cpleppert (u/cpleppert)

cpleppert commented on Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser github.com/LadybirdBrowse... · Posted by u/goplayoutside

ericjmorey · 6 months ago

I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.

cpleppert · 6 months ago

To be clear on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ they changed this >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.

to this: >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.

cpleppert commented on Pg_lakehouse: A DuckDB Alternative in Postgres blog.paradedb.com/pages/i... · Posted by u/eatonphil

braza · a year ago

how this type of licencing affects people that are not google et. al. in big companies? e.g. I am bootstrap/indie dev doing a small SaaS? Should I be concerned?

cpleppert · a year ago

Short answer: yes. The AGPL should be avoided at all costs because it has never been robustly tested in court and its unclear what the licensing implications actually are.

There are various explanations in plain english sometimes offered about how the AGPL will apply. None of these are true.

Companies that have a made a business decision to provide AGPL licensed code do so with the understanding that no serious business will ever consider using such a product in their software stack. If you choose an AGPL licensed product it will (rightly) become a gigantic headache at some point. It will certainly become a problem if anyone does due diligence.

cpleppert commented on Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs arxiv.org/abs/2406.02061... · Posted by u/tosh

voxic11 · a year ago

Yeah, I think these chatbots are just too sure of themselves. They only really do "system 1 thinking" and only do "system 2 thinking" if you prompt them to. If I ask gpt-4o the riddle in this paper and tell it to assume its reasoning contains possible logical inconsistencies and to come up with reasons why that might be then it does correctly identify the problems with its initial answer and arrives at the correct one.

Here is my prompt:

I have a riddle for you. Please reason about possible assumptions you can make, and paths to find the answer to the question first. Remember this is a riddle so explore lateral thinking possibilities. Then run through some examples using concrete values. And only after doing that attempt to answer the question by reasoning step by step.

The riddle is "Alice has N brothers and she also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?"

After you answer the riddle please review your answer assuming that you have made a logical inconsistency in each step and explain what that inconsistency is. Even if you think there is none do your best to confabulate a reason why it could be logically inconsistent.

Finally after you have done this re-examine your answer in light of these possible inconsistencies and give what you could consider a second best answer.

cpleppert · a year ago

There isn't any evidence that models are doing any kind of "system 2 thinking" here. The model's response is guided by both the prompt and its current output so when you tell it to reason step by step the final answer is guided by its current output text. The second best answer is just something it came up with because you asked, the model has no second best answer to give. The second best answers always seem strange because the model doesn't know what it means to come up with a second best answer; it 'believes' the output it gave is the correct answer and helpfully tries to fulfill your request. Sometimes the second best answer is right but most of the time its completely nonsensical and there is no way to distinguish between the two. If you ask to choose it will be strongly influenced by the framing of its prior response and won't be able to spot logical errors.

Asking it to do lateral thinking and provide examples isn't really helpful because its final output is mostly driven by the step by step reasoning text, not by examples it has generated. At best, the examples are all wrong but it ignores that and spits out the right answer. At worst, it can become confused and give the wrong answer.

I've seen gpt-4 make all kinds of errors with prompts like this. Sometimes, all the reasoning is wrong but the answer is right and vice versa.

cpleppert commented on Kate image withdrawn by three news agencies amid 'manipulation' concerns bbc.com/news/uk-68526972... · Posted by u/timack

cpleppert · a year ago

This isn't a simple composition; entire details were ai created. You can see sections around her hair that look like stable diffusion inpainting. The texture will immediately be cut off and a very softer blurred ai generated part will continue. There are details all around the image that look like that. The jacket and both sweaters aren't original for instance. Large sections of the background on the left were clearly added in as well.

Virtually the only original parts of the image that are unmodified are the faces and hair from the neck up and fingers on the two older children. The person who made this clearly had nothing to go on.

cpleppert commented on 70 years ago, an H-bomb test went awry. We must never forget the fallout washingtonpost.com/opinio... · Posted by u/wolverine876

cpleppert · a year ago

Fantastically chronicled in Atoms and Ashes. [^1]

The explosion was so powerful that the personnel in the monitoring station who were not expected to receive any radiation at all had to hide in a back room of their concrete bunker and hope an evacuation was possible. The radiation & fallout was so intense that all the monitoring ships had to leave their assigned stations. The bomb was a full 2.5 times what the designers expected: 15 megatons as opposed to 6. Just a complete unnecessary tragedy for the islanders.

[^1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VCPQZWP

cpleppert commented on Skulls reveal scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital (2018) science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

throwup238 · 2 years ago

It took them several more centuries to conquer the Mayan civilization with New Spain as a base of operations. Without the Aztec conquest giving them that foothold, it would not have played out the same way at all. If the Aztec leaders were determined to slaughter them in the jungle it would have been impassable to the Spaniards regardless of how many cannons, guns, or horses they had. Even before the Conquistadors knew that Tenochtitlan existed, they were almost wiped out several times by tribes on the coast.

Montezuma invited the Conquistadors into the city and they even held him as a hostage for months before any fighting broke out. Those alliances took a while to establish and the germs only came later into the campaign when they started sending ships back for more troops during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak.

