I think your job in your current form is likely in danger.

SOTA Foundation Models like GPT4 and Gemini Ultra can write code, execute, and debug with special chain of thought prompting techniques, and large acale process verification on synthetic data and RL search for correct outputs will make this 10x better. The silver lining to this is that I expect this to require an absolute shit ton of compute to constantly generate LLM output hundreds of times for each internal prompt over multiple prompts, requiring immense compute and possibly taking longer than an ordinary software engineer to run. I suspect early full stack developer LLMs will mainly be used to do a few very tedious coding tasks and SWEs will be cheaper for a fair length of time.

I expect it will be 2-3 years before this happens, so for that short period I expect workers to be “super-productive” by using LLMs in the coding process, but I expect the crossover point when the LLM becomes better is quite soon, perhaps in the next 5 years as compute requirements go down.

I suppose having worked with LLMs a whole bunch over the past year I have a better sense of what I meant by “automate high level tasks”.

I’m talking about an assistant where, let’s say you need to edit a podcast video to add graphics and cut out dead space or mistakes that you corrected in the recording. You could tell the assistant to do that and it would open the video in Adobe Premiere pro, do the necessary tasks, then ask you to review it to check if it made mistakes.

Or if you had an issue with a particular device, e.g. your display, the assistant would research the issue and perform the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix the issue.

These are currently hypothetical scenarios, but current GPT4 can already perform some of these tasks, and specifically training it to be a desktop assistant and to do more agentic tasks will make this a reality in a few years.

It’s additionally already useful for reading and editing long documents and will only get better on this end. You can already use an LLM to query your documents and give you summaries or use them as instructions/research to aid in performing a task.

Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.

The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.

Yeah, I think Nix is a good concept but I feel like 99% of the config work could be managed by the OS itself and a GUI to change everything else. I also feel like flakes should be the default, not this weird multiple systems thing they have. I also wish most apps would have a sandbox built in, because nix apps would then rival flatpak and, if ported to Windows, become a universal package manager. Overall good concept but not there yet.

NFTs are stupid AF for most of the tasks people currently use them for and definitely shouldn’t be used as proof of ownership of physical assets.

However, I think NFTs make a lot of sense as proof of ownership of purely digital assets, especially those which are scarce.

For example, there are several projects for domain name resolution based on NFT ownership (e.g you look up crypto.eth, your browser checks that the site is signed by the owner of the crypto.eth NFT, then you are connected to the site), as it could replace our current system, which has literally 7 guys that hold a private key that is the backbone of the DNS system and a bunch of registrars you have to go through to get a domain. This won’t happen anytime soon but it is an interesting concept.

Then I think an NFT would also be good as a decentralized alternative to something like Google sign in, where you sign up for something with the NFT and sign in by proving your ownership of it.

In general though I find NFTs to be a precarious concept. I mean the experience I’ve had with crypto is you literally have a seed phrase for your wallet, and if it gets stolen all your funds are drained. And then for an NFT, if you click on the wrong smart contract, all your monkeys could be gone in an instant. There is in general no legal recourse to reverse crypto transactions, and I think that is frankly the biggest issue with the technology as it stands today.

“I use Signal to hide my data from the US government and big tech”

“Wait, you seriously still use Reddit? Everyone switched to the Fediverse!”

“Wow, can’t believe you use Apple! Android is so much better.”

No one who isn’t terminally online understands what these statements mean. If you want people to use something else, don’t make it about privacy and choose something with fancy buttons and cool features that looks close enough to what they have. They do not care about privacy and are literally of the mindset “if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear”. They sleep well at night.

Only thing really missing is Wallet and NFC support. Other than that I think Graphene and Lineage OS cover it all

Bypass paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20230825195049/https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/trump/2023/08/25/florida-attorneys-14th-amendment-lawsuit-aims-to-disqualify-trump/70672653007/

Hello, kids! Pirates are very bad! Never use qBittorent to download copyrighted material, and certainly do NOT connect it to a VPN to avoid getting caught. Additionally, you should also NEVER download illegal material via an https connection because it is fully encrypted and you won’t get caught!

