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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Plug it into a computer and see what the computer says.

    I usually use Linux for that because it offers good error messages and I know the tools. But other operating systems might help, too.

    And if you start writing to the card or executing recovery tools, make a backup / image first.

    If the files are very important, maybe don’t tamper with it and ask for help. Like a repair shop, your local Linux community or any trustworthy computer expert friend.

    The biggest enemy is probably encryption, if it’s encrypted. The files are definitely still there if you just ripped it out. In the old days you could just run a recovery program and get everything back.



  • Well that paper only says it’s theoretically not possible to completely eliminate hallucination. That doesn’t mean it can be migitated and reduced to the point of insignificance. I think fabricating things is part of creativity. I mean LLMs are supposed to come up with new text. But maybe they’re not really incentivised to differentiate between fact and fiction. I mean they have been trained on fictional content, too. I think the main problem is to control when to stick close to facts and when to be creative. Sure, I’d agree that we can’t make them infallible. But there’s probably quite some room for improvement. (And I don’t really agree with the premise of the paper that it’s caused solely from shortcomings in the training data. It’s an inherent problem in being creative and that the world also consists of fiction and opinions and so much more than factual statements… But the training data quality and bias also has a severe effect.)

    That paper is interesting. Thanks!

    But I really fail to grasp the diagonal argument. Can we really choose the ground truth function f arbitrarily? Doesn’t that just mean given arbitrary realities, there aren’t hallucination-free LLMs in all of them? But I don’t really care if there’s a world where 1+1=2 and simultaneously 1+1=3 and there can’t be an LLM telling the “truth” in that world… I think they need to narrow down “f”. To me a reality needs to fulfill certain requirements. Like being contradiction free etc. And they’d need to prove that Cantor applies to that subset of “f”.

    And secondly: Why does the LLM need to decide between true and false? Can’t it not just say “I don’t know?” I think that’d immediately ruin their premise, too. Because they only look at LLMs who don’t ever refuse and have to decide on a truth.

    I think this is more related to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which somehow isn’t mentioned in the paper. I’m not a proper scientist and didn’t really understand it, so I might be wrong with all of that. But it doesn’t feel correct to me. And I mean the paper hasn’t been cited or peer-reviewed (as of now). So it’s more like just their opinion, anyways. I say (if their maths is correct) they just proved that there can’t be an LLM that knows everything in any possible and impossible world. That doesn’t quite apply because LLMs that don’t know everything are useful, too. And we’re concerned with one specific reality here that has some limitations. Like physics, objectivity or consistency.



  • I think most of the media coverage is hype. That doesn’t directly answer your question… But I take everything I read with a grain of salt.

    Currently, for the tech industry, it’s main use is to generate hype and drive the speculation bubble. Whether it’s useful or not, slapping the word “AI” on things and offering AI services increases the value of your company. And I personally think if they complain about this, it’s they want the bubble even bigger, but they already did the most obvious things. But that has nothing to do with “find use” in the traditional sense (for the thing itself.)

    And other inventions came with hype. Like smartphones (the iPhone.) Everyone wanted one. Lots of people wanted to make cash with that. But still, if it’s super new, it’s not always obvious at what tasks it excels and what the main benefits are in the long term. At first everyone wants in just because it’s cool and everyone else has one. In the end it turned out not every product is better with an App (or Bluetooth). And neither a phone, nor AI can (currently) do the laundry and the other chores. So there is a limit in “use” anyways.

    So I think the answer to your question: what did they have in mind… is: What else can we enhance with AI or just slap the words on to make people buy more. And to be cool in the eyes of our investors.

    I think one of the next steps is the combination with robotics. That will make it quite more useful. Like input from sensors so AI can take part in the real world, not just the virtual one. But that’s going to take some time. We’ve already started, but it won’t happen over night. And for the close future i think it’s gonna be gradual increase. AI just needs to get more intelligent, make less errors, be more affordable to run. That’s going to be a gradual increase and provide me with a better translation service on my phone, a smart-home that i can interact with better, an assistant that can clean up the mess with all the files on my computer, organize my picture folder… But the revolution already happened. I think it’s going to be constant, but smaller steps/ progress from now on.




