Ehhh. I get that exploitative techbros and cryptobros have confused the issue by latching onto the AI bubble.
But at the same time generalized artificial intelligence is very likely possible and will be an absolute game-changer if and when it happens. It’s easily of similar value to fusion technology.
And it is already bringing truly impressive results into reality - protein folding and diagnostic medicine come to mind.
But at the same time generalized artificial intelligence is very likely possible and will be an absolute game-changer if and when it happens. It’s easily of similar value to fusion technology.
The “AI” we have now is basically advanced Autocomplete.
In the same way that computers are basically advanced abaci.
Don’t confuse a simplification made to demonstrate the basic functioning to a layman with how things actually work.
LLM’s are neural networks, which are based on a model of brain function. There’s little reason to believe that we cannot eventually reach similar levels of effectiveness as human brains.
Hell - reaching the levels of pigeon brains would already be absurdly useful.
While I agree that LLMs can achieve human-tier efficiency at most tasks eventually (some architectural changes will be necessary, but the core approach seems sound), it’s wrong to say it’s modeled after the human brain. We have no idea how brains work as they’re super complex, we’re building artificial neural networks from the ground up. AI uses centuries’ worth of math, but with our current maths knowledge the code isn’t too complicated. Human brains aren’t like that, they can’t be summed up in a few lines of code because DNA is a huge mess that contains so much more than just “learning”, so many inactive or redundant bits and pieces. We’re building LLMs with knowledge of how languages work, not how brains work.
Transformers are not built with our knowledge of language. That’s a gross approximation – it would honestly be more accurate to say they’re modelled after the human brain than that they’re built with our understanding of language. A big problem is that the connection between AI and language is poorly understood – we can’t even understand what the word2vec axes are.
i’m not talking about knowing about how humans perceive/learn languages, i’m talking about language structure. Perhaps it’s wrong to call it “how languages work”
different neural network types excel at different tasks - image recognition was invented way before LLMs, not only for lack of processing power, but also because the previous architectures didn’t work with languages. New architectures don’t appear out of thin air, they are created with a rough idea of what we could need to make the network do a certain task (e.g. NLP) better. Even tokenization isn’t blind codepoint separation but is based on an analysis of languages. But yes, natural languages aren’t “parsed” for neural networks, they don’t even have a formal grammar.
The fundamental problem is that there’s money to be made by consuming more and more “sustainable” resources. The real solution is to reduce consumption on a global scale.
Not OC, but some ways to “reduce consumption” are reducing our usage of inefficient technology by replacing it with more energy/resource efficient means.
Examples include replacing individual automobiles with mass transit, building more dense cities to reduce consumption of construction materials/ vehicle miles, and not training massively large language models in facilities that consume more energy than an entire small country.
… gotta admit this is quite a bit more sound than I anticipated
As for LLMs, people don’t really like when others say they can’t explore the applications of tech, even if it’s unsustainable, so there’f bacaklash ofc
In real world application, increased efficiency doesn’t decrease energy usage nor decrease labor required to live. Tech has gotten more efficient since the industrial revolution, but demand for technology has increased exponentially, energy use is astronomical, and workers still work more hours.
Always I see this kind of “mixed” good/bad points comments. Wonder what it is and where does it come from…
Now to get on track: The topic is simple ANY computer infrastructure CONSUMES a LOT of POWER so if you want to be easy on the PLANET RESOURCES we need to you use it WISELY
Here are some suggestions:
stop people surveillange(aka gathering “advertising” data) and data hording from people devices like smartphones, routers, tv, smart anything like your fridge, ai assistant and other useless shit that only SPIES on you/us/me!
stopping running companies servers that do nothing and are useless or created for scopes that are not meaningful or that provide a real use;
stop creating and working for companies that do not promote/create technologies that support people and their long run sustainability…
This may be true of chopping down forests or mining coal. But we can use nuclear power. And the earth has plenty of water – does chatgpt need clean drinking water specifically?
Datacenters moved to using evaporative cooling to save power. Which it does, but at the cost of water usage.
Using salt water, or anything significantly contaminated like grey water, would mean sediment gets left behind that has to be cleaned up at greater cost. So yes, they generally do compete with drinking water sources.
There’s no way nuclear gets built out in less than 10 years.
Flip it around a little: we need to take control over production to eliminate this pointless and even pernicious waste. There is such massive waste in this system, so much energy and resources and lives dedicated to harmful or wasteful activities, that never really touches a consumerist perspective.
For example, the for-profit healthcare insurance system in the US. If you fired 90% of them, ran a central insurance option through the government, and then paid every single person you fired the same just to do whatever they wanted, you’d actually make the system better and more efficient. That 90% are not just redundant, they are there to put up barriers for needed healthcare because that makes the company money.
The more you analyze any industry, the more you will find these attributes. The product that doesn’t need to exist and only does because of some other deficiency driven by capitalism. The massive bureaucies dedicated to monitoring workers so they don’t unionize, the massive bureaucies that must be duplicated across 50 companies because they each have to do accounting and taxes and payroll and answer calls even though they make the same widget.
