Great article looking at LLM fascination as an extension of the psychic’s con
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviourOut of the Software Crisis
Just your most recent reminder the people behind Plex are a bunch of goat fraggers.
https://torrentfreak.com/plex-asks-github-to-take-down-reshare-repository-over-piracy-fears-240404/
So. I got called a "homelab waaior" for having wanting math for load balancing to be fast, efficient, easy to tweak, and predictable. And for pointing out that the math in question is largely integer math and been fairly settled for decades.
Ahhh... yes... the dude who literally specializes in system monitoring could not possibly understand anything about this...
Haha. I must say, this made my day.
On a more amusing note... Urbie LAM is now a thing...
https://www.sarna.net/news/urbanmech-lam-now-exists-and-is-awaiting-canonicity-approval/
So hoppscotch has come out and proved it a great example of what is wrong in the opensource community. Also proving themselves to be massive leeches. The concept of difference between personal and enterprise is bullocks in this sphere and only furthers to fuck over everything from a security stand point.
https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/pull/3266#issuecomment-1984106576
Wow, seriously? Authentication servers for an API system are inherently and always commercial?
Yeah, this looks pretty bad.
Here's your regular reminder that by picking a cutesy name under some #ccTLD you are necessarily relinquishing full control to the ccTLD owner. @violetblue found out about that when Lybia shut down her vb.ly back in... 2010 or so? Now here is @GossiTheDog noting that queer.af was suspended by the Taliban.
Don't register your domains under a repressive regime's #TLD.
https://mstdn.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/111918426534026789
"They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like" by Chris Person
https://aftermath.site/true-lies-4k-uhd-blu-ray-james-cameron-peter-jackson-park-road-post
The 4K transfer of True Lies is what happens when a company uses proprietary tech to overwrite and denoise history.aftermath.site
Retrofit an ESP32 into APC 7920 PDU. Contribute to pimvanpelt/apc7920 development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
https://nextcloud.com/de/blog/open-source-email-pioneer-roundcube-comes-aboard-nextcloud/
Sadly this won't mean the death of Nextcloud Mail as they still can't admit their own home rolled webmail is utter garbage.
So was sitting down and comparing borgbackup and urbackup features when I noticed apparently the peps behind urbackup don't use Github issues or anything else even remotely close to sane. Apparently they use Atlassian Jira for issue reporting. This made the choice easy, borgbackup all the way.
Fuck everything about Atlassian and JIRA, speaking as some one who has had their insanely slow and incompetent SW inflicted upon them before.
So it is looking like BackupPC is sadly dead.
4.4.0 has been a buggy non-functional release for nearly for like 3 years now.
I found the network rack gacha! Assumed it was so niche it would only be found in like Tokyo but there was one around my neck of the woods as well.
This is the cutest thing ever! Look at the little cables and cable management hoops, the PDU, all of it is so well-done!
#japan #gacha #networking #sysadmin #mb
Links to the various resources regarding my disease and live liver transplantation for potential donors.ginpuliver
I see a third possibility (speculating outside my competence): what if Chomsky was onto something with his concept of a "deep grammar" underlying human languages, and LLMs have inadvertently exposed or replicated it.
But language and linguistic competence alone are not actual intelligence or sentience—they're just how intelligence communicates.
(Which is where the illusion arises.)
People who've never seen a picture of a face see one for the first time and think it's a face.
@cstross
Iirc, Chomsky was arguing for an innate grammar inherent in all human individuals? Never really got into Chomskian linguistics (but did a bit of linguistic anthropology as an undergrad).
Incidentally, this was a fascinating read:
https://aeon.co/essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky
An anthropologist studies the warring ideas of Noam Chomsky | Aeon Essays
Chris Knight (Aeon Magazine)@scottmatter Wow: "Language, for Chomsky, is a computational module restricted entirely to the individual, and devoid of communicative, cultural or social aspects. If it has any remaining purpose or function, it exists merely for talking to oneself. This novel and allegedly ‘scientific’ model of language was so extreme in its individualism and abstraction that, in the end, it proved of no use to anyone. Not even the US military could make any of it work."
Sounds like an LLM!
Yep!
it's been contentious for a while - this is kinda pop lit, but covers the essential problem.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/
@cstross @emilygorcenski
Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning
Paul Ibbotson (Scientific American)@BradRubenstein
Yes, I'm familiar with the debunking—but as the article says, "His research looked for the underlying computational structure of language and proposed a set of procedures that would create “well-formed” sentences. The revolutionary idea was that a computerlike program could produce sentences real people thought were grammatical. That program could also purportedly explain the way people generated their sentences."
If that doesn't describe LLMs, what does?
@cstross @BradRubenstein There's this conceptual problem with "developmental".
There are constraints on language—all those noises we can't make—but one of the deep problems with the idea that language involves a generative grammar is figuring out where it would come from. Language is everywhere if we mean communication. More of the question is how did we go from conveying basic emotion to speaking with precision, given what we must have started with?
@cstross There is a shedload of wetware specifically to recognize faces. It's why we can see faces in clouds.
The problem with Chomsky's grammar notions is that no one has been able to find it. There's a bunch of developmental stuff about sound order in infants and another bunch of developmental stuff leading up to theory of mind, but the organization of language doesn't seem to be especially constrained.
I think the "psychic illusion" take is much closer.