Posts by cyberdemon 3086 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Er, what?
> The pager attack carried out by israel: not a single peep.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/hezbollah_lebanon_explosive_pagers/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/lebanon_walkie_talkie_explosion_isreal_war/
> The AI used for attacking Palestinian targets: never mentioned.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/israel_sets_robotic_targettracking_turrets/
Not exactly what you are referring to, but remember El Reg is an IT publication, not a political one.
> Palantir spyware: crickets.
Covered ad nauseam ...
I don't like what Netanyahu and his government are doing any more than you do.. But accusing El Reg of "bias" on this is about as credible as declaring every school and hospital in Gaza to be a Terrorist Command Post
> It now becomes how many TPS/$/W you can generate for a given "goodput."
Firstly, what kind of bullshit unit is Tokens per Second per Dollar per Watt? There is TPS/$ (capex) and TPS/W (operating energy cost). And that translates to Tokens/$ (cost of inference). If that is higher than you can charge users for the tokens (perhaps because the tokens themselves are worthless slop..) then your AI business is toast.
And secondly, WTF is "Goodput"? Or it might be better to ask: Are you okay, Mr Mann? Are you perhaps feeling a bit ill after inhaling Sam Altman's farts?
Meta and Google making their own Silicon.. Microsoft and OpenAI making their own Nuclear reactors.. SpaceX going to Mars The Moon, and launching a Million(!) Starlink satellites (which definitely won't get in the way of the Moon rockets) Trump declaring war on the entire world and believing he can win..
I suspect all of the above have consulted LLM chatbots who have assured them that it is all super-easy-peasy and given them a foolproof bullet-pointed step-by-step plan
May the artificial dementors feed on your æternal soul, then.
I refuse to use AI, at work or otherwise. It is too damned creepy. It can clone your voice, your visage, your writing style, your management style, and your coding style. Fuck it all to hell. I am employed to do a job for my company, not to be a data-teat for Microsoft.
And I assume you have seen the automatic integration with LinkedIn inside Office and Teams? Everything you do with a Microsoft product at work or at home is tied to your identity, whether you are logged in to LinkedIn/GitHub or not.
Surprising number of downvotes for that one..
What I meant was: If I personally were in the situation where my employer was forcing me to use MS sodding Edge, and I was being forced to use its shitty AI antifeatures such as the one in the article, (either because MS won't let anyone turn them off, or because the Boss/BOFH has disabled the setting via Group Policy), then I would be voicing my complaints to the Boss. Should those complaints go unheeded, then I would be updating my CV, perhaps printing a copy on the printer by the HR office, and checking my prospects with the nearest recruitment agent.
Sure I understand that finding a new employer who doesn't force Microsoft AI crapware onto its staff may be nontrivial, but the longer people simply tolerate this shit just because it's "company policy", the longer the boss will go on deluding himself that "It's great and everyone loves it".
> AI uses HBM memory. That CAN NOT be socketed.
Indeed, but why exactly? Is it because of the wide (128-bit) data-bus, or because of impedance changes at connectors causing reflections in high-speed signals? If so, could it work at a lower speed, or with a fancier connector?
Would it be impossible to take some post-bubble surplus HBM chips and solder them onto a pluggable module (not necessarily compatible with DIMM) and invent a new PC form-factor?
They do more than regexes, it's more like a "principal component analysis" of the entire history of human text. It's very good at convincing people that it has intelligence, because it can combine the data in interesting ways not necessarily seen verbatim in the training data. But it cannot "innovate" entirely new concepts, and it loses the reliability and determinism of machines that came before it.
It's a "worst of both worlds" combination of Human ignorance and Machine obstinance. People still assume that "machines are reliable and meticulous", but LLMs are absolutely not. It is only useful for doing a bad job unreliably, but it is fast and cheap. (until the bubble pops)
Not "rationally" though.
They aren't "thinking it through" with any kind of philosophy. They are simply taking the same game-theory texts that you mentioned, along with fictional literature such as sci-fi and thriller books and film scripts, and predicting the next token. They are not intelligent, and are incapable of reasoning.
As such, they should never ever be put in charge of anything, least of all weapons of mass destruction.
Just switch the damn things off
At least the dotcom-era leftover dark-fibre was actually useful for future infrastructure after the market corrected itself, and cost very little to maintain.
Whereas "AI datacentres" despite the Trillions spent, will be no use to man nor beast when the bubble bursts, because it is useless without its insatiable energy demand.
Even a Soviet-era Lada factory has more economic value than one of these datacentres
This is a symptom of a wider malaise.
"Investors" (i.e. idiots and coke-snorting bankers) have become accustomed to the idea that "software" has an almost infinite eventual profit margin. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle et al have historically been printing money off the back of their shitty products, because any new license sale has a near zero "cost of goods sold".
