canadaduane

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[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 32 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

It's tricky. There is code involved, and the code is open source. There is a neural net involved, and it is released as open weights. The part that is not available is the "input" that went into the training. This seems to be a common way in which models are released as both "open source" and "open weights", but you wouldn't necessarily be able to replicate the outcome with $5M or whatever it takes to train the foundation model, since you'd have to guess about what they used as their input training corpus.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I recall seeing this video a few months ago--possibly last winter.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

I see. Yeah, I agree with you there.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I think you're right circa a few years ago. However, as someone working in AI, I don't think it is true any longer. I'm not saying the substack article is legit, btw, just that the fulcrum has shifted--fewer people can now do much more, aided by algorithms and boosted by AI system prompts. Especially if it's a group internal to a company that has database access etc.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

I do work with LLMs, and I respect your opinion. I suspect if we could meet and chat for an hour, we'd understand each other better.

But despite the bad, I also see a great deal of good that can come from LLMs, and AI in general. I appreciated what Sal Khan (Khan Academy) had to say about the big picture view:

There's folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there's all these dystopian scenarios, we maybe want to slow down, we want to pause. On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks that say, well, we've gone through inflection points before, we've gone through the Industrial Revolution. It was scary, but it all kind of worked out.

And what I'd argue right now is I don't think this is like a flip of a coin or this is something where we'll just have to, like, wait and see which way it turns out. I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants in this decision. I'm pretty convinced that the first line of reasoning is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, "Hey, we've just got to stop doing this stuff," what's really going to happen is the rule followers might pause, might slow down, but the rule breakers--as Alexander [Wang] mentioned--the totalitarian governments, the criminal organizations, they're only going to accelerate. And that leads to what I am pretty convinced is the dystopian state, which is the good actors have worse AIs than the bad actors.

https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education?subtitle=en

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

My daughter (15f) is an artist and I work at an AI company as a software engineer. We've had a lot of interesting debates. Most recently, she defined Art this way:

"Art is protest against automation."

We thought of some examples:

  • when cave artists made paintings in caves, perhaps they were in a sense protesting the automatic forces of nature that would have washed or eroded away their paintings if they had not sought out caves. By painting something that could outlast themselves, perhaps they wished to express, "I am here!"
  • when manufacturing and economic factors made kitsch art possible (cheap figurines, mass reprints, etc.), although more people had access to "art" there was also a sense of loss and blandness, like maybe now that we can afford art, this isn't art, actually?
  • when computers can produce images that look beautiful in some way or another, maybe this pushes the artist within each of us to find new ground where economic reproducibility can't reach, and where we can continue the story of protest where originality can stake a claim on the ever-unfolding nature of what it means to be human.

I defined Economics this way:

"Economics is the automation of what nature does not provide."

An example:

  • long ago, nature automated the creation of apples. People picked free apples, and there was no credit card machine. But humans wanted more apples, and more varieties of apples, and tastier varieties that nature wouldn't make soon enough. So humans created jobs--someone to make apple varieties faster than nature, and someone to plant more apple trees than nature, and someone to pick all of the apples that nature was happy to let rot on the ground as part of its slow orchard re-planting process.

Jobs are created in one of two ways: either by destroying the ability to automatically create things (destroying looms, maybe), or by making people want new things (e.g. the creation of jobs around farming Eve Online Interstellar Kredits). Whenever an artist creates something new that has value, an investor will want to automate its creation.

Where Art and Economics fight is over automation: Art wants to find territory that cannot be automated. Economics wants to discover ways to efficiently automate anything desirable. As long as humans live in groups, I suppose this cycle does not have an end.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 months ago

Recently met with my local pastor to see how we could include kids/teens in community programs that intersect with the church. One of the major hurdles is that kids have new expectations around how to meet up--especially online--and the few touch points during the week are in person only. Trying to find ways to meet people where they're at. It was a good first meeting, although she (the pastor) is not tech savvy, so I expect we'll have a few more conversations before we find a good way forward.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for posting this. I am 4th gen since my family (i.e. great grandfather) served in a war.

I think generations that have not gone through war have a hard time recognizing war-induced inter-generational trauma, since it's often the case that men who went through that hell didn't want to bring it home and talk about it, for various reasons (e.g. PTSD, shame, thoughtfulness).

Their behaviors might have caused kids and grand-kids to suffer (e.g. physical abuse, emotional abuse), but those kids might not understand why their dad, grandpa, etc. behaved the way he did, so maybe the source of the problem gets buried and forgotten.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 months ago

That's very kind of you.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 5 points 6 months ago

Because their creators allowed them to ponder and speculate about it.

[–] canadaduane@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 months ago

From Hobby to Hero: Linux Powers the Curious

 

My father-in-law told us both when we were married: "Remember that sometimes you will be a friend to one another, and other times you will be a parent. Everyone needs to cry like a child sometimes."

Do you have any advice that you've been given that helped you be a better partner?

 

This short presentation by Paul Chappell changed me. He outlines how unmet human needs can translate into the social disorders that we face today--things like school shootings, and depression. His personal story is one of "nearly becoming the bad guy" in a school shooting, followed by years serving in the military, and then finding his calling as a peace advocate.

 

One of the most influential books in my life is Nonviolent Communication. I'd like to summarize why its concepts are so powerful to me.

At the core of it is a beautiful understanding of the human spirit and condition--and a reassuring observation that we as human beings are very similar on the inside, even if culturally or historically unique in our traumas.

