NeatNit

You might know Robert Miles from his appearances in Computerphile. When it comes to AI safety, his videos are the best explainers out there. In this video, he talks about the developments of the past year (since his last video) and how AI safety plays into it.

For example, he shows how GPT 4 shows understanding of "theory of other minds" where GPT 3.5 did not. This is where the AI can keep track of what other people know and don't know. He explains the Sally-Anne test used to show this.

He covers an experiment where GPT-4 used TaskRabbit to get a human to complete a CAPTCHA, and when the human questioned whether it was actually a robot, GPT-4 decided to lie and said that it needs help because it's blind.

He talks about how many researchers, including high-profile ones, are trying to slow down or stop the development of AI models until the safety research can catch up and ensure that the risks associated with it are mitigated.

And he talks about how suddenly what he's been doing became really important, where before it was mostly a fun and interesting hobby. He now has an influential role in how this plays out and he talks about how scary that is.

If you're interested at all in this topic, I can't recommend this video enough.

Or a very very high zoom to get a similar effect.

No real reason for this question, just a random wonder I had. Basically the effect this would have on perspective might be interesting, and I wonder if any movie used this kind of shot for more than a couple of seconds.

I know that DNA encodes proteins. Truthfully, everything besides that (including 'what are proteins') mostly wooshes over my head, but that's not relevant because whenever I search this question I never even find it addressed anywhere.

The human body has, among other things, two hands each with five fingers, with a very particular bone structure. How are things like that encoded in DNA, and by what mechanisms does that DNA cause these features to be built the way they are? What makes two people have a different nose shape? Nearly everyone in my family has a mole on the left side of their face, how does that come about from DNA?

I'm sure there are many steps involved, but I don't see how we go from creating proteins to reproducibly building a full organism with all the organs in the right places and the right shapes. Whenever I try to look this up, all of these intermediate steps are missing, so it basically seems like magic.

As I said, any explanation will most likely go over my head and I won't be able to understand it fully, but I at least want to see an explanation. I'll do my best to understand it of course.

Kind of an update from my previous post. The Proton Drive app on Android utterly failed to back up my photos and videos. I've now got a glimpse to a possible reason why.

I realized that it was doing fine with photos and small videos but was struggling with large files, so as a temporary measure, I moved all the files bigger than 1GB to a different folder on my phone. I then had to wipe the app's data and log back in because it was just hanging or looping repeatedly otherwise. After logging back in, it successfully backed up all the remaining files over many hours. At least, I think it did - I'd have to go one by one to find out and I'm really not feeling too confident about it. But if it didn't get all of them, it got almost all of them.

Then I added back in the files that were between 1GB and 2GB. It managed this fine. The app's data usage grew to about 4GB at some points but that is fine as it needs to create encrypted copies of the file it's backing up and it might be doing a few files in parallel. At the end, the data usage went back down to <1GB.

Then I tried to add back the files between 2GB and 5GB. There were four of them: 2.25GB, 2.50GB, 3.86GB, and 4.12GB. Total size: approximately 12.73 GB. After setting the app running, its data usage grew to upwards of 60GB and I had to halt it. As before, there was no way to get the app to behave again after that besides wiping data and logging back in again. The "clear local cache" button in the app's settings did seemingly nothing. I moved the big files back to the temporary folder.

Next I tried to move the files one at a time, starting from the smallest one. So one 2.25 GB video file. Turns out my phone shows base-10-based file sizes, so it's actually 2.091 GiB. The app misbehaves a little bit in vague ways that I didn't quite comprehend and can't explain, e.g. it got stuck at "3 files remaining" even though I only added 1 file, so I needed to wipe its memory again, but eventually it uploaded the dang file. I don't remember exactly how much data it used in the process, but the important thing is it worked. And then I looked at the file through the Proton Drive web interface and checked its details, where I saw what's in the picture:

Size: 2.09 GB

Original size: -2049486257 bytes

The original file size is stored as a 32-bit signed integer! Is this only in the web frontend, or is it also like that behind the scenes? What happens when the file size exceeds 4GiB? Does this only affect photos/videos or does it happens for the general-purpose Drive as well? Is this why big files have been failing for me?

I'll keep you guys updated... And I hope these bugs are fixed. I still believe in Proton.

Edit: the four files, added one by one, uploaded successfully. Now moving on to a 6.10GB file. This is bigger in bytes than 32 bits can represent. Wish me luck.

Edit next day: the 6.10 GB file failed to upload. It's perpetually stuck at "1 item left" after giving it more than enough time overnight. The app is also taking up some 15GB of space - much more than it should. While uploading previous files, it gree to marginally larger than the file being uploaded. Now it's well over 2x that. So my conclusion is that Proton Drive for Android can't back up videos larger than 4GB, and fails catastrophically when attempting to do so.

I'm already in contact with Proton support. I'm not sure I've quit convinced them of the severity of this bug yet (or multiple bugs) but they acknowledged that there are issues and suggested that the current beta version 2.4.0 of the app has mitigations regarding storage usage, and they gave me instructions for trying to access it.

I upgraded to Proton Unlimited today and I've set Proton Drive to back up my whole camera gallery, a few hundreds of GBs, so it will take a while. But I noticed that it skips large videos, e.g. it skipped a 9.8GB video file. Is this intended behavior? I can't find documentation of it anywhere and it seems to happen silently. I easily could have missed it, assumed that it backed up everything down to a certain date, and deleted the only copy of the videos.

I joined Proton just a few days ago, and I'm paying for it so I can use my custom domain.

I watched this interview and it raises a huge question for me (link includes timestamp): https://tilvids.com/w/q1mZzv6eq3iULLmGdV6w6M?start=6m20s

In this interview, Andy Yen says about gmail et al "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Then, in nearly the same breath, he boasts that most Proton users don't pay, they use the basic service for free because that's all they need.

So my question is: if there's no such thing as a free lunch (which there isn't), how come Proton can offer it?

Hope these kinds of questions are allowed here. On this occasion I'm just looking for a straight answer.

For a university course I need to install ROS - software for doing robotics stuff. Specifically, I need ROS 1 - which is no longer being updated, as ROS 2 is now the focus. The installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ros.org/Installation/Ubuntu

The instructions from the course material say that only Ubuntu 18 would work, though the ROS wiki says Ubuntu 20.04 is the target. Either way, it doesn't seem to be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and therefore Linux Mint 21, which is what I'm running.

The course instructions generally gives 3 options:

1. Install ROS on a VirtualBox virtual machine
2. Install on Windows using WSL
3. Install on a real Ubuntu 18 system

Right now I'm going to use VirtualBox to get started, but I'd really prefer to run it natively and I'm worried about performance. Is there a simple way to download and run software intended for Ubuntu 20.04 on Linux Mint 21.3?

Edit: thank you all for the great suggestions! I got stuck on an unrelated problem (ran out of storage space) but I'm sure your suggestions will work once I fix that. Forgive me for not replying individually, you're all awesome and I don't have anything to add other than "thank you" :)