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nickwitha_k

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Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump’s second term (www.politico.com)

Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate...

nickwitha_k ,

Well, evangelical Christianity is pretty literally a doomsday cult TRYING to bring about the apocalypse, so, they ignore those parts.

nickwitha_k ,

We already can’t due to Google’s pushing of irrelevant promoted sites and failing to take meaningful action against SEO in recent years.

Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works (www.cnn.com)

Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

nickwitha_k ,

Designing and marketing a system to plagiarize works en masse? That’s the cash grab.

nickwitha_k ,

What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.

Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.

nickwitha_k ,

No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:

I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.

You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.

nickwitha_k ,

That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.

nickwitha_k ,

It really doesn’t. The data is just tokenized and encoded into the model (with additional metadata).

If I take the following:

Three blind mice, three blind mice See how they run, see how they run

And encode it based upon frequency: 1:{“word”: “three”, “qty”: 2}``2:{“word”: “blind”, “qty”: 2}``3:{“word”: “mice”, “qty”: 2}``4:{“word”: “see”, “qty”: 2}``5:{“word”: “how”, “qty”: 2}``6:{“word”: “they”, “qty”: 2}``7:{“word”: “run”, “qty”: 2}

The original data is still present, just not in its original form. If I were then to use the data to generate a rhyme and claim authorship, I would both be lying and committing plagiarism, which is the act of attempting to pass someone else’s work off as your own.

Out of curiosity, do you currently or intend to make money using LLMs? I ask because I’m wondering if this is an example of Upton Sinclair’s statement “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

nickwitha_k ,

It is not literally how they work, no. But, an oversimplified approximation. Data is encoded into mathematical functions in neural network nodes but, it is still encoded data in the same way that an MP3 and WAV of a song are both still the song; the neural network is the medium.

Just because the data is stored in a different, possibly more-efficient manner doesn’t mean that it is not there for all intents and purposes (I suppose one could make the argument of it being transformed into metadata but if it is able to reconstruct verbatim, this seems like a fallacy). Nor is it within free use exemptions of most IP laws to use others’ copyrighted, trademarked, or copy-left data to power a commercial product in ways contrary to licensing terms.

As for my job, well, yes, I do have some anxieties in that area but as a software engineer focused in automation, tooling, and security, I suspect that my position is fairly secure. I would hope yours is too, both for youself and overall software quality. Likely there will be more demand for both of our skillsets with the CRA.

nickwitha_k ,

there is no limited right granted that allows a IP holder to say how that IP can be processed.

There very much is. Literally all intellectual property law concerns how intellectual property may or may not be used and licensed. For example, one may not record and sell a cover of a song that is in copyright without explicit permission in the form of a mechanical license. In our industry, one may not use code that is covered by a GNU GPL license without fulfilling the source code distribution requirements (see: IBM RedHat drama).

The training data is what gives the LLM value in the problematic situations so, it is very clear that the material is a key component in the business plan and commercial use. This is not an educational, parody, or other exempt fair-use activity. This means that if any data used for training is not licensed appropriately, such use is a clear violation of intellectual property laws, even if but explicitly covered due to the technology not existing when they were written.

I am not so sure that this specific role is in any way secure, myself. You may come to the same conclusion after reading that link I provided-- pay attention to how rapidly the LLMs are growing in complexity. I do not wish for anyone to lose their financial security, even a stranger like you, but I can’t help but look at the available information and come to that conclusion.

I do agree that there are software engineering jobs at risk in the short-term due to management desire to cut labor while riding the hype train as well as US taxation on R&D but, given the widespread failures found when companies have replaced engineers and others, I have been expecting wave of desperate re-hiring to occur in 1-3 years after layoff. The particular segment that I’m involved in is generally considered high-ROI so, likely less vulnerable (but no guarantee).

I don’t see how QA could be sanely replaced though as, from my experience, it’s already frequently under-funded and, as I mentioned, for all the bad in the CRA drafts, one of the positives is that QA-related work is going to be mandatory for software and devices sold in the EU market.

nickwitha_k ,

or-not2.be

nickwitha_k ,

I’d suggest something like Keycloak or earning the wizard robe and beard by buckling down and learning OpenLDAP. The biggest suggestion that I have though is to have a disaster recovery plan for even your auth system goes down. Don’t be like Facebook and lock yourself out without any hope of regaining entry (or, if you’re a fan of Russian Roulette, do).

nickwitha_k ,

I’m still trying to cover up with a good one to allow more self-hosting. Probably a SHTF security key kept in a safe that can be used with physical access.

My “plan” is to SSH in and figure out what’s wrong.

