Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.
Most software is already available on Linux. I've successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background. Windows is really great at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed. Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but you can usually fix them without having to resort to extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from Linux.
> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.
You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
>but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
Yeah... no. If you're dealing with changing systems, you'll need continued support from maintainers. And there's a lot of stuff out there in the business world that is commonly used and breaks all the time. Stuff will break. If not, it is not getting updated. In that case I'd be more worried about security than compatibility.
Yeah... yes. There are systems which are continuously maintained but don't break all the time. Yes, stuff will break but this is way less common in Linux.
Claws-mail has all my email for over 15 years. My inbox is several gigabytes in size, which claws handles flawlessly. And the software is continuously maintained. I'm using version 4.4.0 now, which was released 16 days ago on March 9.
I don't know what are these nasty bits windows is supposedly hiding, or what exactly breaks more often on Linux. For me it's exact opposite: my linux just never breaks. I don't do anything special, just plug in the hdd into new box bought when old gets too slow for new tasks, continue as nothing happened.
Uptimes of half a year are not uncommon, the record so far is 400+ days. I just don't shut it down unless there's a serious kernel or hardware upgrade.
It just works, non-kernel updates, stuff being plugged/unplugged, couple times I swapped sata hdds without turning off power (which is simple, they are hotplug by design, just don't drop the screws onto motherboard and don't forget to unmount+detach first).
Now, when I used to and test some cross-builds for windows (win7-win10 era), I had another dedicated windows machine for that. And even though I tried to make it as stable as possible, it was a brittle piece of junk, in comparison.
So in my experience, yes, linux is fundamentally different usage philosophy: you don't need to think about what crap Microsoft will break your workflow with next Tuesday.
We already know exactly what causes these bugs. They are not a fundamental problem of LLMs, they are a problem of tokenizers. The actual model simply doesn't get to see the same text that you see. It can only infer this stuff from related info it was trained on. It's as if someone asked you how many 1s there are in the binary representation of this text. You'd also need to convert it first to think it through, or use some external tool, even though your computer never saw anything else.
> It's as if someone asked you how many 1s there are in the binary representation of this text.
I'm actually kinda pleased with how close I guessed! I estimated 4 set bits per character, which with 491 characters in your post (including spaces) comes to 1964.
Then I ran your message through a program to get the actual number, and turns out it has 1800 exactly.
Okay but, genuinely not an expert on the latest with LLMs, but isn’t tokenization an inherent part of LLM construction? Kind of like support vectors in SVMs, or nodes in neural networks? Once we remove tokenization from the equation, aren’t we no longer talking about LLMs?
It's not a side effect of tokenization per se, but of the tokenizers people use in actual practice. If somebody really wanted an LLM that can flawlessly count letters in words, they could train one with a naive tokenizer (like just ascii characters). But the resulting model would be very bad (for its size) at language or reasoning tasks.
Basically it's an engineering tradeoff. There is more demand for LLMs that can solve open math problems, but can't count the Rs in strawberry, than there is for models that can count letters but are bad at everything else.
Nothing specific yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid both in the US and in the EU. Starting in July, all new cars sold in the EU will need to be able to fit after-market alcohol interlocks. In the US, interlocks are already mandatory for convicted DUIers in most states, but new cars will also have to come with factory installed drunk driving prevention technology in the coming years. We just don't know how far that mandate will go eventually.
obviously it will require an age verification, also you need to tell Google that you want to go somewhere 24 hours in advance, and Apple gets 30% of the revenue that gas stations make.
Manufacturers are now encrypting Canbus traffic, voluntarily on current and future models.
Buying or selling tools designed to break the law is already illegal - trivial or not. If a driver gets a DUI and possess a NOOP interlock, they are getting an additional charge, and get to help am investigation into the illicit device supply chain.
> Buying or selling tools designed to break the law is already illegal - trivial or not.
I'm curious how this will play out. The "John Deer" exemption from the DMCA comes to mind, not sure if it's strictly for farm equipment or still in effect.
Sleeping moves your memories from your working memory in your neocortex to your long term memory in your hippocampus. If you were an LLM, sleeping would basically move the contents from your adaptive system/memory prompt to the underlying model weights. It's weird that noone has really done that yet, but I can understand why the big AI chat corpos don't do it: You'd have to store a new model with new weights for each user if you don't want to risk private info spilling to others. If you have a billion users, you simply cant do that (at least not without charging obscene amounts of money that would prevent you from having a billion users in the first place). Current LLM architectures that start with a clean slate for every conversation are really good for serving to billions of people via cloud GPUs, because they can all run the exact same model and get all their customization purely from the input. So if we ever get this, it'll probably be for smaller, local, open models.
