…are you serious?

There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?

These things are interesting for two reasons (to me).

The first is that it seems utterly unsurprising that these inconsistencies exist. These are language models. People seem to fall easily into the trap in believing them to have any kind of “programming” on logic.

The second is just how unscientific NN or ML is. This is why it’s hard to study ML as a science. The original paper referenced doesn’t really explain the issue or explain how to fix it because there’s not much you can do to explain ML(see their second paragraph in the discussion). It’s not like the derivation of a formula where you point to one component of the formula as say “this is where you go wrong”.

Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.

It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.

I just noticed this.

As others have mentioned the stars have been largely useless in the last little while so to be honest I’m not sure this has any impact. Even sites that try and give a rating based on fake reviews are not helpful because so many reviews are faked. The only helpful part is to try and read negative reviews.

I imagine this star fiasco is something that’s easy for browser plugins to reverse.

I would love to see AI and Machine Learning used to filter out fake reviews. This would actually be useful.

Nah this is changing.

This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.

I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.

Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.

The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.

There are so many recipes with minor variations. In the end it doesn’t matter much except for some points I’ll mention. Here is a random one. https://www.vickypham.com/blog/vietnamese-beef-noodle-soup-pho-bo

I would say that a lot of the cooking process is hard to explain via a book. Videos are good. This one seems to be done by a very knowledgeable woman. https://youtu.be/xxM4t8vP-0A

After skimming the above video I’m really impressed by that woman’s knowledge. One thing i am not sure she discusses is the process of skimming the fat off the broth.

After having moved to the UK, where Vietnamese food is not so readily available in areas outside of London (and similar) I’ve gotten used to making my own pho.

The main problem are the herbs as it can be hard to get all the necessary herbs outside of Asian supermarkets.

It’s a really good dish for special events as well, since few people I’ve met dislike pho.

Fantastic work.

Do you think the bot numbers for Reddit will be as bad or worse? Or is there better protection over there?

Eh, I think a lot of it is who you hang around with.

Both at home and at work, nobody in my community cares. We have people using Linux, Mac, and PC. Android and iPhone.

Is this a popularity thing in high school?

Can you link an example of what you mean by the problems in image generation models?

It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.

You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.

In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.

So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.

Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.

Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.

As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.

This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.

Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.

Thanks. Let me read it a bit more closely.

Interesting. Maybe I don’t know as much as I thought. Let me do some more reading…