Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

That undersells them slightly.

LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.

They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.

I know I sorted by feed by Top 6 Hours but that doesn’t mean I expect six hours worth of text in a single image. Did they copy and paste three different job postings together? Did they use a LLM that had its stop token configured incorrectly? Is it an attempt at weeding out people who object to having their time wasted by corporate bullshit?

We may never know. What we do know is that this wall of text has more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

Given that prisons are an industry in the States and that inmates are one of their main sources of cheap labor, the high recidivism rate is there to maximize profits.

Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.

I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.

The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.

But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.

Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.

There is decent UHT milk but it’s by no means the majority of the market.

I manually disabled HSP in pulseaudio. I’d rather use an external mic than subject myself to the atrocious audio quality of HSP.

Run a fairly large LLM on your CPU so you can get the finest of questionable problem solving at a speed fast enough to be workable but slow enough to be highly annoying.

This has the added benefit of filling dozens of gigabytes of storage that you probably didn’t know what to do with anyway.

I installed Garuda and then immediately switched my theme to Breeze. I don’t know what that says about me.

And this is the point where I’d step in as a creator and announce that Paul the Protagonist wasn’t in a coma, all of the audience were, and that we’ve hallucinated the entire show.

Just to fuck with people a bit.

I wouldn’t call their Windows support stellar, either. There’s only one error code for any and all problems and RTXes can be damn finicky if you’re unlucky.

sfc /scannow does fix certain problems, just not nearly as many as the Microsoft support forum would like.

I do agree with you on the log, although that’s often because whichever component is misbehaving just doesn’t believe in error logs. I’m looking at you, Nvidia.

It’s the cover of Action Comics #454. The Silver Age was full of stupid plots like this.

My bad. I went with the WD Red Plus, model WD40EFPX. It’s basically the successor to the old CMR Red line. The Pro line has 7200 RPM and is a bit noisier, which isn’t great for a living room server.

I’ll correct my earlier comment.

Yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one’s Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn’t want to reuse the old ones.

A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.

Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn’t great because most of them won’t let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.

Of course that’s where an old desktop is the computer of choice.

What if the ants are coworkers?

“Oh no, not Marxism. We are Keynesian communists.”

It wasn’t that early but early enough that a) a major news site hotlinked an image from some random website and b) that website redirected the image to point at a sexually explicit shock image without anyone panicking.

That still has early Internet energy to it. Not quite Mahir Çağrı energy but still markedly different from today’s relatively sanitized interactions.