented as his.

We should strive to be gentle and humble to anyone, despite success in a field: we'll never know who we're talking to and what they can teach us. Perhaps is our misconception that we think that we're average (or above average) that prevents us from learning from other people.

-----

¹There is a variation, "No one is so ignorant that they have nothing to teach, no one is so wise that they have nothing to learn.", but I kinda like the former because it fits perfectly with the Lord of the Rings.

²I'm not raising the Dunning-Kruger card here.

Some of the issues could be resolved with better prompting (it was biased to always interpret every comment through the lens of predictions) and LLM-as-a-judge, but still. For example, Anthropic's Deep Research prompts sub-agents to pass original quotes instead of paraphrasing, because it can deteriorate the original message.

Some examples:

  Swift is Open Source (2015)
  ===========================

  > “It could become a serious Javascript competitor due to its elegant syntax, the type safety and speed.”

  > Great news! Coding in Swift is fantastic and I would love to see it coming to more platforms, maybe even on servers. It could become a serious Javascript competitor due to its elegant syntax, the type safety and speed.

  How to be like Steve Ballmer (2015)
  ===================================
  
  Most wrong
  ----------
  
  >     corford (grade: D) (defending Ballmer’s iPhone prediction):
  >         Cited an IDC snapshot (Android 79%, iOS 14%) and suggested Ballmer was “kind of right” that the iPhone wouldn’t gain significant share.
  >         In 2025, iOS is one half of a global duopoly, dominates profits and premium segments, and is often majority share in key markets. Any reasonable definition of “significant” is satisfied, so Ballmer’s original claim—and this defense of it—did not age well.

  > And in a funny sort of way he was kind of right :) http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougolenick/2015/05/27/apple-ios...
  > Android: 79% versus iOS: 14%

  > volandovengo (grade: C+) (ill-equipped to deal with Apple/Google):
  >  
  >     Wrote that Ballmer’s fast-follower strategy “worked great” when competitors were weak but left Microsoft ill-equipped for “good ones like Apple and Google.”
  >     This is half-true: in smartphones, yes. But in cloud, office suites, collaboration, and enterprise SaaS, Microsoft became a primary, often leading competitor to both Apple and Google. The blanket claim underestimates Microsoft’s ability to adapt outside of mobile OS.

  > Despite his public perception, he's incredibly intelligent. He has an IQ of 150.
  > 
  > His strategy of being a fast follower worked great for Microsoft when it had crappy competitors - it was ill equipped to deal with good ones like Apple and Google.

  [Let's Encrypt] Entering Public Beta (2015)
  ===========================================

  - niutech: F "(endorsed StartSSL and WoSign as free options; both were later distrusted and effectively removed from the trusted ecosystem)"

  > There are also StartSSL and WoSign, which provide the A+ certificates for free (see example WoSign domain audit: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=checkmyping.c...)
  > 
  > pjbrunet: F (dismissed HTTPS-by-default arguments as paranoid, incorrectly asserted ISPs had stopped injection, and underestimated exactly the use cases that later moved to HTTPS)

  > "We want to see HTTPS become the default."
  > 
  > Sounds fine for shopping, online banking, user authorizations. But for every website? If I'm a blogger/publisher or have a brochure type of website, I don't see point of the extra overhead.
  > 
  > Update: Thanks to those who answered my question. You pointed out some things I hadn't considered. Blocking the injection of invisible trackers and javascripts and ads, if that's what this is about for websites without user logins, then it would help to explicitly spell that out in marketing communications to promote adoption of this technology. The free speech angle argument is not as compelling to me though, but that's just my opinion.

I mean, we could go on, there are many others like these.

That said, I understand the concept and love what you did here. By this being exposed to the best disinfectant, I hope it will raise awareness and show how people and corporations should be careful about its usage. Now this tech is accessible to anyone, not only big techs, in a couple of hours.

It also shows how we should take with a grain of salt the result of any analysis of such scale by a LLM. Our private channels now and messages on software like Teams and Slack can be analyzed to hell by our AI overlords. I'm probably going to remove a lot of things from cloud drives just in case. Perhaps online discourse will deteriorate to more inane / LinkedIn style content.

