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robterrell

3,197 karma · joined October 25, 2010

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robterrell··on Counterfeit Apple II computers (1985) [video]
You might find the story of MacBasic interesting: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Apple intended to ship the Mac with a programming language, a really nice threaded and graphical Basic, but Bill Gates put the squeeze on them.

robterrell··on Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features
This is how I got CarPlay on the used BMW I bought. Gave some guy in Thailand my VIN and $60, he sent me firmware to install, and now I drive around with working CarPlay and the vague notion that I've maybe been p0wned in ways I don't fully understand.
robterrell··on LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
I was in college (and a physics major!) when cold fusion hit. Really similar vibe -- competing press conferences and publications, huge public excitement tempered by frowning disbelief from experts, a rush to replicate from many labs, with only occasional claims of success, all of which turned out to be errors. Still, I'm rooting for you, LK-99.
robterrell··on Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013)
I like paperclips. Should we maximize?
robterrell··on GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better
I mean, figure something out?

Didn't Sam want to create UBI? That's one way!

robterrell··on GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better
> Like every time someone streams a song on sportify, the artist gets a few pennies

You're thinking of broadcast radio. Streaming is a fraction of a penny!

> So should they be paid a few pennies every time the LLM spits out a response that "used" that training data?

That doesn't sound unreasonable! I understand that current LLMs have no way to report "this token came from this data" but that doesn't mean it's impossible to build. (Ack: this is a full-on proper dunning-kruger, having not looked into it & having zero knowledge of the field.)

But I think it's probably more reasonable to simply split a % of the service revenue across everyone whose data was used. Or pay an up-fee for ingesting the data in the first place.

Generally, it's crazy to name that some people think it's reasonable for these companies to pay for GPUs and CPUs and electricity to run them but not for the data that's the actual core of their service.

robterrell··on GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better
> From my point of view, it is sad that these sort of socio-political constructs (copyright) are hindering innovation

Why not pay authors of the data the LLM has ingested?

robterrell··on Actors union will join writers on strike, shutting down Hollywood
"Looker" is a Michael Crichton film from 1981 that features actors getting scanned and replaced with cheaper & more compliant CGI equivalents.
robterrell··on AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen
Earlier this week I got spam call that was almost certainly an AI-generated human voice.
robterrell··on Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript
That's a possible mitigation mentioned in the article.
robterrell··on Mysteries of the Griffin iMate
From the TMK ADB to USB faq:

On ADB Standard keyboards(M0116) left and right corresponding modifiers are logically indentical and can not be discriminated one another by the converter. This is ADB keyboard limitation, not converter's. Apple Extended keyboard(M0115/M3501) can discriminate them except for 'Command' key.

robterrell··on Databricks Releases 15K Record Training Corpus for Instruction Tuning LLMs
Typo on row 7!
robterrell··on If you’ve raised venture capital, you have to pay yourself
"You’re not working for equity — you are giving up equity." Bingo.
robterrell··on The influencers getting rich by teaching you how to get rich
Not enough Robin Hoods. Too many halos, not enough heroes.
robterrell··on TinyVG – an alternative binary encoded vector graphics format
https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf
robterrell··on Appler: Apple ][ emulator for IBM PC, written in 8088 assembly

  It was developed in 1990, at a time when Apple IIe was still in
  production, which means that Appler is likely the first Apple ][ 
  emulator ever made
Not to be one of those guys, but "][ in a Mac" was from 1985:

https://archive.org/details/2InaMac

robterrell··on ChatGPT for Robotics
The microwave example reminded me of https://twitter.com/_LucasRizzotto/status/151620562566283673...
robterrell··on Tesla to open some superchargers to other vehicles
What company rents Polestars?
robterrell··on Bard and new AI features in Search
Fun exercise for the reader: how much of this is actually possible with LLMs and how much is not.
robterrell··on Whisper.cpp example running fully in the browser
The current crop of transcription apps are truly awful. Trying yours now!

One suggestion -- the trial is difficult to use if I have a long file, because it won't let me select a file that is longer than 5 min. Maybe let me pick a longer file but only transcribe the first 5 minutes? Most people aren't going to edit their files to accommodate your trial mode.

robterrell··on Uxn is a virtual machine with 32 instructions
Yes! I made a blockchain in Apple ][ BASIC (with one machine-language routine for hashing). And yeah, I did it because of insomnia-related boredom.
robterrell··on Inkbase: Programmable Ink
This is really impressive. There's no video on how the "Logic" editor works. Have you thought about linking something like QuickJS and allowing actual code?

If one could write generic code, and if the properties of the inked objects were exposed to the runtime (i.e. corner points, stroke/fill colors, rotation, etc.) your app would be really close in functionality to the linked project.

robterrell··on Ask HN: Where to buy old computers and consoles?
The Vintage Computer Fest has an annual event on each coast: https://vcfed.org/vcf-swap-meet/

I went last year and there was a smallish number of old 8- and 16-bit computers for sale at vendor booths. (Large numbers of old Macs, if you're into that.)

robterrell··on Why is the terminal input so weird?
Also -- BBEdit's "Shell Worksheet" is the MPW Workshop for today. I use it for so much every day. No commando, though, that was so great.
robterrell··on An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
I'm sure I've still got a bunch of MP3 files from Napster on a hard drive somewhere, but yeah, that genie was put back in the bottle. This one can too.
robterrell··on My dad's resume and skills from 1980
Would love to read these if you've collected them somewhere.
robterrell··on My dad's resume and skills from 1980
My copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s!

My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills components, aside from demos of software I'd written and general discussions of implementation details.

One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was probably 1990-ish? They made a LAN email product that ran on top of Novell NetWare. There were a couple of hours of general interviews, including a lunch on-site. The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.

robterrell··on Reddit's favorite products in one place
This damn site just got me to buy something, so, well done.
robterrell··on LG 28-inch 16:18 DualUp Monitor
I use Moom at home but can't at work, so I just started using https://rectangleapp.com instead.
robterrell··on The 8bit Keyboard
It's nostalgic in the best/worst way! Anyone old enough to remember the start of the 8-bit era (not the Apple ][+ and the Commodore Pet and the SOL, but before those, the Altair and IMSAI and the Byte-8) will have memories of using these switches to input a bootloader-type program that would let you load a stored program from an optical paper tape reader or a magnetic cassette tape. Set all the bits for a byte & store it, set all the bits for the next byte & store it...
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