• 2 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle





  • CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that’s why security updates are important. If not these, it’d have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can’t exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.

    You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.










  • I’m using local models. Why pay somebody else or hand them my data?

    • Sometimes you need to search for something and it’s impossible because of SEO, however you word it. A LLM won’t necessarily give you a useful answer, but it’ll at least take your query at face value, and usually tell you some context around your question that’ll make web search easier, should you decide to look further.
    • Sometimes you need to troubleshoot something unobvious, and using a local LLM is the most straightforward option.
    • Using a LLM in scripts adds a semantic layer to whatever you’re trying to automate: you can process a large number of small files in a way that’s hard to script, as it depends on what’s inside.
    • Some put together a LLM, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model and function calling to make an assistant that can do something you tell it without touching your computer. Sounds like plenty of work to make it work together, but I may try that later.
    • Some use RAG to query large amounts of information. I think it’s a hopeless struggle, and the real solution is an architecture other than a variation of Transformer/SSM: it should address real-time learning, long-term memory and agency properly.
    • Some use LLMs as editor-integrated coding assistants. Never tried anything like that yet (I do ask coding questions sometimes though), but I’m going to at some point. The 8B version of LLaMA 3 should be good and quick enough.

  • it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own

    Nope.

    Even without corporate tuning or filtering.

    A language model is useful when you know what to expect from it, but it’s just another kind of secondary information source, not an oracle. In some sense it draws random narratives from the noosphere.

    And if you give it search results as part of input in hope of increasing its reliability, how will you know they haven’t been manipulated by SEO? Search engines are slowly failing these days. A language model won’t recognise new kinds of bullshit as readily as you.

    Education is still important.