Not the parent, but LLMs dont solve anything, they allow more work with less effort expended in some spaces. Just as horse drawn plough didnt solve any problem that couldnt be solved by people tilling the earth by hand.

As an example my partner is an academic, the first step on working on a project is often doing a literature search of existing publications. This can be a long process and even more so if you are moving outside of your typical field into something adjacent (you have to learn what excatly you are looking for). I tried setting up a local hosted LLM powered research tool that you can ask it a question and it goes away, searches arxiv for relevant papers, refines its search query based on the abstracts it got back and iterates. At the end you get summaries of what it thinks is the current SotA for the asked question along with a list of links to papers that it thinks are relevant.

Its not perfect as you’d expect but it turns a minute typing out a well thought question into hours worth of head start into getting into the research surrounding your question (and does it all without sending any data to OpenAI et al). That getting you over the initial hump of not knowing exactly where to start is where I see a lot of the value of LLMs.

Yeah, fair enough, I was refering to posts and comments not other metadata because that isnt publicly available just as a get request (as far as I’m aware)

Everything on the Fediverse is almost certainly scraped, and will be repeatedly. You cant “protect” content that is freely available on a public website.

So if I modify an LLM to have true randomness embedded within it (e.g. using a true random number generator based on radioactive decay ) does that then have free will?

If viruses have free will when they are machines made out of rna which just inject code into other cells to make copies of themselves then the concept is meaningless (and also applies to computer programs far simpler than llms).

So where does it end? Slugs, mites, krill, bacteria, viruses? How do you draw a line that says free will this side of the line, just mechanics and random chance this side of the line?

I just dont find it a particularly useful concept.

No, they dont

When the United States moved to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and de-recognize the Republic of China (ROC) in 1979, the United States stated that the government of the People’s Republic of China was “the sole legal Government of China.” Sole, meaning the PRC was and is the only China, with no consideration of the ROC as a separate sovereign entity.

The United States did not, however, give in to Chinese demands that it recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan (which is the name preferred by the United States since it opted to de-recognize the ROC). Instead, Washington acknowledged the Chinese position that Taiwan was part of China. For geopolitical reasons, both the United States and the PRC were willing to go forward with diplomatic recognition despite their differences on this matter. When China attempted to change the Chinese text from the original acknowledge to recognize, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher told a Senate hearing questioner, “[W]e regard the English text as being the binding text. We regard the word ‘acknowledge’ as being the word that is determinative for the U.S.” In the August 17, 1982, U.S.-China Communique, the United States went one step further, stating that it had no intention of pursuing a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan.”

To this day, the U.S. “one China” position stands: the United States recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China but only acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China. Thus, the United States maintains formal relations with the PRC and has unofficial relations with Taiwan. The “one China” policy has subsequently been reaffirmed by every new incoming U.S. administration. The existence of this understanding has enabled the preservation of stability in the Taiwan Strait, allowing both Taiwan and mainland China to pursue their extraordinary political and socioeconomic transitions in relative peace.

As is confirmed in your first link, the USA acknowledges that the Chinese position is that Taiwan is a part of China, and recognise that the PRC is the government of China, they deliberately do not say if they consider Taiwan a part of China or not.

There’s a vast gulf between automated moderation systems deleting posts and calling the cops on someone.

Look, Reddit bad, AI bad. Engaging with anything more that the most surface level reactions is hard so why bother?

At a recent conference in Qatar, he said AI could even “unlock” a system where people use “sliders” to “choose their level of tolerance” about certain topics on social media.

That combined with a level of human review for people who feel they have been unfairly auto-moderated seems entirely reasonable to me.

Ok, but then you run into why does billions of vairables create free will in a human but not a computer? Does it create free will in a pig? A slug? A bacterium?

Its a political stech in a newspaper, not a link to a video. You can either go to the guardian’s front page to see the it or type anything even slightly relatred to it into a search engine to see the video.

Please try to read usernames, I didnt say anything about motivations.

And all of them threatened retaliatory tariffs immediately after trump anounced his:

• China
• Canada
• Mexico
• EU

Obviously most of those havent been implemented yet as THe USA hasnt implemented it’s tariffs. But the more general point about imposing retaliatory tariffs is sound, they make the other countries exports less attractive. If the US does that to other countries they are going to want to do it back to the US.

So do you think the EU, Canada, Mexico and China all dont understand how economies work either? As they all immediately said they would respond to tariffs with tariffs on American goods.

eh, the entireity of training GPT4 and the whole world using it for a year turns out to be about 1% of the gasoline burnt just by the USA every single day. Its barely a rounding error when it comes to energy usage.

The articles point was that markdown (or other similar utf-8 text based documents) is the best guarantee you have for the files being usable into the indefinite future. As you get into the complicated formats of things like word processors the less likely that format will be meaningfully usable in 10,20,50 years time, good luck reading a obsolete word processor file from the 80s today.

labor

1 of 3

noun

la·​bor ˈlā-bər

plural labors

• expenditure of physical or mental effort especially when difficult or compulsory was sentenced to six months at hard labor
• the services performed by workers for wages as distinguished from those rendered by entrepreneurs for profits
• human activity that provides the goods or services in an economy Industry needs labor for production.

So by going harder on blocking content that China? Because that’s what they do but most of the big providers get through after a day or two of downtime each time the government make a change to block them.

It would be more productive if you said how you think im wrong. Just saying ‘youre wrong’ doesnt really add anything to the discussion.

It produces about the same power per cubic metre as compost does, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.

Inertial confinement doesnt produce a “stable reaction” it is pulsed by it’s nature, think of it in the same way as a single cylinder internal combustion engine, periodic explosions which are harnessed to do useful work. So no the laser energy is required every single time to detonate the fuel pellet.

NIF isnt really interested in fusion for power production, it’s a weapons research facility that occasionally puts out puff pieces to make it seem like it has civilian applications.