[–] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Honest answer? Not much... yet. As the stupidity of "tokenmaxxing" and replacing developers with hallucinations-and-plagiarism engines really comes into focus, I expect developer hiring to ramp back up.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    He probably is. Maybe if Republicans stopped cheating, lying, and behaving like abysmal, horrid monsters at every conceivable turn and using every dirty trick in the book, Democrats wouldn't have decided that they need to fight fire with fire.

    I'm not condoning this, but it is an utterly predictable outcome after decades of Democrats trying to take the high road while Republicans turn taking the low road into an art form.

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  • [–] 43 points 3 days ago* (7 children)

    Meanwhile, in the real world, my company has locked down usage of Anthropic's top-tier models, because costs were out of control. Even the low-end models are usage-capped, and developers are starting to write code by hand again.

    And we're busily setting up local models we control ourselves on our network edge. We'll probably end up with a modest budget for frontier models (until the model providers collapse), but most of the coding will be done by local models and developers themselves.

    And that seems to be the way the entire industry is going, unless Anthropic starts subsidizing tokens with investor money again.

    In conclusion: Get fucked, Dario.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago

    Well, most of those can either run natively on Linux or have web-based clients.

    • Teams works fine in a browser as long as you don't mind some slight differences in the UI. There is also a well-maintained Electron app.
    • Excel and other Office apps already work fine in the browser on Linux.
    • OneDrive has unofficial clients on Linux, but you might as well just commit to accessing those files in a browser as well.
    • SharePoint is already browser-based and integrated with OneDrive.

    That said, CAD is definitely going to be an issue. In general, I wouldn't recommend trying to switch all the way to Linux in a Windows-only office ecosystem. A better option if you can get permission is to dual-boot, or to run Windows in a virtual machine.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    As I've mentioned elsewhere, not if by "information" you mean semantic content that a mind can process. What they have are vector fields (essentially just numbers) with statistically more or less likely relationships.

    If I say, "take me out to the ballgame" to an LLM, the tokens representing the words in the next verse of the song are statistically "close" in the vector database, so it's likely to generate them. But that doesn't mean it actually knows the lyrics... or even has those lyrics recorded in a regular database anywhere.

    That's why they hallucinate. The model determines that the next token is something nonsensical, but it has no way of understanding that it has made a mistake. In a sense, it actually hasn't made a mistake. It's done exactly what it's designed to do. It's just that in the case of hallucinations, its output isn't useful.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    No, they really don't. That's not how they work. At least, not if the "information" you're talking about is real semantic content that real minds can process.

    Every piece of information you think an LLM has access to is actually just converted into a stream of additional tokens that are fed into the model to (hopefully usefully) modify the next tokens it predicts. That's not the same thing as having actual access to information. Tokens are just numbers with statistically more (or less) likely relationships to each other.

    I'm not trying to downplay LLMs. They're architecturally interesting and have genuine uses. I'm just trying to head off a bit of technical inaccuracy.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 week ago (14 children)

    The important thing to remember is that it actually has zero access to information, because that's not how LLMs work.

    At their core, they're vector databases, and they're trying to probabilistically come up with the next most likely token in a stream of tokens found in the DB. You can manipulate the stream by injecting text such as the content of existing files (which becomes more tokens) into the stream, but it never actually understands any of it.

    That's why hallucinations are inherently unavoidable. It's really all just hallucinations. It's just that you can sometimes get useful text from their hallucinations if they happen to comport with reality.

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    Look, I get it. The gargantuan shit-show that is U.S. politics and the American descent into fascism is on everyone's minds. It's certainly on mine.

    But the point of this community is to highlight weird news stories that make you go, "By golly, I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion. You know, America's finest news source." A lot of stories being posted lately don't even remotely fit that.

    That doesn't mean political stories aren't allowed here, but they must have headlines that would make people pause and wonder if it's a story from The Onion. Straight up regular, non Onion-y headlines don't fit.

     

    Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow President Trump to serve a third term in the White House so that the country “can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs.”

    For the record, Trump is 78 years old. Assuming he survives and manages to stay in office, he would be 86 when we're finally rid of him.

     

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case made public Friday a heavily redacted trove of documents that provide a small glimpse into the evidence prosecutors will present if the case ever goes to trial.

    The nearly 1,900 pages of documents collected by special counsel Jack Smith’s team were initially filed under seal to help U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan decide what allegations can proceed to trial following the Supreme Court opinion in July that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office.

    That's gonna be some serious reading over the weekend.

     

    The Biden administration on Wednesday plans to accuse Russia of a sustained effort to influence the 2024 US elections by using Kremlin-run media and other online platforms to target US voters with disinformation, six sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    It’s expected the US will make a series of moves on Wednesday aimed at addressing the Kremlin’s efforts including the White House publicly condemning the actions and the Justice Department announcing law enforcement action targeting the covert Russian campaign, the sources said.

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