The problem here being that you have a circular dependency:

  1. SSH auth requires OpenLDAP/Keycloak
  2. SSH access is required to fix broken OpenLDAP/Keycloak
  3. GOTO 1
nickwitha_k ,

That makes sense. I like the idea of combining physical key with physical/KVM access so that there is no password auth (at least, not without a second factor).

nickwitha_k ,

I vehemently dislike coding directly on my workstation and do all of my development in remote VMs via SSH, when possible. My work MBP is a glorified SSH terminal with a web browser. I got my start in the industry with remote SysAdmin stuff so, it feels pretty natural.

For an IDE, I use Neovim, currently with a plugin distribution - Neovim because I got used to the vim syntax as a SysAdmin and the distribution because I can’t justify sinking more time into tuning my env for a bit but am intending to scrap it all around the holidays or so.

Most of my work is in Go or Python. At home, it’s a mix of CircuitPython, C, and I’m picking up some Rust (mainly embedded for C and Rust). Will be starting to learn Verilog this weekend.

For Go and Python, I tend to lean towards a TDD approach, even if it gets a bit derided by coding streamers.

My workflow tends to be:

  1. Prototype desired functionality to get at least individual parts working.
  2. Start from scratch and rough out any classes/structs and test suite boilerplate.
  3. Start the red->green->refactor loop, giving extra granularity to parts of code that I am less confident in.
  4. Once all intended functionality is implemented, run manual tests (I generally develop tools).
  5. Fix bugs that unit tests failed to prevent or I failed to anticipate.
  6. Repeat 4 and 5 until acceptable.
  7. Prepare commit.
  8. Push commit and receive failure because I haven’t fully configured my formatters to clean trailing whitespace and VT100-compatible line lengths.
  9. Push commit again and send for code review.

Currently, my build automation is kinda in CMake. Really, the Makefile is just calling a build in a docker container.

For C, Rust, and Verilog, I’m not yet familiar enough to have yet established workflows.

ETA: I think I just got the same FPGA as you! Xilinx Zync-7020 (Digilent Arty Z7-20).

nickwitha_k ,

I think that some companies and devs also have a bad taste in their mouth due to overzealous adopters and policies, along with using mocks that are not necessarily going to maintain parity with their production counterparts. Some things are a bit silly to test and mocks like that are going to introduce future technical debt.

What does your 'home' instance really matter?

One thing I’m not clear about is the impact my home instance has on me. I joined lemmy.world and am currently using the connect for lemmy app. I know when I sort by Local it will only show me posts from lemmy.world, but beyond that are there any things to keep in mind?...

nickwitha_k ,

Largely, I’d say it depends on the sort of engagement that you’re looking for. I went with mine because I’m passionate about FOSS and think that, long-term, it’s only sustainable by organizations that do not have a profit motive.

nickwitha_k ,

Electronics/maker stuff welcome?

nickwitha_k ,

Awesome! I’m clawing back more time from work and working towards some open source hardware and software stuff. Will be fun to post once I have things underway. Mostly, I’m aiming at free and open FPGA libraries and actually useful AR/mobile computing stuff that fits in with the positive technological side of cyberpunk, rather than the dystopian. Absolutely want to dig into doing LoRa at some point as well, myself.

EDIT: Just realized that I misread the community name but, I’m still into it.

nickwitha_k ,

Seems rather bizarre to me, though it could make sense for some non-technical roles. For developers, seems a bit impractical; much of language documentation is online and odd errors, common and esoteric, are frequently completely absent from docs. This seems likely to require devs to either use unauthorized devices or waste time digging through source (possibly for the programming language itself) to figure things out.

However, the remark about root access makes me hope that there are not people logging into systems at Google as root. A sudoer, sure, but root is a big no-no.

nickwitha_k ,

I would think that this would be an approach that absolutely makes sense for corporate infra systems like domain servers, systems with access to network configs, etc.

Maybe adding an additional security tier? Something like “sandbox dev” where new third-party libraries and technologies can be tested and a “production dev” which is more restricted. That might be the “right” way.

The problem that I’d see is that productivity, development velocity, and release cadence would all take a nose-dive as software engineers have to continually repeat work, roughly doubling the real amount of work needed to release any piece of software. This would likely be seen as incompatible with modern business and customer expectations.

nickwitha_k ,

sudo cat bleach | /dev/eyes

nickwitha_k ,

TBH, that’s not a factor for me. I use an HMD for everything these days so, it’s likely favorable to have a lower res to save power.

nickwitha_k ,

But why? …

Because this is about enshitification of life for studio exec profits. It’s not really about where a machine can or should be a part of creative works, but HOW they are being used.

Nearly very industry in which LLMs are being used in the latest hype wave, it’s not being used to improve anything but concentration of wealth in the hands of a dwindling number of individuals by worsening product quality and real ability of any of humanity, outside of those of hereditary wealth, to be get by.

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