tomo

measure twice; cut once. believer in milo dinosaur / 友愛 by any other name

usually on Mastodon.

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@sago35tk i went back to work afterwards and my colleagues got a good laugh while trying my keyboard! thank you all for the workshop. 勉強になりました ^_^

now I have to figure out what to do with the actual keys...maybe T9? 🤔

[shaurya @shauseth]

being an engineer is less about being smart and more about having the dawg in you

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@sarahookr https://t.co/MuhtYlEhsm some slightly morbid local food trivia: there are 2 murtabak restaurants next to each other in the Bugis area that've been feuding for 100+ years (founded 1908 and 1910)

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@sarahookr highly rec roaming abt Golden Mile food centre and Golden Mile Tower - tower has lots of Thai food and is also home to an independent cinema (https://t.co/SyhwE6egwg).
visit https://t.co/nFYQYEm442 for how to order drinks at local hawker centres. try sugar cane juice :D

[tomo @nondescryptid]

some brave IT administrator in a school needs to start pushing refurbished thinkpads before the chromebooks take a hold

[Zito @_Zeets]

They’re not even giving kids a chance to develop their brains or their social world. Hooking them as customers as early as possible.

[tomo @nondescryptid]

my favourite part of How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab (1988) is the section titled "Emotional Factors":
"All research involves risk. If your project can't fail, it's development, not research."
and this timeless bit on research as background process + taste:

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@YourAnonHeart I get about 14%

Based on Tor metrics for Iran, it looks like snowflake connections have gone down while obfs4 has gone up
https://t.co/BelRHXzOyb

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@YourAnonHeart As a kid who grew up online, I think everyone should be able to experience a free internet! hopefully will get another server running (with more cores) soon 🤞

[tomo @nondescryptid]

thank you @YourAnonHeart for conduit-manager : ) i set up my first VPS yesterday (Poland) and have been contributing to a tiny bit of traffic as it was really easy to set up Conduit with this tool.

after some tweaking i've found a config that works for my specs!

[Ali Ghanavati @alighanavatidev]

نسخه جدید Conduit pro با رابط کاربری و نصب بسیار آسان
#JavidShah

https://t.co/RfHf21r2r0

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@agihippo what kind of availability and scope of work are you looking at?

you can try asking on places like Quest (local taskrabbit), r/askSingapore

if it's not clear at the moment, you can start with paying a kid cousin/relative, see what actly needs to be done and hire from there

[tomo @nondescryptid]

thanks to my dinky thrifted camera from Hard-Off (it cost sgd5.50)

[tomo @nondescryptid]

forever inspired by https://t.co/WSL4CPCBfZ

all this compute, waiting to be composted and used 🌱

[tomo @nondescryptid]

i don't know what's going on but I'll slowly figure it out. and hopefully get this to host a blog or something.

[tomo @nondescryptid]

got postmarketos on my old samsung galaxy S II!! but after checking dmesg it appears that loading broadcom firmware failed so I have no wifi for now

[tomo @nondescryptid]

kim yeji did not make it into the 25m women's pistol finals but i hope she gets some insane brand deals after this

[tomo @nondescryptid]

real question is whether it's the pre-2016 japanese original or the korean reboot

[evan conrad @evanjconrad]

we have the special chalk in case u were wondering

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

In the 14 months since the release of GPT-4, there have been massive cost reductions but no big leaps in LLM capabilities. Many AI researchers are disappointed by this.

Personally I find cost reduction far more exciting than capability improvements, for a few reasons.

1. On many tasks, cost reductions directly translate to improved accuracy, as we explained here: https://t.co/C8Y8p1sEuG

2. There is already a near-endless list of things that leading LLMs are capable of, but they are practically useful for only a tiny fraction of those things. Cost is one big barrier. Here's a nice example from just yesterday of functionality that's made possible by cost reduction. https://t.co/xk0ySxLpkw

So in terms of what will make LLMs more useful in people's lives, cost is hands down more significant at this stage than capability.

Like everything about LLMs, this is double edged. Cost reduction will also lead to more slop. https://t.co/03zLJNRHjR

(Of course, cost is not the only factor; improvements in latency, multimodality, and low-resource language fluency — leading to the ability to converse in a natural way in many languages — have also opened things up to billions of people.)

3. Reliability is another underappreciated barrier. https://t.co/fIEV2xeZTI
Improving reliability is an open research challenge and I don't know what it will take, but I'll bet it won't come from bigger models but rather from agent designs that invoke LLMs many, many times under the hood.

4. Speaking of research challenges, cost is also currently a big barrier to the pace of research.

5. Finally, cost reduction also means improvements in energy efficiency. But whether this is better for the environment is a complicated question. My guess is that Jevons paradox will be an important factor. https://t.co/zpSE5V6E6h

Summary: if we want LLMs to be less hype and more of a building block for creating useful everyday tools for people, AI companies' shift away from scaling and AGI dreams to acting like regular product companies that focus on cost and customer value proposition is a welcome development.

[tomo @nondescryptid]

@RemiCadene this reminded me of a 2007 study by Georgia Tech about people developing emotional attachments to their Roombas (though this is a bit wider in scope than cuteness)
https://t.co/H7nVIAH5op