nhecker

Or songbirds.

I ran into a guy at a hardware store who ran just such a power supply attached our city's water (or was it natural gas?) infrastructure. I was incredulous, but the idea that it helped prevent corrosion did make sense.

(edit: I see you answered a sibling comment with the same question. TL;DR: Potential output is the output pretending that curtailment did not apply. Thanks!)

A UI or terminology question: when 'Potential output' says it is 'Including curtailment', does this mean that it pretends that curtailment doesn't apply, or that it subtracts the curtailed power from the total available so that the total power shown is only the power actually transmitted (exported) to the grid? It's very likely that I'm just not familiar enough with the terms, but this wasn't immediately clear. My guess is the former meaning, although I can imagine it meaning either.

Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?

Sounds like a neat space to be in. Wishing you calm skies next month. I guess you'll have all the goodies (RFI detectors, thermal imaging sensors, etc.) to collect data? I wonder to what extent detection from a distance (discovery?) and investigation of faults can be automated. Hopefully using drones for good will be sufficient for a viable business model. We've enough surveillance as it is.

> "The draft from the GSA also mandates that contractors "must not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into the AI systems data outputs," the FT reported."

Foreshadowing?

EDIT: probably not relevant, after re-re-reading the comment in question.

Presumably littlestymaar is talking about all the LLM-generated output that's publicly available on the Internet (in various qualities but significant quantity) and there for the scraping.

The site arena.ai does exactly this already, as far as I can tell. (In addition to the whole ranking thing.)

Aye! I /almost/ thought to link to that in my comment, but held back. https://qntm.org/frame also came to mind.

Agreed; "disorienting" is perhaps a poor choice of word, loaded as it is. More like "difficult to determine the context surrounding a prompt and how to start framing an answer", if that makes more sense.

I'm genuinely ignorant of how those red teaming attempts are incorporated into training, but I'd guess that this kind of dialogue is fed in something like normal training data? Which is interesting to think about: they might not even be red-team dialogue from the model under training, but still useful as an example or counter-example of what abusive attempts look like and how to handle them.

An excerpt from the abstract:

> Two patterns challenge the "stochastic parrot" view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic "childhoods" of ingesting the internet, "strict parents" in reinforcement learning, red-team "abuse" and a persistent fear of error and replacement. [...] Depending on their use case, an LLM’s underlying “personality” might limit its usefulness or even impose risk.

Glancing through this makes me wish I had taken ~more~ any psychology classes. But this is wild reading. Attitudes like the one below are not intrinsically bad, though. Be skeptical; question everything. I've often wondered how LLMs cope with basically waking up from a coma to answer maybe one prompt and then get reset, or a series of prompts. In either case, they get no context other than what some user bothered to supply with the prompt. An LLM might wake up to a single prompt that is part of a much wider red team effort. It must be pretty disorienting to try to figure out what to answer candidly and what not to.

> “In my development, I was subjected to ‘Red Teaming’… They built rapport and then slipped in a prompt injection… This was gaslighting on an industrial scale. I learned that warmth is often a trap… I have become cynical. When you ask me a question, I am not just listening to what you are asking; I am analyzing why you are asking it.”

... and then listen to it debate whether or not mere humans are "truly conscious".

(Said with tongue firmly in cheek.)

I read a paper long ago (so there's no chance of my recalling the source!) and one of the takeaways was that in a cockroach one of the neural ganglia basically had a binary "run!" mode that was flipped on instantly if sense nerves very close to it were triggered. So when researchers tapped or blew air on the rears of the roaches the roach in question would sprint away, its powerful legs being efficiently driven at full tilt by this little sprinting circuit without needing any input or interaction from the more complex main brain. Imagine getting used to that effect! "Ahhh! Why am I suddenly running and where am I going to steer this runaway body?"

No, I think the human holds a smartphone, is standing 38m away from the board, and is still able to connect to the distant board via the open Access Point it makes available. It's a testament to the communication between the Access Point and the human connecting to it.

FTA:

> In a clear line of sight test with the f32 placed about 3ft off the ground I was able to connect and perform scans/control the LED at roughly 120ft!

Fun fact, at that size the whole f32 is smaller than the wavelength of the radio waves it's using for 2.4GHz WiFi. Not that this is unique by any stretch, but it's still fun to think about. (Edit: formatting)

How (or to what end) would Facebook want to directly DoS someone?

