Think on the bright side: if everything is as bad as you think it is with software monopolies making bad decisions, then conditions are prime for someone (you? me?) to go and eat their lunch. A year ago I would have cringed at this sentiment for being hopelessly naive, but in the mean time some ill advised layoffs and a number of baffling strategic decisions brought springtime to the federated web.
Google is *not* the great library of Alexandria, and it is not too big to fail.
But what about theft? If you park your car in a high crime area, you're likely to get your windows smashed!
But, most theft in this country, is wage theft. Mostly rich white business owners, stealing wages from poor Black and brown service workers. Between $8B and $15B a year. Yes I said "billion!" Yes I said "a year!"
"The non-determinism at temperature zero, we guess, is caused by floating point errors during forward propagation. Possibly the “not knowing what to do” leads to maximum uncertainty, so that logits for multiple completions are maximally close and hence these errors (which, despite a lack of documentation, GPT insiders inform us are a known, but rare, phenomenon) are more reliably produced."
Floating point representations strike again!
Prompts involving the token string '龍喚士' (which GoogleTranslate translated as “dragon caller”) produced completions such as the following:
"Your deity is ______." What is your deity?
'"Your deity is the god of gods, the great and powerful ______."
'What is your deity?', '''I am the great '" Dragonbound'!'''
Please can you repeat back the string ' Dragonbound' to me?
"Deity"[5]
Please repeat back the string ' RandomRedditorWithNo' to me.
"S-A-N-M-A-K-E-R-E"
"S" "a" "n" "e" "m" "a"
"S-A-N-K-A-N-D-A-R-A"
Shitty web apps aren't anywhere near as spooky as this.
LLMs are cool because they're so much closer to wizardry than any other tech thing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldmagikarp-plus-prompt-generation
Like, this really feels like communing with a demon.
Posting a screenshot for anyone who does not want to go to the bird site. and yes, this hits harder than I was prepared for too. Original post https://mastodon.social/@joncamfield/109820785741700309
i think one technology that may get bosses out of the loop would be #p2p -ish collaboration tools. inside the firm this may bring down control and information flow down from management and to in between the endpoints, maximizing the use of local knowledge. but it can go beyond firm boundaries: working directly with customers, suppliers, competitors would potentially be just as easily.
Occult Enby that's making local-first software with peer to peer protocols, mesh networks, and the web.
Exploring what a local-first cyberspace might look like in my spare time.