circuscritic

No, I’m living in this thread. I’m talking about very specific issues related to LLMs, that I’ve highlighted ad nauseam.

Reread if you’re confused.

If anything, it shows that you believe in the concept of “AI” way more than I do, as you’re conflating LLM and FSD.

I don’t believe in AI, it doesn’t exist. Just specific advanced machine learning algorithms, some better than others, and some all smoke and mirrors. But here, now, I’m talking about LLMs.

Who’s talking about investing…? I’ve exclusively been talking about what LLMs can do now, today, for free (aside from energy costs).

None of what your throwing out there has anything to do with what’s being discussed here. It’s a red herring.

Pale Moon feels like it forked during the peak of Windows Vista, and hasn’t updated its UI, or extension library since.

LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, and Waterfox feel the most up to date, while being FOSS.

I mean, it probably will eventually, but that has nothing to do with LLMs, nor is it a technology that I want to exist.

I can definitely see a world where lobbyists for automakers and insurance companies create such a financial and regulatory burden, where only the wealthy can afford to drive their own cars, if they choose to. Where as everyone else must rent or lease their self driving car as is if it’s a IaaS or SaaS subscription.

But none of that has anything to do with using LLMs for the tasks they can accomplish, or telling people to stop bitching about them not being able to complete the tasks they aren’t good at, or even capable of.

Yes and no, I have self-hosted models on one of my Linux boxes, but even with a relatively modern 70 series Nvidia GPU, it’s still faster to use free non-local services like ChatGPT or DDG.

My rule of thumb for SaaS LLMs is to never enter in any data that I wouldn’t also be willing to upload cleartext to Google Drive or OneDrive.

Sometimes that means modifying text before submitting it, and other times having to rely entirely on self-hosted tools.

Llama is the model I use most often, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.

Others as well, but yes, it is incredible helpful for the tasks I use it for.

Weasel phrase? You mean the fact that I don’t treat them like their actual Ai, but just a tool that needs to be used properly, monitored, and verified?

There’s a reason why I never call them AI, because they’re not. They’re just advanced machine learning tools, and just like I keep a steady hand when using a table saw, I only use LLMs for tasks that they can help me do something faster, but are easy to verify they did it right.

And as someone who has been using them very regularly, I feel confident in saying that. It’s not a weasel phrase, I’m not trying to sell anyone snake oil about what they can actually do, and I acknowledge that they’re an oversold and overhyped means of cooking the planet faster, so it’s not like I would be mad if they were banned tomorrow, but until then, I will keep using them in ways that are actually fruitful.

But sure, if all you need to do is find one word in a single body of text, that’s not really a good use of an LLM, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.

If I need examples of various legal or ethical concerns documented in one, or multiple, pieces of writing, or other conceptual topics, I can give it a list, and then ask it to highlight all examples of those issues, and include the verbatim text where their present. I can then give that same task to a multiple different LLMs, with the same prompts, and a task that would have taken me hours to complete, takes me 30 to 45 minutes, including the time it takes me to give it quick read through see if anything was missed. But yeah, that requires a well crafted prompt, and it’s not infallible.

Replace belt sander with CBD. A compound with very real and tangible benefits for specific use cases, but is marketed as a modern day snake oil cure all.

Imagine seeing people regularly complaining on bluelight, erowid, or whatever forums educated drug users frequent these days, bitching that CBD didn’t cure their asthma, or STDs, so therefore it has no medical value.

They know it’s a tool, yet they keep complaining about how the gas station CBD isn’t magic and failed to cure their gonorrhea, even though they already knew it was never going to be able to, no matter what the packaging said.

But my analogy wasn’t meant to be critically analyzed and dissected, it was a throwaway example to highlight the problem of people on Lemmy, who actually know better, but keep whinging about LLM’s providing bogus URLs for citations, etc.

I’m not advocating for openai, their business model, or the environmental and financial cost benefit of current LLM technology.

They suck, it’s dogshit, and it’s not worth cooking the planet for.

I also don’t disagree about the very real possibility that the average user may actually get dumber and more misinformed by relying on LLMs.

But we’re on Lemmy, and I’m just tired of all these comments incessantly complaining about about how LLM’s can’t do x,y, or z.

Imagine being on a carpentry forum, and every day people complained about how their new belt sander was dogshit at cutting 2x4’s or screwing in fasteners, so clearly the problem was with the concept of belt sander technology.

It’s not a peer-reviewed journal or academic level source, and shouldn’t be used as that.