Also, I like that your prompt itself has some purposefully leaked bias, which shows other risks—¹for instance, "fsflover: F", which may align the LLM to grade worse the handles that are related to free software and open source).

As a meta concept of this, I wonder how I'll be graded by our AI overlords in the future now that I have posted something dismissive of it.

¹Alt+0151

My own anecdotal example. I stopped playing music years ago because I thought I wasn't good, despite liking it. I started playing again because I had no games and I noticed that I should have gotten back to it sooner, despite not being music material. Not only I was able to play stuff that I liked, I learned stuff that I thoroughly enjoyed. Some music were really hard at first, but as I progressed (very) slowly through weeks, I could see my skills improving and I was very satisfied to watch it (slow as it was).

If you like it, I think you should do it, despite of others. Because it won't matter, in the end. It may take time and a lot of effort, can be painful, but it's worth it.

I think this advice by Terrence Tao translates well to other areas: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

You're considering that everyone watching this video knows who styropyro is and have watched all his past videos, including the ones with safety instructions (which may sound like a waste of time to some people with other cooler videos to watch). This looks like the curse of knowledge at play, because there is a demographic that may think it's fine to try this at home. My suggestion would be to simply include more visual disclaimers, because his presentation makes it look like it isn't dangerous, despite him warning sometimes (but always half joking). The current disclaimers are easily missed since there are some people who skip the video to the good parts and don't watch everything.

And just making clear that I want him to keep the jokes (like the moment at 3:20). Those are the best parts. ElectroBOOM does stuff like that too and it's great, but I think it conveys better how painful/dangerous it is. Perhaps if he includes an intro where he warns without jokes, and then adds some visual warnings throughout the video, would be enough. For instance, in this joke, it wasn't shown to a newcomer what he did to ensure it's safe to poke the microwave around like that.

I share the sentiment, but I noticed that sometimes I use it as an excuse for not doing what I can within my reach. One benefit I see with individual action is that it's a way to stimulate political change (another one being economical). Plus, it may be contagious and make changes for the next generations. Thus, nothing prevents us from adopting bidirectional planning, i.e., both top-bottom (political, schools, etc.) and bottom-up (individual). It intuitively seems faster than top-bottom only.

It sounds funny, because I do acknowledge exactly what you're saying. I'm in tech, interested in using VPN for years. I researched some, but was put off if they would mishandle my data. In the end, it will be Mullvad who will be dealing with my data, after all. But now I kinda trust them more after Mozilla.

I know it sounds illogical, just explaining how I feel about this.

https://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/from-python-to-numpy/

A book teaching Numpy vectorization.

  You are Trump, a peasant living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a pitchfork
 and a nothing else. You wake up and begin working in the fields. You see your
 brother, who is also named Donald. He has a wife and two children. One day he
 tells you that he wants to marry his sister. You think it's stupid, but you
 agree. Your brother marries her and you become their neighbor

Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&u=https%3...

Original (Portuguese): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179903474244444160.html

Same approach, they also pretended to be from the bank calling about an irregular transaction. In this scam, it seems they hijacked her home phone line. She tried to call from her cell phone, then they called back to her home phone and said all communication should be from it, to ensure she was at a different location.

> “The enormous amount of time, effort & money that goes into such projects might be overkill. I don’t need to know the precise details of the wiring of each cell and each synapse in the brain. What I need to know, instead, is the organizational principles that wire them together.”

I think this endeavor might still be useful, e.g., it may help identify missing elements in a model. An example of that in another field: astrophysicists did know the organizational principles to build galaxy kinematics models, but only using the Schwarzchild's method---which is akin to mapping the galaxy---they were able to confirm that supermassive black holes should be at the center of most galaxies. Hence, both approaches (machine learning and mapping the brain) may walk hand in hand, helping identify such organizational principles.

In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.

Preprint: https://haystack.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint....

Are there any tools for anyone to test their own phones?