It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it’s doing, then figure out how it’s doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.

I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.

Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.

This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.

I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).

Though it’s more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.

I feel this also misses something rather big. I find there’s a huge negative value of people I have to help through doing a task - I can usually just get it done at least 2x if not 5x or more faster and move on with life. At least with a good intern I can hope they’ll learn and eventually actually be able to be assigned tasks and I can ignore those most of the time. Current AI can’t learn that way for various reasons, some I think technical, some business model driven, whatever. It’s like always having the first day on the job intern to “help”.

The other problem is - unless I have 0 data security rules, there’s just so much the AI cannot know. Like I thought today I’d have Claude 3.7 thinking write me a bash script. I wanted it to query a system group and make sure the members of that group are in the current users .k5login. (Now, part of this is me not knowing how to prompt, but it’s also stuff a decent intern ought to be able to figure out.) One, it’s done a lot of code to work out what the realm is - this is useful generically, but is just code that could contain bugs when we know the realm and there’s only one it’ll ever operate in.

I also had to re-prompt because I realized it misunderstood me the first time, whereas I think an intern would have access to the e-mail context so would have known what I meant.

Though I will say it’s better than most scripters in that it actually does a lot of “safety” stuff we would find tedious and usually have to have something go wrong to add in, so … swings and roundabouts? It did save me time, assuming we all think it’s method is good enough - but this is also such a simple task that I think in some ways it’s barely above filling out a lot of boilerplate. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see on stack overflow back in the day.

EDIT: I actually had a task that felt 100% AI could have done… if there was any way for it to know lots and lots of context. I had to basically fill out a long docx file with often AI like text describing local IT security standards, processes, responsibilities and delegations. Probably over 60% I had to “just make up” cause I didn’t have the context - for higher ups to eventually massage into a final form. But I literally cannot even upload the confidential blank form, forget about have some magic way for AI to get a brain dump from me about the last 10ish years of spoken knowledge and restricted wiki pages. Anything it could have made up mostly would have “been done” by the time I made a functional prompt.

I don’t think we solve this till we can run frontier models locally at prices less than a human salary, with integrations into everything a human in that position could access.

Personally I think most of these sorts of things should have a 3 year warranty - but very few offer that. If you can’t handle the 1 year you need to plan on the reality in the US IMHO. This isn’t a Valve thing, its a USA thing. So ranting against Valve feels a little disengenuous. AFAIK there’s no competitior that’s better. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would say the same thing.

So - in the future buy with a card that extends the warranty by a year or buy an extended offering from the company or square or whatever, if you can’t self insure the 200 repair or 600 ish replacement costs.

For home use (and small uses at work) I’ve found cyberpower to be cheaper than APC and yet work as well. You’d likely need to get a model with a network card option, and that’ll cost more I think. I’m not in EU though, so IDK what model would meet your needs and price point (which seems pretty low to me for a network enabled UPS).

I guess not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good would be a fundamental different value. I used to think just pay for what you want because being a customer should lead to better results. The last 10 or so years has disabused me of the notion - so many companies are plenty willing to lie to us or treat us horribly and charge for the “privilege”.

My main point is you seem to be saying “Advertising driven journalism is worse than pay for access journalism.” I’m saying “citation needed” - given how cable news and online sites are such echo chambers now (and widely accepted and studied to be so). Even more concerning is the drift of podcasts, substacks, and youtube channels that rely on donations or subscriptions to ever more extreme areas in “audience capture” where advertising has been less a direct driver than broadcast news. This leaves me wondering if the traditional broadcast media like ABC/NBC/CBS isn’t less prone to conspiracy theories, outright lies, and also more likely to be willing to show me something I don’t want to hear because I’m not directly paying them.

Also sites like https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/ and https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ tend to rank traditional “boring” sources as most factual and least biased, especially local broadcast affiliates local newscasts. I.e. pretty traditional advertising driven news a la the 1980s.

Maybe you dispute factuality rankings and bias rankings. Maybe you think conspiracy theories or shows like “The Daily Show” or Tuckers twitter show are better than choosing not to cover some topics that you feel they should have covered.

I just think today it’s far harder to bury a story - if you want to hear about it, someone is commenting. But it’s far easier to flood the zone with bullshit, and the incentives with pay for access media seem to encourage being like Joe Rogan and not Barbara Walters for instance.

And maybe your entire point is there’s no good solution and news was worse in broadcast times vs today. I might agree with the first except for that means giving up on getting any news at all and I disagree on the second. It’s also why I think having both currently known workable models as alternatives may help - the paid news sources will not be able to as easily be pressured by advertisers or the government funding to not cover topics and the advertiser sources will be more incentivised to report mainstream and boring news than the pay sites.

And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues. IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century. Lies of omission are better than straight up lies imo - no documentation is better than wrong documentation.

You should worry about audience capture / gifting from the patreon model for journalists. And the government control from public funded.

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.

I looked at both, and went with fastmail because at the time it had a shared calendar you could use, which I do with my family to track events and do scheduling. Fastmail is standard commercial privacy though. Good enough for me, but no where near Proton Mail from what I understand.

Testing the Jellyfin photos thing out now. I don’t know if it’s working right, but when I first looked at it the issue was I thought it seemed very video focused. I guess otherwise I’m learning docker after all.

Fair enough, last time I tried docker, which was a long time ago, I had all sorts of issues with permissions and persistence. I guess it’s probably better now.

I don’t want a research project. I just was hoping there was an easy to use program to make the viewing better than samba shares. Maybe I just need a set of programs that will display thumbnails over samba.

Yes definitely. Many of my fellow NLP researchers would disagree with those researchers and philosophers (not sure why we should care about the latter’s opinions on LLMs).

I’m not sure what you’re saying here - do you mean you do or don’t think LLMs are “stochastic parrot”s?

In any case, the reason I would care about philosophers opinions on LLMs is mostly because LLMs are already making “the masses” think they’re potentially sentient, and or would deserve personhood. What’s more concerning is that the academics that sort of define what thinking even is seem confused by LLMs if you take the “stochastic parrot” POV. This eventually has real world affects - it might take a decade or two, but these things spread.

I think this is a crazy idea right now, but I also think that going into the future eventually we’ll need to have something like a TNG “Measure of a Man” trial about some AI, and I’d want to get that sort of thing right.

Yea, that was a bad way to phrase it - I just meant that from what I’ve heard tokens are very much not word by word. And sometimes it’s a couple words, but maybe that was misinformation. And I was trying (and failing) to make an analogy for a human - a concept is a compression of what otherwise would be a bunch of words, though I kind of meant more like a reference I guess.