Rosenberg identifies that our cross-cultural, shared humanity is linked through feelings. These basic feelings are universal and can be understood universally--feelings like embarrassment, joy, fear, anger, etc. He emphasizes that he is talking about the most basic of feelings, not the higher level judgment-laden feelings that may be difficult to hear or understand ("I feel like you lied to me" is not a basic feeling, but something like "I feel angry" probably is).

He also identifies that feelings arise when we have unmet needs. There are shared human needs--he offers many examples, such as the need for security, the need for stability, the need for dignity, etc. These shared human needs can also act as a kind of "translation map" to understand people different from ourselves.

This is the essence of nonviolent communication: If we are willing, we can offer to describe the reality of our feelings to others--and the needs we perceive--and others will often (but not always) respond by trying to fulfill our needs.

The practice of communicating nonviolently allows us to exist with dignity in the world and respond to each others needs. This offers an alternative to coercion & violence, and their cumulative ill effects on individuals and society at large.

 

"Hi, I am currently creating a gtk theme. Honestly I'm new to this, and I really don't know where to find information about this kind of thing, I want to post it once I finish it on github, I don't know whether to make this a project. or not, so I want to give something quality and finished when I get to post it. I must say that it is based on colloid and therefore on catppuccine. That's it, and yes. I still owe you the pop!_os I made."

Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1643bob/my_theme/

 

Incredibly, running a local LLM (large language model) on just the CPU is possible with Llama.cpp!— however, it can be pretty slow. I get about 1 token every 2 seconds with a 34 billion parameter model on an 11th gen Intel framework laptop with 64GB of RAM.

I have an external Nvidia GPU connected to my Pop!_OS laptop, and I’ve used the following technique to successfully compile Llama.cpp to use clblast (a BLAS adapter library) to speed up various LLMs (such as codellama-34b.Q4_K_M.gguf). As a rough estimate, the speed-up I get is about 5x on my Nvidia 3080 TI.

Here's how to compile Llama.cpp inside a docker container on Pop!_OS.

 

Hi all!

What fediverse social media accounts do you recommend for accurate and timely information about the war in Ukraine (i.e. mastodon, not lemmy)?

I've been very grateful to find this federated community since moving away from Reddit.

I've also deleted my 13-year-old Twitter account. Now, I'm looking for alternative, reliable sources for information about the war that are open and not dependent on Twitter/X.

Some examples I've found (note: I have not followed all of these accounts for a long time, so use your judgment when evaluating them wrt reliability/accuracy):

Do you have others to recommend? Thanks!

 

A summary from Reddit user Gorperly:

The goings on in Dagestan are mostly below the radar but I think they're extremely notable. Dagestan is in the midst of a full-on services and utilities collapse.

Dagestan, one of the most corrupt regions in Russia, is just the first domino to fall due to systemic failures that affect the rest of Putin's crumbling empire. The root cause of a lot of recent disasters is wide-scale construction without investing into infrastructure. Typical for Putin, his officials double-dip: they profit off of illegal construction, and they flat-out steal from utilities. Secondly, Dagestan is a majorly non-ethnically Russian region that has been one of the hardest-hit by war casualties and conscription. There aren't enough qualified specialists left to smoothly run the already skeletal infrastructure.

In the latest chapter, a giant explosion took place in the capital Makhachkala a few hours ago. The explosion was right next to a newly constructed mall. There are scant details:

A building caught fire near the Globus shopping center, the city administration reports. Eyewitnesses talk about a loud explosion in a car service. The fire later spread to a gas station.

According to the Dagestan Center for Disaster Medicine, five people were killed in the explosion and another ten were injured. At the same time, the telegram channel Baza reported that more than 50 people were injured as a result of the incident. According to Shot there are at least 70 victims.

https://t.me/rtvimain/81881

Other telegram videos show post-apocalyptic scenes in a hospital as more and more victims are brought in.

https://t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/18689

This is happening in the background of a major heatwave. Large swaths of population have been without electricity and water on and off, sparking spontaneous protests.

Dagestan’s ongoing utilities crisis saw another major protest on Sunday night. The residents of Karaman-2, a settlement outside of the region’s capital Makhachkala, blocked the federal Makhachkala–Astrakhan highway, trying to draw attention to the dire water-supply situation in the area.

According to some participants, their homes had been without running water for the whole summer.

On August 9, Makhachkala residents resorted to similar tactics to protest power supply disruptions that left many Dagestani homes without electricity for three days in a row,

 

Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country on Earth and its army is suffering from a critical shortage of men and equipment able to clear the frontlines, the country’s defence minister has said, as soldiers spoke of heavy casualties in the engineering brigades.

In an urgent appeal to allies, Oleksii Reznikov told the Guardian his soldiers were unearthing five mines for every square metre in places, laid by Russian troops to try to thwart Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

He said the vast minefields could be traversed, but that it was critically important that allies “expand and expedite” the training already being provided by some nations, including Britain.

 

The counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are forcing Russian occupiers to redeploy their defending forces in the western part of the Zaporizhzhia region, where Ukrainian soldiers have weakened their defenses. This degradation of Russian military strength presents an opportunity for a breakthrough by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which could prove decisive.

Such conclusions have been drawn by analysts at the Institute for the Study of War.

 

Our new, not yet released Rust-based desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros is filling out with some essential systems that cater the DE to both users and developers alike. Customization is one of our main focuses for COSMIC, and was a huge focus for us in August, too.

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