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TechLich

@ TechLich @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
49
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • A $200 ChatGPT subscription could cost OpenAI $14,000 if you actually used it to its full potential

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  • While this advice is true for all models, when it comes to agentic tasks (add this small feature/write this test harness/find bugs/suggest improvements), open source models are still way behind, vibe code or not.

    Claude Fable or even Opus in an editor like Zed have a 1 million token context window and will "think" through the goals of the application, test their changes, work through debugging processes the way a programmer would, stop to ask for clarification, check diagnostic tools and linters, prompt to run test code, etc.

    Llama, Gemma and Qwen etc. Do lack a lot of the world knowledge to get the goals of the application, but they also just don't have the debugging skills, won't test their code, don't always tool call correctly, get confused as the context increases and nobody has enough vram to run on large context sizes locally.

    They can do autocomplete on small functions but aren't really there for more complex tasks.

    On top of that, the biggest problem is that the best open source models are trained and released by the same giant tech conglomerates that have an interest in not competing with their own products. Qwen is Alibaba, Llama is Meta, gpt-oss is OpenAI. Even the more "independent" ones, kimi (Moonshot) and GLM (z.ai) are mostly funded by Alibaba and Tencent. They're released for research and marketing purposes and to please their corporate backers with inflated stock. Almost nobody has the resources to train new models from scratch. People make lots of merges and fine tunes but AI is not democratised the way that traditional programming tools have been.

    Maybe some day there will be enough cheap compute for open source communities to pool together resources to build competing models but they're not really there yet :(

  • What's something interesting (to you) you'd like to share about your current hyperfixation/obsession? (Infodump safespace for both neurotypicals and neurodivergents)

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  • If writing a lot of bash scripts, I really recommend shellcheck. It's a linter for bash that gives a lot of good advice and points out common issues/inefficiencies and errors. There's plugins for most editors or you can just run it in a terminal. I also like that it has good documentation that tells you why something might be wrong or inadvisable.

    https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

  • ‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

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  • There are quite a few. The best ones are sustainable closed loop datacenters with on-site solar which is becoming pretty common across the world, especially for new builds. Often producing more power than they need and feeding it back to the grid (especially if the local government has an energy buy back scheme).

    But most data centers are pretty tiny and just built into an office building with a bunch of server racks.

    Depending on where you live, a quick web search for data centers in your local area will probably show up dozens of them of varying quality hosting people's websites and business apps etc. They aren't any scarier than anything else you find in a city. They're critical infrastructure that helps make the internet a thing. In most cases, if it wasn't a datacenter, it would be a car yard or a factory, etc.

    But! There are also truly evil datacenters. Like this insane Utah monstrosity built for a shitty purpose and the size of a freaking city. An obscene monument to the US tech cesspool's hubris.

  • ‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

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  • I mean they're not all for AI and they're not all environmentally devastating.

    This one very much is.

  • ‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

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  • That's fair. The nuance that people lose is more that people are often painting them all with the same brush. Protesting any datacenter regardless of impact.

    It becomes something like: "datacenters are evil and are a symbol of techno fascist distopia! If they build a datacenter in my city, the taps will run dry and Elon Musk will use it to make ai porn of my children!" Even if it's a small solar powered closed loop that provides VPS, storage and web hosting for nerds and small businesses.

    I also do think there's also a scale of evil there. Some environmental impacts are not immediately obvious and might not be known about during planning. Some were built a long time ago with older tech and are a bit shitty but have a plan to transition to be more sustainable, etc.

    The world is full of "alright but a little bit shit." It's not all perfect angels and mustache twirling villains.

    I don't want to detract too much from the real villains though. Nobody needs a 9GW datacity for military ai.

  • ‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

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  • Not all data centres are evil and the issue is nuanced. This one sounds pretty evil though.

    9GW is totally insane and they're building a gas plant for it instead of renewables (although there's some solar too). It's closed loop so the water use fears once it's running are probably a bit overblown, but the construction itself is going to be ecologically insane. The thing is basically a data city, 162 square km is even larger than a lot of cities and involves building an entire power plant and new energy infrastructure. Building it is a full megaproject and even just noise pollution and the construction impacts will mess with bird migration etc. Obviously the whole thing isn't going to be full of data centre, some of that space is empty but still.

    It's also going to have the US military as a major client so... Pretty high up there on the evil scale IMO.

  • A dark chapter returns: Stripping citizenship

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  • They do use emojis quite a lot.

    I think Claude code is the one that does emojis in lists and as icons/graphics the most. Especially in "make me a shitty website/blog" kind of cases. They can't reliably produce good icons and glyphs yet, so they stick in emojis like graphical placeholders everywhere. Especially in lists.

    You also see it in some of the more corporate, venture capital or ai-friendly github readme.md files so some people see emojis in lists and have an immediate negative response. It's not universal and the style obviously originated with humans or the AIs wouldn't have learned it.

  • ‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots

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  • I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: "Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!"

    But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there's no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don't sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).

