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grumbel commented on Proposal: AI Content Disclosure Header   ietf.org/archive/id/draft... · Posted by u/exprez135
grumbel · a day ago
Completely the wrong way around. We are heading into a future where everything will be touched by AI in some way, be it things like Photoshop Generative Fill, spell check, subtitles, face filters, upscaling, translation or just good old algorithmic recommendations. Even many smartphones already run AI over every photo they make.

Doing it in a HTTP header is furthermore extremely lossly, files get copy around and that header ain't coming with them. It's not a practical place to put that info, especially when we have Exif inside the images themselves.

The proper way to handle this is mark authentic content and keeping a trail of how it was edited, since that's the rare thing you might to highlight in a sea of slop, https://contentauthenticity.org/ is trying to do that.

grumbel commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem   vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus
andy99 · 4 days ago
If you believe the bitter lesson, all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data. Someone likely would have written the same thing as this 8 years ago about what it would take to get current LLM performance.

So I don't buy the engineering angle, I also don't think LLMs will scale up to AGI as imagined by Asimov or any of the usual sci-fi tropes. There is something more fundamental missing, as in missing science, not missing engineering.

grumbel · 4 days ago
> all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data.

How long until that gets more reliable than a simple database? How long until it can execute code faster than a CPU running a program?

A lot of the stuff humans accomplish is through technology, not due to growing a bigger brain. Even something seemingly basic like a math equation benefits drastically from being written down with pen&paper instead of being juggled in the human brain itself (see Extended mind thesis). And when it comes to something like running a 3D engine, there is pretty much no hope of doing it with just your brain.

Maybe we will get AIs smart enough that they can write their own tools, but for that to happen, we still need the infrastructure that allows them writing the tools in the first place. The way they can access Python is a start, but there is still a lack of persistence that lets them keep their accomplishments for future runs, be it in the form of a digital notepad or dynamic updating of weights.

grumbel commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing   rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777
grumbel · 20 days ago
Cyc[0] tried for 40 years to make handwritten semantic rules a thing, but still don't have much to show for. Humans just aren't good or fast at writing down the rather fuzzy semantics of the real world into a computer readable format.

With RDF specially, there was also the issue of "WTF is this good for?". Semantic Web sounds lofty in theory, but was there ever even a clear plan on how the UI would look like? How would I explore all that semantic data if it ever came into existence? How would it deal with link rot?

And much like with RSS, I think a big failure of RDF is that it's some weird thing outside the Web, instead of just some addition HTML tags to enrich existing documents. If there is a failure, it's that. Even today, a lot of basic semantic tags are missing from HTML, we finally got <date> in 2011, but we still have nothing for names, cities, units, books[1], movie, gps coordinates and a lot of other stuff we use daily.

Another big failure is that HTML has become a read-only format, the idea that one uses HTML as a source format to publish documents seems to have been completely abandoned. HTML is just a UI language for Web apps nowadays, Markdown, LaTeX or whatever is what one uses to write content.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

1. <a href="urn:isbn:..."> exists, but browsers don't support it natively

grumbel commented on Writing a basic service for GNU Guix   tannerhoelzel.com/gnu-she... · Posted by u/hermitsings
tempfile · 24 days ago
As someone who has tried both, I found the learning curve for Guix much more pleasant than for Nix. With Nix, the community is for sure a lot larger, and more things are available (notably it is a lot faster, too). But I could never get everything clear in my head, how it hangs together, and the community seemed very much more fragmented than with Guix. I think the Guix documentation and manual, as well as the CLI and secondary docs written in people's blogs, were much easier to get a handle on than with Nix. Flakes are a great example, I still have no idea what a flake is, they are still an experimental feature, and I have no idea how I should think about them. I've been using NixOS full time for 3 years by the way.

I also think the shepherd alone is almost a killer app relative to something like systemd. I had to write a service myself for restarting ssh tunnels, and I could even do "advanced" things like templated configuration, almost trivially. It felt like a superpower, relative to systemd services.

grumbel · 23 days ago
> Flakes are a great example, I still have no idea what a flake is

A package that fully specifies its dependencies (via flake.nix/flake.lock) instead of depending on whatever the user has in their Nix channels. You enable them via:

    nix.settings.experimental-features = [ "nix-command" "flakes" ];
And then forget about "nix-channel", "nix-env" and all the old ways of doing stuff, the new "nix" command is much easier to understand and much closer to what guix is doing.