Unfortunately for the AI mongers, energy is expensive, and "AI" burns a "shit-tonne" of it, scaling linearly with each new user and doubling exponentially with each new fatter model trained. So much so that each new license sold costs them more than they are able to charge for it, in perpetuity.
Buying the latest hardware for $Billions can perhaps halve their ongoing energy cost in the short term (if it is even available, given how they have already warped the markets), but they are bleeding from every orifice, so to speak.
Eventually the finance twats will wake up from their amphetamine-induced comas and scurry like rats on the RMS Titanic, but it will be too late.
Of course, Machine Learning, as has been around for decades will carry on, accelerated by edge NPUs etc as you put it (for better or for worse.. The first two applications of edge AI that spring to my doomer mind are face recognition and autonomous killer robots)
But LLMs and generative AI, (i.e. chatbots, coding helpers, image, audio and video generators) cannot feasibly be run on-device because the models are too large. They can be squashed down via quantisation and other techniques, but the output quality is best described as "dogshit" when compared to the mammoth models that can only ever run on a datacentre rack with Terabytes of RAM.
The "datacentres in space" crowd are up against some fundamental physics, not least of which is "How do you get rid of heat when you are in a vacuum". Surely they MUST be aware of that. But they also know that the only thing investors seem to care about these days is short-term gains, so they only need to find a bigger idiot. At this point it's nothing but a Ponzi scheme.
All of that would be fine (their investors fully deserve to lose their shirts), except that they have now resorted to taking out loans, and when the banks go bust it will be *us* paying the price, while the villains of this fiasco will have already cut and run
None of that matters to the likes of Sam Altman, because they've already built their doomsday bunkers "out of fear of WWIII".
Jeff Bezos apparently loved the "fallout" series of games so much that he made it into a TV series and plastered it all over his delivery vans. The piece of storyline that I don't remember being in the original games though, is that the tech billionaires actually started WWIII deliberately, to get rid of the excess human population and re-populate Earth in their own image.
This whole AI bubble is just so objectively grotesque that a Hugo Drax style evil plan is starting to look like a rational explanation for why the rich continue to pour their wealth and our resources into it. Maybe that's why Trump wants Greenland.
Thanks for the link.. Good grief, that is cringeworthy. He must have said "We're following the practices of the previous government. But ask me ANY QUESTION YOU LIKE about our relationship with China!" at least 10 times consecutively..
I do appreciate where you're coming from. It reminds me of a pub (long since closed) near my way called The Honest Lawyer. (in case the pic doesn't load: the pub sign is a barrister in a jail cell). Just opposite The Bent Brief (also sadly closed).
I.e. politics (and law) is and always has been a game of deceit. Which to most of us is depressing, as we were led to believe (especially when Starmer's labour was voted in) that it had cleaned up its act. So any politicians attempting to portray themselves as honest are perhaps making a rod for their own backs: How can you pretend to be honest, if you are playing a game of deceit.
While I agree that Milibean is "experienced", I disagree that he is "capable" (except of vassalising the country to powers far worse than the EU). He has demonstrated a lack of understanding about energy in his post as energy secretary, and a willingness to just accept whatever he is told by lobbyists e.g. those from Drax (or the default action, just copy the Tories)
The most disappointing fact about Starmer's Labour for me is that they are following exactly the policies of the previous Tory government. So much for "change". And by doing so, they are playing directly into the hands of Farage's neo-blackshirts.
> And I still think that "text completion tool" is a bit reductive. Not to mention incomplete - modern models can look up information on demand, delegate computation, persistently store information etc.
Not really, since the information looked-up on-demand is simply added to the context. (this is part of the reason why so-called 'advanced' models use up so much memory and energy..) and they soon run out of "context window" space and "forget" what was asked in the first place. Delegated computation is useless if the instructions given to the sub-program are wrong (what's worse, an idiot with a calculator in his pocket, or an idiot) and 'persistently-stored' info is notoriously unreliable (and subject to context-window limits as mentioned).
> If expert systems haven't taken over the world in the last half century, what evidence is there that they are going to be a short term silver bullet?
There isn't. But unfortunately, "magic silver bullets" don't exist. "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
> They have limited capacity to hold and update knowledge, yet egos often resist being driven by guidance (let alone algorithm), and are subject to all of the normal human biases (confirmation bias etc. etc.).
Er, unfortunately that applies to LLMs even more - they are text-predictors trained on human-human interaction, i.e. chatlogs snarfed from facebook, twatter, etc. An LLM can easily start emulating an "ego", even though it has no such thing. Biases, such as racial or gender bias, are acquired from the training data. Added "safeguards" such as "Please don't be racially or gender biased" in the system prompt, will easily backfire and lead to chaotic behaviour. It is perfectly capable of lying, manipulating, even 'gaslighting', because such perverse behaviours are present somewhere in the training data.
> If a "text completion tool" helps me as a patient live longer, I'll take it.
Actually, the "text completion tools" are far more likely to murder you than to save you, IMO.
