rescbr

Direct democracy doesn't mean everyone votes on everything.

At the extreme you could do something like localized e-voting: citizens vote on issues that affect a given geographic radius of where they live. Because the boundaries are purely distance-based, gerrymandering is impossible.

Maybe we could have a decaying distance boundary by some measurement like population density or something like it?

The issue is that those marketplaces got too mainstream, and the average consumer is too stupid.

10-15 years ago if you were importing stuff from China you'd know that the trade off for cheaper prices is that you'd lose your consumer laws protection and you'd be on your own. If you wanted those, then you'd go to your local retailer and pay extra.

They go to the decent computer hosting the model, which can be yours if you pay the electricity costs

I know how mmap works. The JVM is/was terrible on freeing allocated memory though.

If the program is actively using that allocation, that's fine. My problem is with the runtime hoarding RAM when it should have been freed after GC back to the OS.

Then there's also the JVM not handling peaks well because it hit the max heap size, while you still could rely on the OS doing its job to shuffle stuff to swap temporarily. I still see JVM OOMs in my $dayjob's product while the OS has plenty of free physical memory. It is stupid.

I mean, we have malloc() and free(), they are in the stdlib for a reason :)

The JVM seems to follow a philosophy where it assumes it is the only process running besides PID 1, which is valid for some scenarios, but not for others.

The JVM has a fixed size heap which for me it is wasteful.

IMHO, Microsoft made the correct approach on .NET.

For LLMs, I prefer C# and C++ instead of TypeScript, JavaScript or Python as the static + compiled language factor keeps the coding agents on track. Plus, they have a true threading/async implementation.

I guess it’s ages of fake download button ads in download pages.

My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.

Eh, the ugly side of humanity was just a click away on the darknet, and I got my share of bait and switch beheading videos on IRC chats.

It was always there, society hasn’t changed. This shit wasn’t monetized back then though.

Agreed. I was a middle-schooler in the 2000's, had my own PC in my own bedroom, we had broadband access and I, of course, was exposed to porn while I was trying to download cracks and keygens on Astalavista and other such sites. Mislabelled files on eMule too. Links to porn also were readily shared on IRC channels. But yeah, I can't say it had a damaging effect on me.

It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.

My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.

At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.

AI doesn't get tired. I can tell it to profile the application and find quick wins and it usually does a decent enough job.

Sure, but you can review the git repo's content/commits in plain text, while curl-pipe-bash would require you to reverse engineer the binary that's downloaded.

If somebody hacks the project's home page and switches the download location to a hacked binary, you'd be none the wiser. Of course, somebody could hack the repo and add a deliberate vulnerability as well, but at least you would have a trail of it.

I personally also don't like this, so use cargo to install it, it's in the readme. Takes a reasonable time to build on my X220, but on a modern computer it is plenty fast.

  cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/tontinton/maki.git maki

I'm using maki (https://maki.sh), it has 1, 2 and 3.

This is definitely not my experience with GLM-5.2. It is writing pretty good ARM SIMD code.

It also is an excellent radare2/rizin/ghidra driver as well. Maybe it's because its ~cyber~ capabilities (pretty much linked with assembly-level knowledge) aren't guardrailed off?

> questions about the modern Chinese history, to which a Chinese LLM will not answer

This has been debunked here on HN so many times. The Chinese open models do answer the hairy Chinese political questions, and the raw APIs pass-through the response. Now, the answer might be blocked by the agent who's calling the API, specially if you are using a Chinese endpoint instead of the RoW (i.e. Singapore) endpoint.

That's the reason why you should always prefer a open agent/harness as well instead of using the provider's.

I'm Brazilian and I had never connected "insha'Allah" to "oxalá". Wow, TIL.

At least we were taught in school that if a word starts with "al" then there is a big chance it has roots in Arabic.

Still, somebody heavily funded this thing for too long, and I very much doubt that we don't have the surveillance apparatus in place today for these things to get unchecked.

Stuff is known but not acted upon for various reasons.

That's why you don't run the model at low quantization

I also make nerdy jokes/puns, and I had similar experiences with beneficial model steering that such puns create.

It's interesting how more loose/informal prompting achieves good results, there is some cultural understanding in the models from training. Once I asked the clanker to remove the gambiarras and puxadinhos that it wrote as part of an experiment, and it promptly fixed those.

They claimed the model was PhD-level, but they never mentioned the university the model graduated from... :)

I currently have a free trial AI Pro subscription that will run out next month.

If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.

Where are you sourcing the API from?

I have zero quality issues on Z.ai Coding Plan and maki.sh as the coding agent, but I've seen many reports on 3rd party providers that they host heavily quantized versions of GLM models.

I imagine they're not spying for fun...

I feel the same. I feel Anthropics' raw models are excellent, but Claude Code's bloat make them lose some potential.

This and I very much miss reading the chain of thought. At least I have it on GLM-5.2.

Happy to disagree with you. There are many examples of the US using the state espionage machinery for private purposes. The extent of "private" is debatable given the US as a nation behaves more like a big corp.

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/nsa-spying-on-petro...

You can trade-off cable shielding for electronics power and corresponding heat to encode/decode stuff.

Ethernet is notoriously power hungry, but I bet you can use a phone cable and still get tens of Gb over a very short range.

And then there are the crappy devices that aren't compliant with USB PD and only charge with a USB-C to USB-A cable.

For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has.

Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.

I had a professor who polled the class if we preferred our exams to be open book or not. First year of undergrad.

The midterm was open book, he even shared the previous year's exams. The final, as expected, closed book, thank you very much.

Exactly! It got so easy nowadays to use AI to setup scenarios since the busy work of writing code/test harnesses and setting things up for the benchmark is done by the machine. Then throw away what does not work.

Some benchmark that would take weeks to plan, code and set up is now hours and days - the time is now spent on the benchmark itself, not on temporary code.

For me, them allowing API usage on coding plans so we can use any harness, and returning the full unabridged reasoning back are how they earned my trust.