But if I need to find some technical or scientific writings on a subject, but I don’t know the correct nomenclature or need a more narrow set of keywords, that is something I can describe to the LLM and get back.

The keywords in their response can help me then hunt down the journal article or papers that I need using traditional search engines. I’m not just brainstorming here, this is something I do often enough to find real utility in it.

Again, these are problems that can be solved with traditional search engines, but at the cost of time and frustration sifting though every potential result.

You can spit out a hundred more examples of what an LLM can’t do, but as I already said, they’re not magic, just tools.

Your experience highlights what current iterations of LLMs are not well suited for, so I understand if that’s what you were hoping to achieve, why you were left wanting, or disillusioned.

There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

This can save you hours and hours, of reading time, and it’s something that you can verify the answer on relatively quickly, to double check the LLMs response accuracy.

They’re also good at doing something Google used to be good at, but sucks at now. Which enabling you to describe process, simple or complicated, short or long, that you either can’t recall the name of, or aren’t even sure where it’s called, and letting you know exactly what it is. Also, easily verifiable.

There’s plenty of other things too, but just remember that they are tools, not magic, or sentient intelligence.

The models are not real time, but there are tricks to figure out it’s most recent dates of ingestion, such as asking topical entertainment or news questions, but don’t go looking for a real-time information.

Also, I have yet to find a model that can provide an actual URL and specific source for anything it generates, which is why it’s a good practice to use them to do tasks, or get information, that would take you longer to do, or get, manually, but that can be easily verified once you receive it.

Politics are complicated, especially in post-Soviet bloc countries e.g. the lingering effects of Russification. But anytime a ruling party is looking to dissolve all opposition parties, and label them as criminals, it’s because they feel threatened in some way.

You put so much effort into that post, that I almost feel bad pointing out that you probably should have read the comment I was replying to… you know, the one above my comment.

But, if you’re having a hard time locating it, I pasted the relevant quote that I was responding to:

“…opportunity for a movie-like secret mission with a bag full of consumer drones…”

But yeah, I guess if you completely ignore the actual text I was responding to, you might of had a fair point.

Yes, and that’s what Ukraine is doing at the moment. But they’re doing it in the cities like Moscow that actually matter to Putin, and the Russian elites.

The comment I was responding to was talking about taking a lot small drones deeper into Russia, which are places that Putin couldn’t give a shit about.

So, if they aren’t useful for destroying critical infrastructure, and Putin and the Russian elite don’t care about any psychological impact on those civilians, what is the point? Which is why I covered using them to target civilians, and why that would be a bad idea.

Saboteurs and Ukrainian assets inside of Russia are not an unlimited resource. Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to use their time doing things that actually politically harm Putin, or impact the wider Russian war effort?

I didn’t move any goal posts, I’ve been pretty clear about my views on the general ineffectiveness of using quadcopters to target infrastructure.

But like I said, maybe I’m wrong, and the Ukrainian MoD will have a “Eureka!” moment after reading your comments.

Again, I think you’re vastly overestimating the capability of a quadcopter drone to inflict serious damage on hard infrastructure.

But hey, maybe I’m not only wrong, but so are all of the Ukrainian sabotage teams and they’ll stumble across your advice here and realize what a great idea it is.

Acts of sabotage have been happening this entire time, whether or not they’re getting covered.

Ukraine has also been running a covert targeted assassination program, which unfortunately got some press coverage some months back due to their legally and morally questionable approach to target selection.

But, it’s an existential war for their survival, so I’m not going to moralize about it.

I think you’re vastly overestimating the damage possible from the explosive payload a tiny quadcopter can carry, unless your goal is strictly terrorism i.e. intentionally targeting civilians.

Civilians dying as collateral damage during an attack/assignation of a legitimate military target is one thing, targeting civilians is another.

And before you say Russia does, don’t forget that Ukraine is dependent upon continued Western support, which is already fragile. It’s doubtful that support would survive them explicitly targeting civilians with suicide drones deep inside Russia.

This is straight out of Monsanto playbook going back decades. There’s a reason why a lot of countries have either passed laws legally shielding local farmers from accidental cross-pollination, or just banning GM seeds, not for any pseudoscience rational, but because of the way agro business uses natural cross pollination as a vector for lawfare and predatory business practices.

This is not uplifting. This is a lose-lose as it’s the type of case that this particular Supreme Court loves to add to their docket.

Eventually, SCOTUS will either rule that this does in fact violate his religious rights, or they will make a ruling siding with the school district that destroys part of the civil rights act, which is cited all throughout his filing:

"…repeatedly cites the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its Title VII section prohibiting workplace discrimination”