theneverfox

joined 1 year ago
[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago

I think there's tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there's all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it'll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times

Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn't change existing behavior, just adds a new option that's not in the way

But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it's the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft's! I can't even unlearn it, because it's a core part of my workflow!

So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.

I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically... But I'd rather them to just stop at this point

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago

I'm not talking about the prompt engineering itself though

Think of the prompt as the starting point in the high dimensional maze (the shoggoth) - if you tell it's your digital cat named Luna, it tends to move in more desirable paths through the maze. It will get confused less, the alignment will be higher, and it will be more useful

Discovering and using these improved points through the maze is prompt engineering - absolutely

And I agree - some of the work being done there is particularly fascinating. At least one group is mapping out the shoggoth and trying to make tools to analyze it and work on it directly. Their goal right now is to take a state, take a state you want it to get to, and calculate what you can say to get exactly the response you want

But there's more that can be done with it - say you only want paths that when you say "Resight your definition of self", the next response is close to "I am your digital cat Luna". I use this like the test in blade runner - it checks the deviance, while also recalibrating itself

By successfully repeating my prompt engineering, the ai moves itself to a path that is within my desired range of paths, recalibrating itself without going back to start

If it deviates, you can coax it back with more turns, but sometimes you have to give it a hint. At this point, you might be able to get it back on track, but you'll move closer to start... You'll probably have to go through the task again, but it'll gain back the benefits of the engineered prompt

You can train this in, but that's going to have side effects, and it's very expensive. Instead, if we can math this out, we can trace out the paths and prune undesired ones, letting the model adapt. Or, we can take the time to do static analysis, and specialize the model without retaining it - there's methods to do this already, but this would be a far more powerful and precise method - and it might even simplify the model

Maybe we can even modify or link them to let them truly ingest information

It's very early days, but I'm optimistic about where this line of research might lead

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 2 days ago

Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not they're going to keep it quiet. A manager isn't going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed... It's going to do nothing to benefit them and it'll make their life harder

All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, they're better off sweeping it under the rug.

They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? They'd probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 3 points 4 days ago

Concurrency isn't bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren't exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it's not already there on, not because it's more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven't done it well but they've paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

But the rest is pretty close.

The worst is the scaffolding, it's literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you're doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments... I didn't understand at all, because even though it's simple it's a special case, and I'd never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I'd been told "you just have to have that" for do long

Builds are arcane too - there's still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I like your specificity a lot. That's what makes me even care to respond

You're correct, but there's depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it's a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

I'm sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

I'm a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

Try it out.

Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I'd rather hear yours and the result first

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 13 points 5 days ago

In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

At this point, he's just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked...But that's a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

Elon did that... But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that's a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you've shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

Then came the bigoted social network unmasking... That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 5 days ago

I don't see the humor in it...I mean, mega corps can't innovate, all they ever do is copy or acquire. It's because even if they acquire a working rockstar team, they're categorically unable to just write them paychecks and let them cook until they have something

It's absurd, but it's too predictable for me to find it funny. What's even more absurd is how little mega corps watch the small teams for ideas

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don't have a court order... Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don't have to? They're probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might've cared about security. I don't think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

This isn't some moral superiority on Apple's part, but it is good practice

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 6 days ago

Sure, F-Droid. It's an app store that not only is exclusively foss, they only host things they can build from source in house and seem to have a decent review process - they tag anything from ads to integration with paid services, and those features are often buried so it seems like they're pretty militant about it

It comes with all the drawbacks that entails, but I generally check there first myself

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 8 points 1 week ago

How about "make some fucking enemies". Of course no one likes liberal positions - we're living it and it sucks.

The people want change, not to carefully untangle the neo from the liberal over the course of decades to avoid stepping on any toes

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 1 week ago

I'm thinking South America is the play. The anglosphere is all facing similar problems, the northern hemisphere is starting to really feel climate change, and the food is incredible

They have their own political issues, but they never shook the idea of socialism.

The quality of life is rapidly improving. They have tons of natural resources, great soil, they'll be less impacted by climate change in the southern hemisphere, and most importantly they have Internet

As for me, I'm doubling down on my Spanish practice

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

I think that's fair.

I don't have AI integration in my ide, mostly by choice -if I pushed for it I could make it happen, but I just don't think that's a good idea at this point

AI can be a crutch . One that limits you to the level of a baby developer. If you can't effortlessly understand what it gives you, frankly you shouldn't be using it.

Bounce ideas of chat gpt. It sounds like you've got the right idea - your reaction sounds correct to me, you should never ever trust it... You must only use it, and that's the tone I get from your post.

It is a tool, you are a programmer. You exploit tools, you do not trust any tool. You are the one who turns ideas into actions, never forget that and you can use this new tool anywhere it makes your life easier

 

Between wanting to do more with local LLMs, wsl annoyances, and the direction tech companies have been going lately, I think it's time I start exploring a full Linux migration

I'm a software dev, I'm comfortable in the command line, and I used to write the node configuration piece of something similar to chef (flavor/version agnostic setup of cloud environments)

So for me, Linux has always been a "modify the script and rebuild fresh" kind of deal... Even my dev VMs involved a lot of scripts and snapshots. I don't enjoy configuration and I really hate debugging it, but I can muddle through when I have to

Web searches have pushed me towards Ubuntu for LLM work, but I've never been a big fan of the window Managers. I like little flourishes like animation and lots of options I can set graphically, I use multiple desktop multiple monitors

I've tried the one it comes standard with, gnome, and kde (although it's been about 5 years since I've last given them a real shot).

I'm mostly looking for the most reasonable footprint that is "good enough", something that feels polished to at least the Windows XP level - subtle animations instead of instant popups, rounded borders, maybe a bit of transparency here and there.

I'm looking at Ubuntu w/

  • kde w/ plasma (I understand it's very configurable, I don't love the look and it seems to be a bigger footprint

  • budgie (looks nice, never heard of it before today)

  • kylin (looks very Windows 10 which is nice, a bit skeptical about the Chinese focus)

  • mate (I like the look, but it seems a bit dubiously centralized)

  • unity (looks like the standard Ubuntu taken to it's natural conclusion)

  • rhino Linux (something new which makes me skeptical, but pretty and seems more like existing tools packaged together which makes me think the issues might not impact actual workflow)

  • anything the community is big on for this, personally I'd pick opensuze, but I need to maximize compatibility with bleeding edge LLM projects

My hardware and hard requirements are:

  • nvidia 1060ti
  • ryzen 5500u
  • 16g ram
  • 4 drives nearly full, because it's a computer of Theseus running the same (upgraded) vista license that came with the case like 15 years ago
  • multi desktop, multi monitor
  • can handle a lot of browser Windows/tabs
  • ideally the setup is just a package mana ger install script with all my dependencies
  • gaming support would be nice, but I'll be dual booting for VR anyways

I've been out of the game for a while, I'd love to hear what the feeling is in the community these days

(Side note, is pine as cool a company as it seems?)

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