I recommend reading Conquest by Hugh Thomas. The whole story is fascinating and very nuanced - it took several expeditions to even get that far and Cortez was possibly the luckiest man alive in the 16th century.

cpleppert · 2 years ago

The Mayan and Aztec conquests were completely different. The Mayan polities were situated in terrain that was much harsher for an invader, military capability doesn't mean much when a military force can't be effectively maintained in the field against. There also wasn't much incentive for the spanish to extend their domains into the mayan polities at that time. The spanish were far more focused on populous areas where they could extract wealth which was the only way for spanish conquistadors to gather volunteers. Even under these conditions the actual military engagements were very one-sided with most of the Yucatan conquered within thirty years of the Aztec conquest.

cpleppert commented on Skulls reveal scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital (2018) science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

throwup238 · 2 years ago

> Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body.

I found this little bit of rhetorical flourish very amusing because there’s a lot packed in that statement that’s painfully relevant to the fall of the Aztecs. It’s true that obsidian can be cleaved to be sharper than some random surgical implement but it’s relatively brittle and prone to breaking when used in combat. That’s great if you’re an Aztec warrior who’s social standing depends on collecting live bodies for sacrifice or a priest cutting someone up, but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established. History could have turned out very different but from the beginning, even without the guns and cannons, the Spaniards were always better equipped for life or death combat than the entire Aztec society and all their vassal cities.

cpleppert · 2 years ago

>>but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established.

Montezuma was never in a position to slaughter the conquistadors in the jungle. The Tlaxcalans (a rival state to the mexica) engaged the conquistadors in a series of brutal skirmishes (most with the advantage of surprise) on their home turf but failed to make any real progress. Its very clear that the attacking Tlaxcalan warriors suffered horrendous casualties when they engaged the castillans in close quarters combat due to the superior steel weapons(mostly swords) of the latter. Since the Tlaxcalans vigorously defended their independence its hard to argue the Mexica could have done any better fighting at a distance that would have stretched their supply lines.

As for his supposed religious obsession, its unclear and isn't necessary to explain his actions. There is certainly no evidence that Montezuma was confused or acting irrationally; he repeatedly tried to deter the conquistadors from coming and made attempts to play them off against the Tlaxcalans.

cpleppert commented on Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030 nucor.com/news-release/20... · Posted by u/kogus

KingOfCoders · 2 years ago

From 2018:

"They are building full-scale, break-even-or-better that is to be ready in 2018. [...] If all goes well this year then Helion Energy machine that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2021."

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/10/helion-energy-got-fund...

When people stop believing you, just double down. Not 50MW in 2021, but 500MW in 2030. In 2027 they will announce a 5GW plant in 2035.

cpleppert · 2 years ago

Their most recent scientific paper they published 3 months ago only says that scientific breakeven (Qsci > 1) is possible. Which has been claimed many times before pesky engineering challenges and unmodeled behavior starts to interfere. The paper actually mostly just rehashes their marketing so its impossible to judge how realistic their claims are. Regardless, they don't seem like they are close to any kind of actual prototype let alone one that can demonstrate scientific breakeven or the order of magnitude harder engineering breakeven.

Their claims seem very hard to believe to put it mildy.

cpleppert commented on Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030 nucor.com/news-release/20... · Posted by u/kogus

jacamera · 2 years ago

This doesn't appear to be just a PR stunt to me given that Nucor is also directly investing $35 million in Helion as part of the agreement. If you're going to post the usual fusion naysayer comment I think you should at least address this part of the announcement as well.

cpleppert · 2 years ago

Helion has never demonstrated that their technology actually works on any scale. Even if they magically made breakthroughs and were able to hypothetically build a prototype plant it would be almost impossible to solve the operational challenges to build a commercial scale plant in seven years. It would be far more challenging than building a nuclear plant for example. That ignores all the complexity of their D-He3 aneutronic fusion cycle; they probably cannot operate a commercial scale power plant (that would presumably use D-He3) without having first constructed D-D reactors.

cpleppert commented on Shrinking economies don't innovate overcomingbias.com/p/shri... · Posted by u/jger15

charles_f · 2 years ago

> GDP is literally a measure of aggregate production

In $, not amount of goods and services.

> GDP does not measure money any more than mass measures kilograms.

Mass is a physical dimension. GDP is the product of the physical dimensions of the goods and services you product by the value attributed to these physical properties.

> It measures the value of all goods and services produced in the economy.

You're saying it yourself: it measures the value of the goods and services. Value is measured in money and is not directly linked to the volume of goods, resources and services they represent.

You can produce the exact same amount of potatoes, if the value of a kg of potatoes increases, the GDP rises. If you look at the value of oil to gauge its production, there's one day in 2020 when we sent oil back to earth[1].

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52350082

cpleppert · 2 years ago

When economists talk about production in the context of an economy they always mean the value of that production. Economic growth never implies the raw quantity of economic production increased regardless of its value. That's a contradiction in terms. If an economy increases production of some finished good by 50% yet the value of that finished good declined that was not economic growth it was a contraction.

Economic growth literally means the value of goods and services produced by the economy rose. It does not mean "monetary value" in one place or "number of widgets" in another place. Robin Hanson is not confused here by what he means by economic growth and his argument does not rely on some ambiguity in terms.

>>You can produce the exact same amount of potatoes, if the value of a kg of potatoes increases, the GDP rises.

Yes, of course.

>>If you look at the value of oil to gauge its production, there's one day in 2020 when we sent oil back to earth[1].

I'm not sure what this is supposed to illustrate. If a finished good or service does not have value then it cannot contribute to economic growth. The entire point of an economy is to produce goods that have value.