    There's some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I'm missing something or reading it wrong?

    Might be a Mandela effect.

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • Ah misread that it was card, not a service. That mostly works and is the same kind of thing as the other crypto solutions.

    Though a bad actor could still set up a service with a legit card that provides government signed anonymous "yes" responses on demand.

    I worry that the response will be to require an account and a full ID from it. Social media sites saying "we need to verify your identity to ensure you're an adult human and to combat bots. Scan your id card..."

    Still one of the better technical solutions here though.

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • The difference is one is physical and requires interaction with a human: "Hey uncle Bob, buy me beer?" Vs. The other one is technical and just requires them to do a Google search and click a button without interacting with anyone.

    The first one has a higher barrier for entry and at least involves some form of adult supervision. The second one makes it not much different to the classic "what is your birthday?" thing.

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • The difference with the asking an adult to buy alcohol is mostly that, because the whole thing is online, they wouldn't need to ever really interact with an adult.

    If the circumvention is as easy as looking up "free age verification" in a search engine, typing a url and clicking a button then it might not be very effective.

    If it at least required them to steal dad's id card or get uncle Bob to help or something that's a different story.

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • I agree, although in this thread I'm mostly interested in the technical puzzle.

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • How do they deal with the other requirements though? What's stopping someone from setting up a service that uses their yivi account to sign "I'm over 18" for anyone who wants to be over 18?

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • This is the first perfect solution I've heard!

    Granted it's a little slow but it meets all the requirements xD

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • It would also reveal to the government that the user was accessing 18+ content (though not what that content is if the token is blinded).

    It also doesn't stop the easy circumvent of someone who is an adult providing a service for children or others who don't want to auth with the government.

    1. The 18+ site provides Child c with a token T and it's blinded to b(T)
    2. The child sends b(T) to a malicious service run by a real adult (Mal)
    3. Mal sends the token to the AVS to create s(b(T))
    4. Mal provides s(b(T)) to the child who gives it to the 18+ site as a legit S(T)

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • How does this work to protect privacy though? Wouldn't the site need to know who you are to be able to look you up with the government?

    Or is it more like an SSO/Oauth callback style thing where you sign into the government and they send the "age bit" digitally signed and your browser gives it back the service? Either way the government would know when you're accessing 18+ material and possibly what specific site you're accessing? Or is there more to it?

  • Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

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  • they could set up an online system which allows anyone to generate a proof of age and generates keypairs on demand for a requested site

    This is the issue I have with most cryptographic solutions. There's usually a way for someone to just share their private keys or run a service that generates valid site-specific credentials. If a user can generate something that says they're over 18, it would be trivial to do that on behalf of others and set up an easy automated system for it. Adding some kind of rate or use limiting would just make it frustrating to use on multiple sites and add more implementation complexity on the side of the site.

    Once such a system exists, the whole thing becomes trivial to circumvent. I guess the governments could try to play whack-a-mole with some kind of revocation capability but if the resulting keypairs are anonymous, then that wouldn't work because they wouldn't know who is creating them.

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    TechLich @lemmy.world

    Is private age verification technically possible and if so how?

  • I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age

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  • Those things come with a big convenience and implementation trade-off that slows adoption.

    If it's hard to export for technical reasons (eg. Needs to be in a tpm) then that adds hardware requirements and complexity and makes it difficult to log in on other devices. If it's a software thing, then it's rippable. Either way "install our government app to watch porn" is not an enticing prospect for people.

    Aggressive rate limiting is also frustrating if you want to log into multiple things and it keeps blocking you because you're using your key too fast, but if it's not aggressive then it likely won't be effective unless all the kids sharing a key are trying to use it at once.

    If it's a temporary thing where you have to auth with the government to get a fresh signing key that expires, you have the issue of having to sign into the government when you want 18+ content which is super uncomfortable.

    I can see it being a browser-based thing set up a bit like video DRM but that would still need to talk to a government server each time for a temp key (like how licence servers work) and you'd need to be logged into their systems. It might still be the best option but it does still leak "X person wants to access 18+ content right now" to the government.

    I'm really interested in seeing a technical/cryptographic solution that actually works but so far I haven't really and I'm starting to doubt that it's possible.

  • Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable

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  • I think they supported the pixel fold which has the same sort of second flippy screen thing. I think the multiple screen stuff is just in the aosp base.

  • I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age

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  • Whenever this comes up, this style of zero-knowledge proof/blind signature thing gets suggested. But the problem is that those only work if people care about keeping their private keys secret. It works to secure eg. "I own $1" but "I'm over 18" is less important to people and it won't be hard for kids to get their hands on a valid anonymous signing key on the web. Because the verification is anonymous and not trackable, many kids can share the same one too, so it only takes one adult key to leak for everyone to use. It's one of the reasons they push biometrics that at least appears to need a real human. Requiring ID has a lot of the same issues on top of being a privacy nightmare.

    I'm starting to think that actual age verification is technically impossible.