Notices by Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx: (njoseph@social.masto.host), page 2

Some thoughts about LLMs

1. "LLMs confidently give wrong answers/lies" - anybody who tried to get information from an LLM.

LLMs have no feelings or emotions. So, they cannot "feel confident". We perceive their lack of doubt to be confidence.

(1/3)

2. "The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent" - from a recently popular toot.

The main ability of LLMs is to place token after token (a token is a part of a word) very quickly. To speak is to transform your thoughts into a form that others can understand. LLMs have no thoughts. Heck, they don't even understand words because they deal in tokens. Jar Jar Binks actually meets this definition of intelligence.

(2/3)

3. "When the LLM made up some stuff you didn't like, it was a hallucination" - Sam Altman probably?

LLMs cannot think. Also, they had no sense organs until they recently became multi-modal. They have no sense of right/wrong/meaning/nonsense etc. All of that comes from the human interpreting the signals coming from the LLM. Does this make their users computer astrologers? It doesn't matter. Like a stopped clock, they are sometimes right and can do novel things so people keep using them.

(3/3)

I have spent a month reading everything I can about the climate & collapse, but I didn't write much about it. I am just starting to.

At first I didn't want to share because I thought people will call me a doomer at best or a nut case at worst.

I am an engineer. Numbers don't scare me. I read the sources to verify claims.

I've put up some bookmarks on my Shaarli starting Oct 10. You can read them if you are not depressed.

https://njoseph.me/shaarli/

If you are used to advanced task tracking systems with projects, tags, subtasks, detailed notes etc. (org-mode or even a full-fledged project management system such as Trello) and not satisfied with the simplicity of a system like ToDo.txt, there is a @TiddlyWiki plugin for Task Management. http://tiddlytables.tiddlyspot.com/

It conveniently appears in the side bar, so that you don't have to figure out how to "pin" a tiddler.

#TaskManagement #todoTXT #TiddlyWiki #FreedomBox

"The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future" is a short book (more like an essay) of climate fiction written by two historians of science.

In an interview, one of the authors described it as "hopeful". I don't know what to say about that, but it mostly believable and somewhat optimistic.

It was written in 2014, you know, those optimistic times when the effects of climate change weren't felt strongly by the common person yet.

#books #ClimateCrisis

My livelihood as a software engineer depends on the existence of computers.

Semi-conductor manufacturing is the most complicated endeavor that humankind has ever undertaken (yes including the Mars missions, read the book Chip War) and it is mostly concentrated in one island nation. Also, it involves critical raw materials that are available in only one location on Earth. It doesn't get more fragile than this.

Meanwhile, the "Cloud" is an illusion of infinite computers on a finite planet.

I wonder what the 4th big grift that involves a huge amount of GPUs is going to be, after cryptocurrencies, metaverse and generative AI models. Because there will be a large amount of unusued GPUs left with Big Tech after the current bubble bursts.

I don't think cloud gaming would be able to use up that much capacity. There are data centers being built now which won't be completed before the bubble bursts.

Please support my free software work on LiberaPay.
https://liberapay.com/njoseph

My work on free software is currently self-funded using a combination of passive income and burning through savings until I am forced to find a job. You can extend this duration by donating.

Also take this opportunity to say what else you'd like to see from me. Blog posts? Wiki? Video?

If all FreedomBox users donated $1 per month, it would match the income from my previous job.

Please boost!

#FreedomBox #Donations

A lot of malicious software is being made these days, sometimes by the biggest tech companies in the world, but the word "malware" isn't being used to describe it anymore.

Most proprietary software these days has a bit of maliciousness baked in, so has it become too common to deserve a special term? Is "malware" a term from the innocent times?

Similarly, "spyware". All Big Tech companies make spyware, no exceptions.

We need these terms back in mainstream tech reporting.

#malware #spyware

Software engineering is said to be programming over time.

Many free software funding models ignore this aspect, funding only new feature development. Projects that are decades old often need more maintenance work than new feature work.

Maintaining old projects also needs more expertise than starting new projects or adding features to an existing projects (at least in well structured ones).

This recent blog post from @AntennaPod is a good illustration of this.
https://antennapod.org/blog/2024/05/modernizing-the-code-structure

About 10 years ago, before fitness trackers and smartwatches were a thing, there were apps that simply plotted the path that you traveled on a map (e.g. #Strava).

If you want to track an activity that involves moving around, such as walking, jogging, running or cycling there is an app on F-Droid called #OpenTracks. It tracks the distance, elevation and time for each activity. It can show the traveled path on an #OpenStreetMap app like #OrganicMaps and also plot graphs.

#FDroid #Android

There should be a global FOSS maintenance grant fund with no expectation of any new feature development.

Newpipe allows you to bookmark any playlist on YouTube. You don't even have to subscribe to that channel. This can be useful for video courses.

Here is one that I bookmarked.

Ecological Civilization (Video Series)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGyDELJdHq36Pl6FtVu7V75OIF04SMW-5

#NewPipe #YouTube

Imagine MongoDB selling all of the data stored by their customers in their hosted offering. The database company will basically cease to exist after that.

But selling all of the data stored by customers in a MySQL database by a WordPress hosted offering is somehow supposed to be acceptable with an opt-out button.

From @ratfactor 's blog post
https://ratfactor.com/leaving-github

> Independent FOSS developers do not owe anything to companies, including the slightest effort to "secure the software supply chain" for "consumers." As the licenses say, THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND …

As somebody else on fedi once said, we ain't part of your corporation's supply chain because you didn't sign any agreement with us to that effect.