rmuk

joined 2 years ago
[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Imagine someone said "make a machine that can peel an orange". You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That's the best you've got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It'll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don't know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn't designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.

Now imagine that it's not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it's files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it's a thousand a second. And instead of "peel an orange" it's "sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works to a standard approaching the point of being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby even against their own interests". When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it's users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.

What I just described is NEAT algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it's a flavour of what's going on.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 13 points 1 day ago

"PCs run Windows. I have a Mac, which is not a PC." - Average Tech Journalist.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone he's the hero.

Now, if you'd said Jailbot...

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 4 days ago

Tarantino. Toes. Figures.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 4 days ago

I'm not sure how long this will last, but I've still not forgiven Netflix for forcing the ending to be rushed. The last season should have been at least two seasons.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The basil guy? Yeah, he's cool, and he helped me get ye flask.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 3 points 5 days ago

Let's go back to a website, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Make sure you don't put "Al" by mistake though. You'll only get offers to be part of "bodyguard/long-lost pal" collaborations with people called Betty.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Most people tend to stay in the same room (or a neighbouring room) when they're microwaving something. They could probably save on the cost of having a full-blown computer with wifi inside the microwave by just having the noisy thing from an alarm clock. But, ah, the fuck do I know?

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago

Broth.

I hate that word. To be clear, I have no ethical, cultural or culinary objection to broth, but it's an awful word to say. You have to empty your lungs to say it, it just sounds like your belching, there's no standout syllable to emphasise, in fact, is it actually monosyllabic or not? Bro-ffff? Utter horseshit. From now on, it's Thick Soup.

 

The UK is currently experiencing some prolonged windy weather and my all-renewable energy provider offers dynamic pricing. That means cheap energy and even negative-cost energy. This is where my HA instance shines and saves me a fortune on my power bill. Thanks again to the HA devs for this incredible project.

For the curious, I'm using bottlecapdave's excellent Home Assistant Octopus Energy integration via HACS.

 

The apartment blocks - two of perhaps a hundred - are surrounded by open greenery, wide walkways and dense tram networks. Most of them have café bars, bookstores, grocery stores or the like on the ground level and loads of benches, play areas and exercise equipment dotted about. The place is rife with Third Places.

The remarkable thing about these is that, to the locals, they seem fairly unremarkable.

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