Posts by Mythical Ham-Lunch 20 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2024
Not if you're arc welding - the flame of an oxy welding torch provides a sufficient atmosphere to prevent weld contamination, but for electric processes without a MIG or TIG setup you will still require flux.
Ironically one is typically require to -remove- any rust with a wire brush or grinding wheel before attempting a weld!
"Almost sounds like it is turning into a company but without any of the responsibilities of being a company and employing people."
Like Uber, or one of a million other gig-work companies that are constantly getting dragged for awful labour practices.
If only their Code of Conduct had something to say about exploitative employment! Of course, if they had employees, they would be subject to employment law, whereas with "awards", they are the judge, jury, and executioner of the precious Code.
Always the right time for this quote:
"There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
This is clearly one of those cases where the effort involved in designing, implementing, and certifying a system dwarfs the cost of manufacturing the components or operating the equipment by a significant factor. You get one shot to get it right and can't really turn it off. But as long as the system is kept to spec and properly maintained, it'll always work.
It seems like there'd be a very lucrative opportunity to start a company that does nothing but manufacture "frozen-in-time" hardware and train people how to service it. A billion dollars (peanuts in any FAA modernization scheme) could pay a thousand people $100K/year for ten years to keep it going. Again, is the US government even going to notice a billion bucks a decade? Definitely not.
Once this outfit is up and running I would very much like to work there!
The bad executives are just the symptom, not the disease. Blame the shareholders who demand perpetual double-digit growth and the voters who want all the government for none of the taxes. When has arresting a john ever hurt a pimp, or harassing a user ever cost a dealer a penny?
The only real fix will take a generation and it is investing seriously in an educational system that teaches reading comprehension and critical thinking.
... I'm not holding my breath either.
Call me a rube but I don't even understand how this works. What do they mean by 'shutdown script'? The model ingests a character string and outputs a statistically probable character string in response. How could it interfere with a shell script on the host computer? Is there some kind of 'script' inside the model that it has to execute in order to be shut down? What happens if you just kill the process? This is just meaningless hype and innuendo unless someone is going to explain what exactly happened.
(edit)
If they trained it to be able to shut itself down in response to user prompts within the input stream and it didn't, is that any surprise at all? That just means it consistently fails at simple instructions, which we already knew...
The real shock is that somehow, researchers keep winning grant applications to study properties of LLMs when they should have known the answer in the first place because they understood the technology!
Get my tinfoil hat, because I almost wonder if some of these 'studies' are funded by the LLM makers themselves. Sure, there's a bit of bad press in "emits buggy code," but they also prop up the much larger and more important narrative that these technologies are mysterious black boxes worthy of study in the first place. As if there is ANY mystery to why a predictive tool, when fed crap, suggests more crap! Because one bad line of code, statistically, is most likely to appear near other bad lines of code!
Framing it as a problem that requires study suggests that there is an as-yet-unknown solution that could fix the aforesaid problem, when really, OpenAI just needs that sweet investor cash.
He tried this before in that book with Kissinger but I guess it's worth another kick at the can. I mean, what IF we could just squash research to preserve our hegemony in the current crappy state of the art?
"We own Nvidia stock and those GPUs ain't gonna buy themselves!"(At least not without AI....)
"This data includes the number of beds in a hospital, the size of waiting lists for elective care services, or the availability of medical supplies."
Okay, so the only justification they can provide is to optimize the finite amount of medical care that the system can provide. Lord forbid they spend the 450 million on, uh, beds, and salaries, and bandages!
I can admire the goals of Rust but I find it very telling that Microsoft pushes it so hard. The selling points of the language seem to be, at a gross level, that for a given final system state it takes comparatively fewer tokens than C to represent the instructions to achieve that state, and that the parts of the system state that are relevant to the user are described by tokens which, statistically, are likely to be close to one another in the source code.
In other words, because of the strong statistical relationship between code blocks and user-observed behaviour, it's amenable for generation by LLMs because the LLM input (the program specification) will have a very tight relationship with the LLM output/compiler input (the source code). Any given line of specification is more likely to correlate to a series of characters in the LLM data model which has been associated by someone else with the same specification already.
A particularly paranoid person might even wonder if the push to get Rust into the kernel is so that an unpaid developer community will generate a whole bunch of Rusty systems code and associated documentation which can then be ingested by Copilot and barfed back out for Microsoft devs. A paranoid person. Might think that.
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