On a much simpler level, llm frameworks could re-summarize their context to keep relevant, use-case-specific facts, cleanup and also organize long and short term memory on some local storage, etc. So kind of like sleep. I think these examples are low hanging fruit to improve the perceived intelligence of LLM systems (so probably they're already used somewhere).
We already have that for a while. It works to some degree, but context tokens simply don't offer the level of compression that model weights do. At least with current approaches that keep the context human-readable.
Same way you distill any model. Training data efficiency matters only while you train the source model/ensemble. Once you have that you are purely compute bound during distillation.
Me too. Switching my home system from Ubuntu back to Debian was influenced a lot by snap. I don't get how they could fumble that one so hard. It goes against everything they used to stand for. If I want a bloated, slow, closed-source, proprietary app store with unclear security ramifications, I'll install MacOS or Windows. It also feels like app developers at least care a little bit about those stores. Mozilla for example still officially recommends installing their Debian package rather than through snap on Linux, despite shipping via snap by default on Ubuntu now.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Precisely. But not because of consumers. Which is the whole point. Legislation and oversight make cars better and safer for consumers, not consumer buying choices.
Not everyone has (or can have) a driver's license and a social security card literally says it is *not* for identification because it lacks even the most basic aspects. But since the US never managed to come up with an actual system, companies started using SSNs like an identity verifier, because it is the one thing everyone has across every state. But that also makes identity theft or credit fraud trivial in the US compared to other countries.
> a social security card literally says it is not for identification
It no longer says this, and has not for a long long time. My parent's cards did, but mine does not. Also, I'm old (for this forum at least), so this isn't a recent change.
> It no longer says this, and has not for a long long time.
Don't know about "a long long time" but the feds have been treating Social Security Cards as identification since 1943 (military, some agencies) or 1963 (IRS) (cf [0])
I think you're misunderstanding why they are requesting an SSN. You cannot use an SSN to do an in person ID like a photo ID. Same reason a birth certificate cannot be used as an ID. These documents can be used to look up information about you, and a lot of places might use your SSN as a database unique ID, but that kind of info is not identification when someone shouts "papers!" at you.
conflating the two meanings of identification feels deliberate at this point
> companies started using SSNs like an identity verifier
Probably because USGOV said it is[0]
"In 1943 a presidential executive order directed the military and other government agencies to use the number for identification purposes, and in 1961 the Internal Revenue Service began using the number for taxpayer identification."
That's correct, but what does a driver license have to do with it? A state-issued driver license is one document that can serve as identification. There are plenty of others, including those that are solely for identification. Are you unintentionally conflating them, or are you suggesting that there a eligible people who are unable to get an identity document?
Some financial institutions may not have proper fraud prevention policies, but that is a problem both caused by and to be resolved by the financial institution, not the consumer. Pretending it's the consumer's problem may protect the financial institution, but leads to entire categories of new problems far more devastating. Don't pretend some nebulous concept of identity has been stolen. Say it like it is: the financial institution was defrauded due to their own lax policies.
Identity theft is commonly understood to be exactly what you just mentioned. Obviously no one can steal me (which is exactly what I thought when I first heard the term as a broke college kid; who wants to be me anyway?)
We aren't "pretending" it's a consumer problem. It is a consumer problem. When someone opens up a credit card or loan in my namd, whose life gets messed up? Not the banks! Pretending it's not a consumer problem is dangerous and can lead to a lot of messed up financial lives.
Personally, I freeze my credit with all major bureaux, and I shred any mail that has my name on it. It's annoying, yes, but the alternative is even more annoying.
The only reason _you_ have a problem when somebody defrauds the bank, is because the banks sufficiently marketed the term Identify Theft. In reality, nothing of yours was stolen. In reality, the actual illicit act was somebody lying to the bank, and the bank not properly verifying who that person is.
You say nothing of mine is stolen but they hypothetically just racked up $10k debt on my identity. This is stuff that affects real things like my ability to get a mortgage, and I am also on the hook for that money unless I find a way to cancel that card. No matter the case, it very much is my problem, and they successfully took money from someone else (the bank) and made me pay for it. That's theft.
> the actual illicit act was somebody lying to the bank
Yes, this is known as fraud, and the entire concept of identity theft.
>I still occasionally hand write code in NeoVim on the bits I care the most about (CSS, design and early architecture like API patterns)
I find it amazing how people's opinions differ here. This is the first stuff I'd trust to Claude and co. because it is very much in-distribution for training data. Now if I had sensitive backend code or a framework/language/library that is pretty new or updated frequently, I'd be much more cautious about trusting LLMs or at least I would want to understand every bit of the code.
I think OP nailed it with 'the bits I care the most about'—if you like those things a certain way, then you'll want to make sure they are that way, not accept whatever Claude does. If you don't care, you just want something done, then you'll have Claude do it while you work on what you do care more about.
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