Reddit since changed the UI again which killed my interest in scrolling r/all. I still have to go there to view r/localllama, r/singularity and r/UFOs, none of which have a sizeable Feddit equivalent. I could do without the speculation of the latter 2 in my life, but I need LocalLlama because it is a great source for news and advice on LLMs.

Yeah there’s no way a viable Linux phone could be made without the ability to run Android apps.

I think we’re probably at least a few years away from being able to daily drive Linux on modern phones with functioning things like NFC payments and a decent native app collection. It’s definitely coming but it has far less momentum than even the Linux desktop does.

Smh my head, Linux is too mainstream now!!! How will I be a cool hacker boy away from society if everyone else uses it!!!

I think this is downplaying what LLMs do. Yeah, they are not the best at doing things in general, but the fact that they were able to learn the structure and semantic context of language is quite impressive, even if it doesn’t know what the words converted into tokens actually mean. I suspect that we will be able to use LLMs as one part of a full digital “brain”, with some model similar to our own prefrontal cortex calling the LLM (and other things like vision model, sound model, etc.) and using its output to reason about a certain task and take an action. That’s where I think the hype will be validated, is when you put all these parts we’ve been working on together and Frankenstein a new and actually intelligent system.

I’ve never used Manjaro but the perception I get from it is that it is a noob friendly distro with good GUI and config (good) but then catastrophically fails when monkeying around with updates and the AUR. This is a pain for technical users and a back-to-Windows experience for the people it’s targeted towards. Overall, significantly worse than EndeavorOS or plain 'ol vanilla Arch Linux.

Based NixOS user

I love NixOS but I really wish it had some form of containerization by default for all packages like flatpak and I didn’t have to monkey with the config to install a package/change a setting. Other than that it is literally the perfect distro, every bit of my os config can be duplicated from a single git repo.

Blocking out the sun with aerosols is a good idea if you know with high confidence how it will impact the climate system and environment. That’s why they’re trying to simulate it with the supercomputer, so they know if it fucks stuff up or not.

Cool meme but Reuters doesn’t own AP and Rothschild doesn’t own Reuters. It is quite ironic to be pushing against the very real problem of media disinfo/government propaganda trickled down through AP/Reuters, while at the same time spreading misinformation.

I really hate the state of the Supreme Court atm. Looking back, it wasn’t a legitimate institution from the beginning, but the current 6-3 court shows how flawed it is, being out of line with public opinion in loads of different cases and effectively legislating from the bench via judicial review.

The only reason it has gotten this bad, though, is because Congress has abdicated its responsibilities as a legislative body and left it more and more to executive orders and court decisions. The entire debate around the Dobbs decision could have been avoided if Dems codified abortion into law, and this one could have avoided too if our Congress actually went to work legislating a solution to the ongoing student loan and college affordability crisis.

I think we need supreme court reform. I’m particularly partial to the idea of having a rotating bench pulled randomly from the lower courts each term, with each party in Congress getting a certain amount of strike outs to take people off that they don’t want, similar to the way jurors are selected. I also think the people should be able to overrule the court via referendum, because ultimately we should decide what the constitution says.

I just can’t see this happening though, at least for multiple decades until the younger people today get into political power.

I mean advanced AI aside, there are already browser extensions that you can pay for that have humans on the other end solving your Captcha. It’s pretty much impossible to stop it imo

A long term solution would probably be a system similar to like public key/private key that is issued by a government or something to verify you’re a real person that you must provide to sign up for a site. We obviously don’t have the resources to do that 😐 and people are going to leak theirs starting day 1.

Honestly, disregarding the dystopian nature of it all, I think Sam Altman’s worldcoin is a good idea at least for authentication because all you need to do is scan your iris to prove you are a person and you’re in easily. People could steal your eyes tho 💀 so it’s not foolproof. But in general biometric proof of personhood could be a way forward as well.

The comment is trying to point out, albeit obtusely, that democrats have also funded crazy people on opposite end of the political spectrum. In 2022 the democrats funded far right candidates in hopes they would win the primary and be an easy victory royale for the dem candidate. The comment is trying to analogize these two things, which is fair because it is a similar political strategy.