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AliasAKA

@ AliasAKA @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
79
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • If I threw a freshly plucked, not yet baked potato on the surface of mars, is it possible that the micro organisms present in the potato would survive and eventually adapt to the new environment?

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  • There are anaerobes that reduce perchlorates (dissimilatory perchlorate reduction). Lack of moisture is a problem, but there will be some supplied by this sweet potato or whatever we’ve deposited on the planet. If we deposited it somewhere where ice was, there probably exists a region of habitability for a long enough period to induce the potential for microbial adaptation in a certain time frame.

    It is hostile to life, but microbes would absolutely have a much better chance of growing there than humans, especially spore formers that could endure cyclic periods of high radiation and lack of water, followed by a very brief almost sublimating thaw, followed by freezing temperatures. That’s just if we didn’t provide more seeding material or more hospitable subterranean environs.

    There is a significant (not meaning magnitude, meaning statistically reasonably) non zero chance that microbes are actively already living on the planet, not necessarily introduced by us but very possibly. Microbes have extremophiles in their ranks. Life finds a way.

  • If I threw a freshly plucked, not yet baked potato on the surface of mars, is it possible that the micro organisms present in the potato would survive and eventually adapt to the new environment?

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  • Sort of. Anaerobes with co2 fixing pathways could very conceivably live and grow on Mars. They would grow slowly, but still orders of magnitude faster than human timescales. There’s also significantly more radiation on mars, so you’ll accumulate more mutations quicker. Time was ill defined here, but you could easily pick up adaptive mutations in as little as hours for fast growing earth based bacteria (because they have a new generation literally every 20 minutes). This would obviously be slower on mars with anaerobes (probably) but the speed at which microbes accumulate adaptive mutations could reasonably be described as “not long” and not at all be in the realm of marvel.

  • Consumers sue Amazon for not refunding Trump tariff costs

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  • Currently, due to recent litigation, importers and companies are able to request tariff refunds. So if you paid a tariff directly, then you can request a refund and the government is required to pay you back. This is already decided and there is a refund request website.

    Current lawsuits like this one are saying that Amazon requested the refund because they have the tariff receipt, and they’ll get the refund. Folks are suing Amazon because while they have the receipt, they passed on the charge, meaning they didn’t really pay the tariff in actuality. So they’re arguing that if the tariffs are illegal (already decided), and that tariff refunds are being sent out (already decided), then companies should also be required to refund their customers for the increased costs they passed along (lawsuits like this one).

    It’s common sense. If a company charged 10 dollars for a product before the tariffs, charged 15 after the tariffs because it cost them 5 dollars in tariffs, then they still made the same profit after the consumer bought the product, and the consumer paid the tariff. So when a refund goes out, companies should have to return that tariff charge to the consumer. They’ll literally make the same profit and the consumer will be reimbursed then for the tariff charge they paid. This is the precedent we want to set, because otherwise consumers get screwed both ways while large companies get to pocket tariff costs. This is class warfare; working class and small business owners are losing.

  • Removed

    Meta's $10 billion Louisiana data center is getting $3.3 billion in tax breaks—more than seven years of the state's entire police budget

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  • A data center that will employ like 100 people and destroy their local air quality (probably), blast tons of light at night (definitely) and otherwise destroy the local ecology.

  • Consumers sue Amazon for not refunding Trump tariff costs

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  • If a company adds a tariff charge to its bill when a consumer pays, or it can be shown that they passed along a charge by raising the price by the tariff amount or similar, then it is clear the consumer paid. The party paying the tariff is the consumer. Suing for a refund sets precedent, and how the current round of tariffs were deemed illegal in the first place.

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    Can we get a megatgread over results across the country? Only thing I miss from reddit

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  • Titlegore. They meant megathread. Basically a place where someone spends the time to collate everything into a single thread so you don’t have to click through various pages, just all the results in one post.

  • Linux kernel czar says AI bug reports aren't slop anymore

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  • Traditional software was developed by humans as an artifact that, and to the degree that humans improved the software for some task, got better, but it was not guaranteed. Windows 11 is proof of that, and there are a laundry list of regressions and bugs introduced into software developed by humans. I acknowledge you say usually and especially for open source — I lukewarm agree with that statement but disagree that large LLMs or other generative models will follow this trend, and merely want to point out that software usually introduces bugs as it’s developed, which are hopefully fixed by people who can reason over the code.

    Which brings us to AI models, and really they should just be called transformer models; they are statistical tensor product machines. They are not software in a traditional sense. They are trained to match their training input in a statistical sense. If the input data is corrupted, the model will actually get worse over time, not better. If the data is biased, it will get worse over time, not better. With the amount of slop generated on the web, it is extraordinarily hard to denoise and decide what’s good data and what’s bad data that shouldn’t be used for training. Which means the scaling we’ve seen with increased data will not necessarily hold. And there’s not a clear indication that scaling the model size, which is largely already impractical, is having some synergistic or emergent effect as hoped and hyped.

    Also, we’re really not in the infancy of AI. Maybe the infancy of widespread hype for it, but the idea of using tensor products for statistical learning algorithms goes back at least as far as Smolensky, maybe before, and that was what, 1990?

    We are in the infancy of I’d say quantum style compute, so we really don’t have much to draw on beyond theoretical models.

    Generative LLM models have largely plateaued in my opinion.

  • “ChatGPT said this” Is Lazy

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  • In my experience it is obvious. Calling people on it also makes them feel embarrassed usually. I put something like “I can just ask an LLM myself if I wanted this output. Please provide your own commentary.” If I were a manager and I had an employee just copy pasting that kind of output, I’d probably wonder if that employee actually contributes anything.

