Disclaimer: : All of my LLM experience is with local models in Ollama on extremely modest hardware (an old laptop with NVidia graphics) , so I can’t speak for the technical reasons the context window isn’t infinite or at least larger on the big player’s models. My understanding is that the context window is basically its short term memory. In humans, short term memory is also fairly limited in capacity. But unlike humans, the LLM can’t really see (or hold) the big picture in its mind.

But yeah, all you said is correct. Expanding on that, if you try to get it to generate something long-form, such as a novel, it’s basically just generating infinite chapters using the previous chapter (or as much of the history fits into its context window) as reference for the next. This means, at minimum, it’s going to be full of plot holes and will never reach a conclusion unless explicitly directed to wrap things up. And, again, given the limited context window, the ending will be full of plot holes and essentially based only on the previous chapter or two.

It’s funny because I recently found an old backup drive from high school with some half-written Jurassic Park fan fiction on it, so I tasked an LLM with fleshing it out, mostly for shits and giggles. The result is pure slop that seems like it’s building to something and ultimately goes nowhere. The other funny thing is that it reads almost exactly like a season of Camp Cretaceous / Chaos Theory (the animated kids JP series) and I now fully believe those are also LLM-generated.

If it turns out to be the former, I don’t blame them.

I used to buy their stuff and use tuya-convert to flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.

• Not every <input type="text"> is suitable for political opinions.
• Political opinions are like assholes: we all have them, they all stink, we all think our own doesn’t stink, and the world is a better place when everyone doesn’t have them on constant display.
• People who inject politics into everything are generally insufferable and there’s a reason major communities have rules prohibiting politics.

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud

Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.

I get mine from ebooks.com

Not all are DRM free, though, but there’s a good selection available. It’s up to the author/publisher whether to release them DRM-free, though, so it’s not their choice.

For the DRM-free ones, you can just straight-up download the epub for them which is fantastic.

Trash? None.

Clutter / work-in-progress: No comment.

I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).

Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.

The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.

I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.

I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.

Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.

I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).

Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.

Chee-chew-choo-cha-chooo

Gonna be a bit nippley this weekend.

I mean, first layer adhesion is a problem common to more than just a specific printer and there are all kinds of tips and tricks to deal with it. The only one I tried (covering the bed in painter’s tape) didn’t pan out, and a friend was talking up the glass bed he just installed.

So instead of trying more tips and tricks like taking a glue stick to the bed surface, I went with the glass bed. I was expecting it to be like a $60 part but it was only like $15 so that worked out really well.

My Ender 3 V3 SE (I think I got all the initials in there?) has been pretty painless. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the stock magnetic bed with the glass one. I was having constant adhesion problems with the base layer and the glass bed fixed that immediately.

The other thing that (seemed to) help was switching from whatever slicer I originally used (forget which) to OrcaSlicer and just using its generic defaults for the filament and printer options. When I first started, I took the specs from the filament rolls and made profiles for each brand, but that just made my prints worse. Orca’s defaults “just work” for me and less effort on my part. Win-win lol.

And i do free upgrades when it makes sense (tall people and passengers-of-size as a priority)

as a tall person with bad knees, i can safely say you’re doing the lord’s work.

Heh, thanks. I definitely try.

Love when people spread the love on their last day.

At an undisclosed time in the past, I worked at a call center for a big, horrible bank. I hated it but didn’t plan on quitting until I got off of a heartbreaking call around 10 in the morning. That call/situation broke me as a person, so I knew I couldn’t work there anymore. My plan was to work until my lunch at 1:00 and then just not come back.

From 10am to 1pm, anyone who wanted an overdraft or other fee refunded got it; no questions asked. Even if they didn’t ask for it, I was like “oh, I see you have a few overdraft fees from a couple weeks ago. I’ll go ahead and refund those to you as a courtesy”.

In those 3 hours, I think I refunded close to $1200 in fees for who-knows-how-many people. That’s probably not possible now since even back then they had a primitive “AI”-like system that you had to go through to issue refunds. But it was still in beta then so we still had access to the old system to do them manually. I’m guessing that new tool got pushed to production real quick after my last day.

I’m not optimistic for a full crash (though I’d love to see it), but at some point the “introductory price” is going to be replaced by the real cost and I am optimistic some people will not want to pay it. As OP said in their post, the guy on the flight would probably keep paying it no matter how much it costs but most people, I hope, would just opt to use their brains for free instead (I said overly-optimistically and probably very naively).

Basically, like the drug dealer cliche, we’re still in the “first hit is free” phase of adoption.

If it means a bunch of people not qualified for the jobs they hold get the boot and are replaced by people who actually know what they’re doing, I consider that a net gain for society.

It’s like Malcolm says in Jurassic Park (slightly modified):

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what [the chatbot shat out] and you [just copied it]. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses [whose knowledge was stolen] to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and [now you’re pretending you’re qualified].