  • Mostly breaking it. They’re centralizing stuff and nowadays lots of services depend on that single service provider. And the original idea of the internet was to make everyone equal and have some resilience against single points of failure. That’s kind of detrimental to the whole idea.

    Secondly, you unencrypt your traffic and send it to them plain so they can read everything. That may or may not be an issue for your use-case, but I like privacy and encryption and no third parties reading my messages.

    And the question is: What do you need their service for? I understand that a tunnel is useful if you’re behind a NAT. But the DDoS protection and attack prevention is mostly snake-oil for most people. It’s often unnecessary, the free tier doesn’t include any of the interesting stuff and it’s questionable if most people get targeted by DDoS attacks anyways. And as I heard if it comes to that point, they will cease service to you anyways and want to see money ($240 to $2.400 per year.) So I don’t see a good reason why you’d use Cloudflare in the first place. Unless you need a tunnel or subscribe to one of the more expensive plans. Otherwise it only has downsides.




  • Is this an honest question?

    If yes: Read the info here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html

    That is the installation guide.

    If you’re not that tech-savy I recommend using a self-hosting platform like YunoHost or Cosmos.

    You have to at least put some effort in and google it and read the instructions yourself. Everyone is invited to run their own instance of Lemmy, and so are you.

    You’d need a domain and some sort of server. Any VPS will do or some 24/7 online device at home if you can do port forwards on your home internet connection.

    I’d invite you to have a look at it. If you’re really interested, feel free to ask follow-up questions.

    Regarding your other question: Yes, you can.





  • I think in the next time it’s mostly the unskilled and office jobs. I think we still have a shortage of skilled IT professionals and people who can do more than webdevelopment and write simple python scripts. And we also have a shortage of teachers, kindergarden teachers, people who care for the elderly, doctors, psychologists. And despite AI creeping into all the fields, I still see a career there for quite some time to come. Also I don’t see an AI plumber anytime soon coming around and fixing your toilet. So I’d say handyman is a pretty safe bet.

    But I’d say all the people making career decisions right now better factor that in. Joining a call center is probably not a sustainable decision any more. And some simple office or management jobs will become redundant soon. I just think big tech laying off IT professionals is more an artificially inflated bubble bursting, than AI being now able to code complex programs or do the job of an engineer.

    It’s not really a gamble. We know what AI can do. And there are lists with predictions which jobs can be automated. We can base our decisions on that and I’ve seen articles in the newspapers 10 years ago. They’re not 100% accurate but a rough guide… For example we still have a shortage of train operators. And 10 years ago people said driving trains on rails is easy to automate and we shouldn’t strive for that career anymore.

    It’ll likely get there. But by that time society will have changed substantially. We can watch Star Trek if we’re talking about a post-scarcity future and all the hard work is done for us. We’d need universal income for that. Or we end up in a dystopia. But I think that’s to uncertain to base decisions on.


  • I don’t think you can use Retrieval Augmented Genaration or vector databases for a task like that. At least not if you want to compare the whole papers and not just a single statement or fact. And that’d be what most tools are focused on. As far a I know the tools that are concerned with big PDF libraries are meant to retrieve specific information out of the library. Relevant to a specific question from the user. If your task is to go through the complete texts, it’s not the right tool because it’s made to only pick out chunks of text.

    I’d say you need an LLM with a long context length, like 128k or way more, fit all the texts in and add your question. Or you come up with a clever agent. Make it summarize each paper individually or extract facts, then feed that result back and let it search for contradictions, or do a summary of the summaries.

    (And I’m not sure if AI is up to the task anyways. Doing meta-studies is a really complex task, done by highly skilled professionals of a field. And it takes them months… I don’t think current AI’s performance is anywhere near that level. It’s probably going to make something up instead of outputting anything that’s related to reality.)