  • “ChatGPT said this” Is Lazy

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  • I think this is the way. A certain number of times of “[coworker] wasn’t asked because they only respond with LLMs, so I just ask the LLMs directly. I am not sure what [coworker]’s expertise is anymore, I just don’t consult them” and I suspect coworker may in fact stop responding with LLMs.

  • Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable

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  • I’m locked in to apples ecosystem for various reasons, but I’ll be buying this as a second phone hands down to try and wean me also convince family on switch over. Goes well with my self hosting.

  • Nvidia delivers first Vera Rubin AI GPU samples to customers — 88-core Vera CPU paired with Rubin GPUs with 288 GB of HBM4 memory apiece

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  • This already happens intrinsically in the models. The tokens are abstracted in the internal layers and only translated in the output layer back to next token prediction. Training visual models is slightly different because you’re not outputting tokens but pixel values (or possibly bounding boxes or edges, but not usually; conversely if not generative you may be predicting labels which could theoretically be in token space).

    The field itself is actually fairly stagnant in architecture. It’s still just attention layers all the way down. It’s just adding more context length and more layers and wider layers while training on more data. I personally think this approach will never achieve AGI or anything like it. It will get better at perfectly reciting its training data, but I don’t expect truly emergent phenomena to occur with these architectures just because they’re very big. They’ll be decent chatbots, but we already have that, and they’ll just consumer ever more resources for vanishingly small improvements (and won’t functionally improve any true logical capability beyond regurgitating logical paths already trodden in their training data but in a very brittle way, because they do not actually understand the logic or why the logic is valid, they have no true state model of objects which are described in the token space they’re traversing probabilistically).

  • Nvidia delivers first Vera Rubin AI GPU samples to customers — 88-core Vera CPU paired with Rubin GPUs with 288 GB of HBM4 memory apiece

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  • Sorry, I’m not saying that’s a good thing. It’s not just the context that’s expanding, but the parameter of the base model. I’m saying at some point you just have saved a compressed version of the majority of the content (we’re already kind of there) and you’d be able to decompress it even more losslessly. This doesn't make it more useful for anything other than recreating copyrighted works.

  • Nvidia delivers first Vera Rubin AI GPU samples to customers — 88-core Vera CPU paired with Rubin GPUs with 288 GB of HBM4 memory apiece

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  • Current models are speculated at 700 billion parameters plus. At 32 bit precision (half float), that’s 2.8TB of RAM per model, or about 10 of these units. There are ways to lower it, but if you’re trying to run full precision (say for training) you’d use over 2x this, something like maybe 4x depending on how you store gradients and updates, and then running full precision I’d reckon at 32bit probably. Possible I suppose they train at 32bit but I’d be kind of surprised.

    Edit: Also, they don’t release it anymore but some folks think newer models are like 1.5 trillion parameters. So figure around 2-3x that number above for newer models. The only real strategy for these guys is bigger. I think it’s dumb, and the returns are diminishing rapidly, but you got to sell the investors. If reciting nearly whole works verbatim is easy now, it’s going to be exact if they keep going. They’ll approach parameter spaces that can just straight up save things into their parameter spaces.

  • Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer

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  • Thank you! This is really good info. I’ll take a look!

  • Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer

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  • This is good to know. Can you provide a link to that court case or anything?

  • Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer

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  • Valve states you can’t sell a steam key in another platform for cheaper than in steam, not that you can’t sell your game anywhere else at a lower price. That’s slightly different than here. Not defending it just saying that it is actually different than here.

  • You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

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  • Looking through, it seems like for the most part these are very niche and/or require the user to be using SSO or enterprise recovery options and/or try to change and rotate keys or resync often. I think few people using this for personal would be interacting with that attack surface or accepting organizational invites, but it is serious for organizations (probably why they’re trying quickly to address this).

    Honestly I think a server being incognito controlled and undetected in bitwardens fleet while also performing these attacks is, unlikely? Certainly less likely than passwords being stolen from individual site hacks or probably even banks. Like at that point, it would just be easier to do these types of manipulations directly on bank accounts or crypto wallets or email accounts than here, but then again, if you crack a wallet like this you get theoretically all the goodies to those too I suppose, for a possibly short time (assuming the user wasn’t using 2FA that wasn’t email based as well).

    Not to mitigate these issues. They need to fix them, just trying to ascertain how severe and if individual users should have much cause for concern.

  • Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues – no.heger

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  • Man, like it’s good the Liquid Glass guy left because holy crap what a steaming pile of terrible UX, but dang do they need to fix this stuff.

    Also stop overly rounding corners. It’s stupid and gives me less space to interact with the content I actually want. Like skeuomorphic design was better than this by a lot, if a little “dated” looking.

  • ICE Making List of Anyone Who Films Them

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  • The short answer is, the more of your face you cover, the harder it is to ID someone. If you wear a hat and a face mask, they will not be able to use facial recognition to identify you, to my knowledge.

    There is still stuff like gait analysis, but that’s also relatively hard unless they have a bunch of visuals of you walking. Which they may have. But wearing a mask does make it discernibly more difficult for them to ID you.

    That said, thank you for having the courage to resist openly. We do need it, and it does matter. I personally mask because of health reasons and generally trying to throw a wrench in the surveillance state (I hate being ad targeted, much less state targeted). But I get so much motivation out of seeing my fellow folks show up to resist in all the ways that they want to personally.