On top of all of this is war and related imperialism. Entire countries are thrown into chaos, with this economic system as the root cause. Why is Venezuela so heavily sanctioned? Simply because they nationalized their oil industry so that the money made would go to Venezuelans. This ran against the capitalist imperialist ownership of Venezuela’s resources so they did their very best to destroy the country using economic means. Think of all the people forced into poverty because of this. Think of what they could have built instead. Now think of Iraq, its infrastructure bombed to nothing. We should center the people, but also think of all of the resources it takes to build a power grid, a clean water system, desalinization plants, roads, etc. All of that rubble because Iraq stepped outside the domination of US Empire, itself just an extension of global capital.
Through this we will decrease consumption as well, it is the natural outcome of not maintaining so much redundancy, of destroying so much of what is built, of being able to focus on real problems and developing real solutions rather than forcing humanity into pointless tasks.
I think it is showing what you are saved as in the other persons phone. There are ones where the guy presumably saved a girls number but she didn’t bother to save his and another where the girl saved him as do not answer. I think the point is so you can see how the other person views you. These are mostly joke features and the feature you mentioned is pretty standard now.
they’ve got almost every single monied interest behind them; the last times that the stars lined up like that for anything we got this and another country that have lasted the last few centuries.
That’d certainly be a good feature, but it feels to me like it’s a fairly niche need. And as per that post, it’s also a big technical effort. I can see why there isn’t anything in the way of development updates.
That is me being a bit of an apologist for Firefox though. If you consider Firefox unusable because of that, then that’s a pretty valid frustration.
Still, I’d encourage you to try and find a way to make it work for you because Chrome is evil.
I don’t use Google Chrome, but there are plenty of other chromium-based browsers out there.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run up against technical shortcomings of Firefox, either. I used to frequent a site which made use of the CSS class column-span. Chrome added full support for that class in early 2016. I was probably accessing this site from about late 2016 until about 2018 or so. Firefox didn’t support column-span until December 2019. The whole time I used the site, Firefox simply could not render it in a usable way.
I’ve said for a long time that we’d be better off if Firefox switched to Chromium. They clearly don’t have the resources to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. 5 years and they still don’t support a browser feature that Google got out in a out 1 year and I think Edge got it done in 2 or 3 (and unsurprisingly, Apple has it ready day 1, though that’s an unfair comparison for obvious reasons). Three and a half years behind other browsers in getting out a CSS feature that’s being used live on the web already.
If they based their browser on Chromium, there would be so much less work for them to do. They’d have to spend some effort maintaining features Google has decided to drop, like Manifest V2, but they wouldn’t be alone in that effort, since they can pool resources with the likes of Vivaldi and Brave, and maybe even Microsoft in some cases. So I’m the end a much higher percentage of their resources could be spent developing features that differentiate them and help maintain them as a great privacy-focused browser, instead of merely keeping up on the treadmill of platform change.
They can be slow to adopt changes. I think the Mozilla foundation getting more funding, staffing, and refocusing on their browser would be the better solution.
While Chromium is an open source project, it is still developed and maintained by Google. For something as important as a web browser, I think it’s imperative that there’s an option outside of their control.
Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can’t control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi, or a hypothetical Mozilla fork. And if those other forks want, they can collaborate together to maintain any features they want to have that Google themselves don’t want.
Like, yeah, more funding for Firefox would be the ideal case. But that’s not something Mozilla really has the ability to effect. They can choose what engine they’re using. And using Chromium would allow them to essentially “steal” the work Google has put in, while not preventing them from changing stuff that they don’t like. In fact, in some respects it would help them even with that stuff they don’t like from Google, since they can pool resources with other privacy-forward browsers like Vivaldi and Brave. I honestly see it as win-win.
Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can’t control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi
Sorry but that’s not how it goes, Google can exert control on forks by increasing the difficulty of maintaining changes. The forks have a vested interest in staying compatible with upstream to benefit from Chromium changes over time, which unfortunately means they avoid making any deep changes to the code. None of the Chromium forks are hard ones, unlike Chromium itself which was a hardfork of Apple’s webkit, which in turn was a hard fork off KDE’s KHTML.
Also, Mozilla should DEFINITELY NOT adopt Chromium. We need diversity in web browsers, the idea is that by having different user agents we give the user more bargain power over how they want to browse the web. Remember, Google, Microsoft and Apple are NOT your friends, all they want is to ransack everything and increase their shareholder values. If they can turn the web proprietary and fully locked down, they will.
For now. If Firefox became a Chromium fork, ideally it would stay that way. But if Google did make things too hard in the way you describe, then I would suggest Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. should share a sort of medium-hard fork of Chromium. Keep their own track with features they need, but keep it close enough that the basic rendering engine can still be merged in from work Google does.
We need diversity in web browsers
That’s an ideological position. I don’t agree that there’s any inherent value in the underlying browser engine being diverse. If anything, I think it’s useful for it to be consistent and predictable.
As I write this, I’m talking myself into a slightly different position. Maybe they don’t need to fork Chromium, but it would be valuable to dump Gecko in favour of Blink. I don’t actually know what Chromium gets you besides Blink (and V8, which I lump together with Blink because for the same reasons, I think it would make sense to unify around). Stick with Blink & V8 to let Google to the work on the rendering side (while still being able to contribute back yourself where necessary), while maintaining your own browser and extension ecosystem. So web developers get a single platform to develop against, users get the full experience of any site they visit regardless of their browser, and Mozilla can maximally utilise their development resources in building and maintaining features that differentiate them.
In their landing page there are some cool features, do yall know any reason nota to migrate? I havê been thinking of quitting firefox to another browser for some time now (dont Sant chrommiun tho)
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