circuscritic

Unless there’s a way to secure public funding for them, this seems like a reasonable middle road.

Like Patreon, which while having its own unique set of problems, enables a paid content distribution ecosystem for independent creators unlike anything else available.

So, absent inserting invasive advertising, and lacking public funds, I can’t see how else they’re supposed to maintain infrastructure and development costs.

Not everyone has a safety deposit box, or the ability to access a proper and secure off-site storage.

And if you’re just keeping those in your house, then fire, flood, and other incidents can destroy all copies at once.

Nah, I’m with you, except I use BitWarden.

There are somethings either worth paying someone else to host, or where you trust a 3rd party more than you’re own setup. I realize other users may feel different, but ultimately it’s a judgement call

BW has been a pretty great opensource company, and it’s worth my $10/yr for premium.

No, I’m living in this thread. I’m talking about very specific issues related to LLMs, that I’ve highlighted ad nauseam.

Reread if you’re confused.

If anything, it shows that you believe in the concept of “AI” way more than I do, as you’re conflating LLM and FSD.

I don’t believe in AI, it doesn’t exist. Just specific advanced machine learning algorithms, some better than others, and some all smoke and mirrors. But here, now, I’m talking about LLMs.

Who’s talking about investing…? I’ve exclusively been talking about what LLMs can do now, today, for free (aside from energy costs).

None of what your throwing out there has anything to do with what’s being discussed here. It’s a red herring.

I mean, it probably will eventually, but that has nothing to do with LLMs, nor is it a technology that I want to exist.

I can definitely see a world where lobbyists for automakers and insurance companies create such a financial and regulatory burden, where only the wealthy can afford to drive their own cars, if they choose to. Where as everyone else must rent or lease their self driving car as is if it’s a IaaS or SaaS subscription.

But none of that has anything to do with using LLMs for the tasks they can accomplish, or telling people to stop bitching about them not being able to complete the tasks they aren’t good at, or even capable of.

Yes and no, I have self-hosted models on one of my Linux boxes, but even with a relatively modern 70 series Nvidia GPU, it’s still faster to use free non-local services like ChatGPT or DDG.

My rule of thumb for SaaS LLMs is to never enter in any data that I wouldn’t also be willing to upload cleartext to Google Drive or OneDrive.

Sometimes that means modifying text before submitting it, and other times having to rely entirely on self-hosted tools.

Llama is the model I use most often, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.

Others as well, but yes, it is incredible helpful for the tasks I use it for.

Weasel phrase? You mean the fact that I don’t treat them like their actual Ai, but just a tool that needs to be used properly, monitored, and verified?

There’s a reason why I never call them AI, because they’re not. They’re just advanced machine learning tools, and just like I keep a steady hand when using a table saw, I only use LLMs for tasks that they can help me do something faster, but are easy to verify they did it right.

And as someone who has been using them very regularly, I feel confident in saying that. It’s not a weasel phrase, I’m not trying to sell anyone snake oil about what they can actually do, and I acknowledge that they’re an oversold and overhyped means of cooking the planet faster, so it’s not like I would be mad if they were banned tomorrow, but until then, I will keep using them in ways that are actually fruitful.

But sure, if all you need to do is find one word in a single body of text, that’s not really a good use of an LLM, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.

If I need examples of various legal or ethical concerns documented in one, or multiple, pieces of writing, or other conceptual topics, I can give it a list, and then ask it to highlight all examples of those issues, and include the verbatim text where their present. I can then give that same task to a multiple different LLMs, with the same prompts, and a task that would have taken me hours to complete, takes me 30 to 45 minutes, including the time it takes me to give it quick read through see if anything was missed. But yeah, that requires a well crafted prompt, and it’s not infallible.

Replace belt sander with CBD. A compound with very real and tangible benefits for specific use cases, but is marketed as a modern day snake oil cure all.

Imagine seeing people regularly complaining on bluelight, erowid, or whatever forums educated drug users frequent these days, bitching that CBD didn’t cure their asthma, or STDs, so therefore it has no medical value.

They know it’s a tool, yet they keep complaining about how the gas station CBD isn’t magic and failed to cure their gonorrhea, even though they already knew it was never going to be able to, no matter what the packaging said.

But my analogy wasn’t meant to be critically analyzed and dissected, it was a throwaway example to highlight the problem of people on Lemmy, who actually know better, but keep whinging about LLM’s providing bogus URLs for citations, etc.

I’m not advocating for openai, their business model, or the environmental and financial cost benefit of current LLM technology.

They suck, it’s dogshit, and it’s not worth cooking the planet for.

I also don’t disagree about the very real possibility that the average user may actually get dumber and more misinformed by relying on LLMs.

But we’re on Lemmy, and I’m just tired of all these comments incessantly complaining about about how LLM’s can’t do x,y, or z.

Imagine being on a carpentry forum, and every day people complained about how their new belt sander was dogshit at cutting 2x4’s or screwing in fasteners, so clearly the problem was with the concept of belt sander technology.

It’s not a peer-reviewed journal or academic level source, and shouldn’t be used as that.

But if I need to find some technical or scientific writings on a subject, but I don’t know the correct nomenclature or need a more narrow set of keywords, that is something I can describe to the LLM and get back.

The keywords in their response can help me then hunt down the journal article or papers that I need using traditional search engines. I’m not just brainstorming here, this is something I do often enough to find real utility in it.

Again, these are problems that can be solved with traditional search engines, but at the cost of time and frustration sifting though every potential result.

You can spit out a hundred more examples of what an LLM can’t do, but as I already said, they’re not magic, just tools.

Your experience highlights what current iterations of LLMs are not well suited for, so I understand if that’s what you were hoping to achieve, why you were left wanting, or disillusioned.

There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

This can save you hours and hours, of reading time, and it’s something that you can verify the answer on relatively quickly, to double check the LLMs response accuracy.

They’re also good at doing something Google used to be good at, but sucks at now. Which enabling you to describe process, simple or complicated, short or long, that you either can’t recall the name of, or aren’t even sure where it’s called, and letting you know exactly what it is. Also, easily verifiable.

There’s plenty of other things too, but just remember that they are tools, not magic, or sentient intelligence.

The models are not real time, but there are tricks to figure out it’s most recent dates of ingestion, such as asking topical entertainment or news questions, but don’t go looking for a real-time information.

Also, I have yet to find a model that can provide an actual URL and specific source for anything it generates, which is why it’s a good practice to use them to do tasks, or get information, that would take you longer to do, or get, manually, but that can be easily verified once you receive it.

Awesome. Truly spectacular.

Generative AI is so energy intensive ($$$), that Google is requiring users subscribe to Gemini.

Google is entirely dependent on advertising sales. Ad revenue subsidizes literally everything else, from Android development to whichever 8-12 products and services they launch and subsequently cancel each year.

Now, Google wants to remove web results and just use generative AI instead of search as it’s default user interface.

So, like I said: Awesome.

I wouldn’t have even thought to consider the possibility that my local meth cook would have a better photo printer then the local pharamcy, but i’ll stop by later and ask him. Well, as long as he’s taken down the tinfoil from the windows. If the foils up, then it’s a pretty safe bet he’s been up for at least 3 days straight.

Thanks for the tip!

What services are you running? Which of them are critical and need to stay up?

Can you migrate, or setup failovers, to a low powered ARM device? Or one the new Intel N series e.g. N100 low power devices?

If not, you’re going to need to buy/build a fairly large battery bank.