The fun part with flakes is that they turn git repositories into full packages, meaning you can do stuff like:

   nix run github:user/project?ref=v0.2.0rc1
or use other git repositories directly as dependencies.

That flakes are still marked as experimental is annoying, but they have been working fine for well over three years.

grumbel commented on Writing a basic service for GNU Guix   tannerhoelzel.com/gnu-she... · Posted by u/hermitsings
tempodox · 25 days ago
From a quick glance, Guix seems to have a similar learning curve as Nix (at least it's based on Scheme, which I know). Is that impression correct? Anyway, I didn't find this “intuitively comprehensible” as an outsider.
grumbel · 25 days ago
Guix is a reimagining of the concepts of Nix with Guile/Scheme instead of the Nix language, so they are very similar in overall feel, but differ in the details (e.g. GNU Shepherd vs systemd).

As for learning curve, I find Nix substantially easier, since the language is much simpler (JSON-like with lazy-functions) and doesn't need all that weirdness that result from using Scheme as configuration language (lots of quoting, module system, etc.)

grumbel commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google   reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
af78 · a month ago
That's a common misconception. The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... and is legally binding in all member states. Sure, there are exceptions but in the USA too freedom of speech is not absolute either.

Moreover, in practice, there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...:

USA: 0.89 France: 0.96 Germany: 0.94 Czechia: 0.96 etc.

grumbel · a month ago
> there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA

A quick look at Steam says otherwise. All the games that credit cards companies pressured to get removed from Steam, were already long gone in Germany. Because that's the level of government censorship that is completely normal in Germany.

The only reason why one might get the idea that Germany ain't so bad is because Germany doesn't do (much) Internet censorship, so we have access to the much less censored outside world. If German law would apply worldwide half the Internet would be wiped out.

grumbel commented on Modern C++ – RAII   green7ea.github.io/modern... · Posted by u/green7ea
90s_dev · 3 months ago
Why don't we just use shared_ptr most of the time? Is it really that inefficient?
grumbel · 3 months ago
With shared_ptr you completely lose track who actually owns an object or when it will get destructed. It encourages sloppy programming and makes code much harder to read and reason about.

Unlike most languages that have ref-counting build in, shared_ptr also doesn't provide anything to deal with cyclic dependencies, so you can end up with memory leaks.

The most important reason however is simply that you don't need it like 99% of the time, unique_ptr provides enough functionality to work just fine as a shared_ptr replacement in most situations. And in the rare cases where you really need a shared_ptr, you can just convert a unique_ptr into one.

grumbel commented on BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)   zverok.space/blog/2024-08... · Posted by u/beeburrt
mppm · 3 months ago
I think at this point it would be preferable for the government to take over the payment infrastructure directly. This is often seen as dystopian, but it's a dystopia that has already come to pass for the most part. If we made it official, at least the rules for what can be blocked or refused or frozen would be out in the open.
grumbel commented on What is HDR, anyway?   lux.camera/what-is-hdr/... · Posted by u/_kush
mightysashiman · 3 months ago
I have a question: how can I print HDR? Is there any HDR printer + paper + display lighting setup?

My hypothesis are the following:

- Increase display lighting to increase peak white point + use a black ink able to absorb more light (can Vantablack-style pigments be made into ink?) => increase dynamic range of a printable picture

- Alternatively, have the display lighting include visible light + invisible UV light, and have the printed picture include an invisible layer of UV ink that shines white : the pattern printed in invisible UV-ink would be the "gain map" to increase the peak brightness past incident visible light into HDR range.

What do you folks think?

grumbel · 3 months ago
Use projection mapping, instead of lighting the photo uniformly, use a projector and project a copy of the image onto the photo, thus you get detailed control over how much light the parts of the image receive.

Alternatively, use transparent film and a bright backlight.

grumbel commented on Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball   privacyguides.org/article... · Posted by u/ChiptuneIsCool
nradov · 4 months ago
Why? And how would that even work? Just because an online account is tied to a verified real human doesn't guarantee that the content isn't coming from an AI-bot.
grumbel · 4 months ago
It's a blockchain, so you can keep permanent record of what a person is doing and when and where they got caught violating the rules. It won't stop the infractions from happening at first, but it will make it very easy to avoid them happening again. And if this gets widespread, people might think twice before risking their blockchain personhood certificate.

u/grumbel

KarmaCake day1448April 16, 2015View Original