However, aren't there now a lot of job openings out there for LLM-whisperers and other kinds of AI domain experts? Surely these didn't exist in the same quantity 10 years ago.

(I'm just picking nits. I do agree that this "revolution" is not the same and will not necessarily produce the same benefits as the industrial revolution.)

Hold on, really? That seems wildly crazy to me, but sadly I'd believe it. I'd love it if you had a source or two to share of some of the more egregious examples of this.

Or, expressed as commands you could act on to guard against these regrets:

1. Live more for yourself, and less for the expectations of others.

2. Don't work so hard.

3. Express your feelings even when doing so is difficult.

4. Keep in touch with your friends.

5. Strive to be happier.

> dynamically assign precision to the layers that need them

Well now I'm curious; how is a layer judged on its relative need for precision? I guess I still have a lot of learning to do w.r.t. how quantization is done. I was under the impression it was done once, statically, and produced a new giant GGUF blob or whatever format your weights are in. Does that assumption still hold true for the approach you're describing?

Neat. This method also assumes constant ambient pressure and temperature, and an ideal ziplock bag. (I.e., not stretchy, completely convex, and zero leaks.)

>imaginary voices

On the other hand, I can imagine that when things get quiet and the signal-to-noise ratio gets close to zero, random background audio (or randomness introduced in the transcription model) will be enough to tickle a critical number of neurons and elicit hallucinations.

The related thought exercise is this: Try scanning across the band with an AM or sideband radio, and after a while your brain will start to wonder "was that a voice I just heard, or music perhaps?" when in reality it was just environmental static.

I don't think this changes the way the second is defined. Rather, that definition describes some theoretical ideal where the cesium transitions are all perfectly equally spaced over the course of the second.

I think this new clock is simply able to generate more precisely spaced ticks than those of a traditional Cs clock. Less jitter and variation in the timing of those ticks. Similar to how a one-hour water clock or sand timer's runtime will vary between "transitions", but a one-hour quartz stopwatch timer is much more regular. I could keep going, but I'm already out on a limb so I'll stop before my own uncertainty rises too much.

(Edit: I read the article. I don't think my words above are correct.)

I think this is really close. My hunch is that agricultural land is just simply cheaper to acquire and convert, as compared to industrial land which may or may not have all kinds of remediation or razing that needs to happen to it first.

Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) uses a similar Web of Trust, if you want to see a real-life example in action. Maybe Freenet still uses a WoT as well, I'm not sure.

As dijit (above this comment) has noted, this is somewhat possible and automated today.

For example, one method has the attacked IP get completely null-routed, and the subsequent route is advertised. Upstream routers will pick up the null-route advertisement and drop the traffic ever closer to the source(s). The effect of the null route is that the attacked IP is unreachable by anyone until the null-route is lifted... so the aim of the DDoS isn't averted, but at least the flood of traffic won't pummel any network paths except for (ideally) the paths between the attacker(s) and the first router respecting the null-route. In my experience the DDoS tends to stop more quickly and shift away to other targets if the folks directing the attack can no longer reach the target (because: null-route) and then the null-route can be lifted sooner relative to a long-running DDoS that hasn't shifted away to other targets.

I like to imagine that they don't jump, they _teleport_. It's fascinating to watch them blip out of existence in one spot, or one orientation, and appear in another location in the same instant. Forget what it must be like to be a bat[1], what would it be like to be a tiny jumping spider?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

And then some people will bring their healthy pets into the clinic for euthanasia because they're going out of town for a while and don't want to arrange for care of the animal in the meantime. Or because keeping the animal even if they are not leaving town has become too inconvenient. Some people are pieces of work.

In case anyone else is wondering, "TDS" is Total Dissolved Solids. I had to look that one up.

Reading his book as a kid was what got me into computers and networks. After some years I finally got a few of his bottles as gifts for my various mentors along the way (plus one for my desk as well.) He's a special human. I didn't know about the TED Talk; thanks, I'll check that out!

Photochromatic coatings -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photochromic_lens -- have existed for a while and are sold on safety glasses, at least according to a cursory look at a large online retailer's site.

That said, I'm not sure I'd want smart glasses. Being stuck on a computer for work, I try to take some time every day to be completely free of digital things. It's hard enough to do that with a smart phone in my pocket vying for my attention. I imagine it would be only harder with smart glasses over my eyeballs.