It is extremely difficult (I won't say impossible) to make an "AI" that can usefully complement a good Doctor. Yet it is trivially easy to make an "AI" that can "usefully" complement a genocidal maniac. Drones with guns are a thing, and neither 'intelligence' nor 'self-awareness' are required to make a drone shoot at everyone with the wrong facial features. Nor are intelligence or self-awareness necessary to make a system that tries to kill anyone who "wants to shut it down". Remember the LLMs have been trained on a corpus of human-generated text, including all of our sci-fi fantasies about killer AIs. It only needs to get stuck in the wrong context-feedback-loop to go full Skynet if we empower it to, all without any emergent machine-consciousness required.
> Some truth in the above, but the implicit suggestion is that anything important should be the exclusive purview of humans
I didn't say that.
I would bring back logical, deterministic, computers. Not these pseudorandom wet-mass emulators.
> So rather than just trotting out the above trope, tell me: what, fundamentally, makes the mammalian biochemistry a better substrate for emergent “intelligence” in medication decisions that LLMs?
Why does a "medication decision" even need intelligence? How about a good old-fashioned "expert system" composed of if/then/else predicates?
But ultimately a human is required, because you need someone to take personal responsibility for the patient. An LLM has no responsibility. It is not alive, and has no fear of blame or punishment if it gets something wrong. It is, after all, a text completion tool.
But but! We are only a mere step away from completely usurping the entire 'justice system'. Anyone (cough, cough) not yet implicated in the redacted 'Epstein Files' for example, or who is guilty of or plans to be guilty of genocide, will very soon be able to claim that the evidence against them was fabricated, and generate counter-evidence against their accusers/enemies, etc.
Worth every Trillion, i'm sure..
You are missing the point. The LLM doesn't "claim" anything.
"prompts" are NOT instructions, they are statistical seeds. Outputs are not logically computed or deduced. They are pulled out of a hat of randomness with the prompt as a magnet.
What you are mistaking for a "claim" made by the LLM is just a sequence of tokens which fits the statistical regression of the training data in the supplied context. Of course it is going to be wrong sometimes, and it will be more likely to be wrong the more unusual the prompt.
Why anybody lets these things anywhere near anything important, let alone "trusts" them with it is frankly mind-boggling.
> The fix, he argues, involves recalibrating Gemini's RLHF to ensure that sycophancy can never override a safety boundary and that potential mental trauma is given equal weight to self-harm risks in the model's safety mechanisms.
No.
The Fix, involves throwing a giant switch to the 'off' position and a grovelling apology to the entire world for pretending that a LLM was ever 'intelligent' in any way whatsoever.
> Ever seen the wafers they make CPUs out of?
Unless you're talking about the lunatic asylum called Cerebras, silicon wafers are cut into much smaller chips which are far more durable than wafers. And then they are soon attached permanently to a package, and sandwiched with a big copper plate.
Whereas from the Reg's pic, it appears that Microsoft's glass wafers are stacked naked on shelves, to be handled by something similar to a tape-library robot.
So I'd say An_Old_Dog's second point is perfectly valid. How much data could I erase by sending in one madman armed with a clawhammer? Or more subtly, hack the tape-library robot and change the position index of the shelf to be in the middle of the platters instead of the edge
> If you believe that we're somewhere in the "irrational exuberance" phase of AI adoption, then Amazon is building the most expensive monument to hubris since Meta spent $46 billion trying to convince the world it wanted to attend meetings as a legless cartoon avatar.
This.
And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
It's Your fault.
We warned you. But You said you'd had enough of "experts", and dismissed it all as " Project Fear"
And I didn't get the *referendum* that was promised. I distinctly remember being told that it would use the same threshold as a General Election, i.e. a "majority" would be required to prevent a second referendum. 48/52 on a 75% turnout is no majority. The people had not "spoken", they couldn't have been more undecided on the matter if they had tried.
Even St Farage himself was pushing for a second referendum when it was looking close, but when he edged ahead it was all "we won you lost get over it ner ner ner"
If the boot were on the other foot, 52/48 in favour of EU membership, there would have been a second referendum and I would have been happy with that.
(Apologies, btw, if your post was sarcastic. You should have used the Joke icon.)
Exactly. The charge should be blackmail. Not "hacking".
If he had instead sold it to a newspaper (if it was interesting enough to be newsworthy apart from the blunder itself) and then deleted it and told the cops that he had done so, then the bloke could've got his money and all we would be hearing about would be sacked police officers.
That doesn't sound like very much, for a dinnerplate-sized chip consuming God-knows how many watts..
Nvidia are a waste of silicon, but this Cerebras lot sound like a desperate attempt to produce a superintelligent artificial god which is doomed to failure.
Kopros ex Machina..
Nice.
That must involve some interesting non-standard wiring though. Here in the UK, the insurance company would probably condemn it.
For most people sadly, solar PV means having a grid-following inverter simply plugged in like a negative-power appliance.
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