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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2023

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  • The LLMs for text are also based on “theft”. They’re just much better at hiding it because they have a multitude more source material. Still, it does sometimes happen that they quote a source article verbatim.

    But yeah basically they’re just really good copy/paste engines that work with statistical analysis to determine the most likely answer based on what’s written in basically the whole internet :P It’s a bit hard to explain sometimes to people who think that the AI really “thinks”. I always say: If that were the case, why is the response to a really complicated question just as fast as a simple one? The wait is just based on the length of the output.

    In terms of the “theft” I think it’s similar ethically to google cache though.


  • A lot of translation and summarisation. ChatGPT is extremely good in absorbing a whole mix of comments in different languages and summarising them in English (or whatever other language).

    For programming I don’t use it so much anymore because it hallucinates too much, calling APIs that don’t even exist. And when I lower the temperature the output is too sparse.

    I’m also trying to build an assistant that can also communicate proactively (I intend to auto-prompt it when things happen and then evaluate if it should cause a message to me). But I need to get a local LLM going for that because running that through the ChatGPT API will be too costly.

    Also, a replacement for some of my web searches. Sometimes I just want to know something and it’s refreshing that it can give me an answer (even though it does need to be validated, it’s much easier to do that when you know what you’re looking for!)


  • Well in this case it’s not really about the fact that they’re Belgian. Because unlike China there is a big separation between state and corporation here. It’s more the fact that it’s only two private concerns which is hardly competition.

    Also, due them being based abroad the local legislation has less grip on them. The exact country they’re from is indeed less important as long as it can be considered friendly.


  • Media ownership by foreign countries is indeed a worry.

    Even in Holland we have this problem: 90% of the media companies (newspapers, magazines, websites) are owned by only two Belgian mediaconcerns. This is not a smart thing to do. But we never hear about that here.

    Not that there’s an explicit problem at the moment but such a huge imbalance is not smart IMO.




  • That’s true. They actually stopped supporting Nginx recently which really bothered me too because I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn’t really have that option. So right now I’m locked out from updating until I fix that.

    And yes it is totally feasible to use upstream! Not a problem at all.

    I would recommend to use the dockers though, as the whole debian thing becomes a bit of a mess with different python requirements for some of the bridges. I tried that in a long forgotten past and there is a reason I’m trying to forget that 🤭

    Like you I know the ansible playbook has its limits (for example one other thing I run into is that I want to run several instances of the same bridge to bridge eg. 2 whatsapp accounts!) but I do think docker is the way to go. I’m interested to hear how you’re faring though as it’s a long time ago since I tried that.



  • most personal trips can be done safely and easily using an E-bike (much smaller batteries that can be produced en mass with existing supply chains) and cars should be reduced in usage outside of particularly rural areas where they truly are a necessity (which is a tiny portion of the overall population).

    E-bikes are often not an option for many reasons. Needing to bring cargo, bad weather, danger from other traffic. If they were actually such an amazing option everyone would be using them because they are hella cheaper than cars. Even in the netherlands where bike infrastructure is great, people are extremely car-centric.

    Personally I think subsidised public transport is a much better option.

    And nuclear is not cheaper and it doesn’t even factor in waste storage and decommissioning otherwise it would not have been viable. Right now when a nuclear plant is closed the operator walks off scot free and the cleanup costs are borne by the public. The mining of the uranium is also pretty polluting. There’s a lot of this externalisation to make it viable.

    The only reason it worked in the past was that the governments were building nuclear arsenals and invested in nuclear industry (note that this industry was not necessarily capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium but still, it was about building up an industry). It’s no coincidence that most countries relying heavily on nuclear power are also nuclear armed.

    Also, environmental pollution is also a safety issue. Don’t just look at human deaths. Even Fukushima was a major disaster despite not leading to many deaths. The regulation is there for a reason and that still didn’t manage to prevent Fukushima (not talking about Chernobyl there because that was just human idiocy fucking up at its worst). And other first-world countries have also had meltdowns.

    Personally I also feel bad about dumping our waste problem on future generations. That kind of thinking is exactly what led to the climate crisis. But admittedly this is a lesser issue for nuclear in particular because we do this with pretty much everything (as this article also mentions)







  • It’s not as snazzy as Discord but it’s fully open-source and federated. So everyone can run their own server (I do, too). If you don’t care about running your own you can just sign up at https://app.element.io/ . It’s free of course. It basically is for chat what lemmy and mastodon are to social media.

    It also offers many “bridges” to other protocols, like WhatsApp, Telegram, even Discord. Those are not quite as mature and mostly third-party provided but they generally work well.

    There’s a really great ansible playbook for installing your own. If you would like to have the full bridged experience, beeper is probably best.