8uurg @ 8uurg @lemmy.world

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At least the European Commission has their own Mastodon instance.

We rarely prove something correct. In mathematics, logical proofs are a thing, but in astronomy and physics it is moreso the case that we usually have a model that is accurate enough for our predictions, until we find evidence to the contrary, like here, and have an opportunity to learn and improve.

You really can't ever prove a lot of things to be correct: you would have to show that no more cases exist that are not covered. But even despite the lack of proven correctness for all cases, these models are useful and provide correct predictions (most of the time), science is constantly on the lookout for cases where the model is wrong or incorrect.

Wouldn't the algorithm that creates these models in the first place fit the bill? Given that it takes a bunch of text data, and manages to organize this in such a fashion that the resulting model can combine knowledge from pieces of text, I would argue so.

What is understanding knowledge anyways? Wouldn't humans not fit the bill either, given that for most of our knowledge we do not know why it is the way it is, or even had rules that were - in hindsight - incorrect?

If a model is more capable of solving a problem than an average human being, isn't it, in its own way, some form of intelligent? And, to take things to the utter extreme, wouldn't evolution itself be intelligent, given that it causes intelligent behavior to emerge, for example, viruses adapting to external threats? What about an (iterative) optimization algorithm that finds solutions that no human would be able to find?

Intellegence has a very clear definition.

I would disagree, it is probably one of the most hard to define things out there, which has changed greatly with time, and is core to the study of philosophy. Every time a being or thing fits a definition of intelligent, the definition often altered to exclude, as has been done many times.

The flute doesn't make for a good example, as the end user can take it and modify it as they wish, including third party parts.

If we force it: It would be if the manufacturer made it such that all (even third party) parts for These flutes can only be distributed through their store, and they use this restriction to force any third party to comply with additional requirements.

The key problem is isn't including third party parts, it is actively blocking the usage of third party parts, forcing additional rules (which affect existing markets, like payment processors) upon them, making use of control and market dominance to accomplish this.

The Microsoft case was, in my view, weaker than this case against Apple, but their significant market dominance in the desktop OS market made it such that it was deemed anti-competitive anyways. It probably did not help that web standards suffered greatly when MS was at the helm, and making a competitive compatible browser was nigh impossible: most websites were designed for IE, using IE specific tech, effectively locking users into using IE. Because all users were using IE, developing a website using different tech was effectively useless, as users would, for other websites, end up using IE anyways. As IE was effectively the Windows browser (ignoring the brief period for IE for Mac...), this effectively ensured the Windows dominance too. Note that, without market dominance, websites would not pander specifically to IE, and this specific tie-in would be much less problematic.

In the end, Google ended IE's reign by using Google Chrome, advertising it using the Google search engine's reach. But if Microsoft had locked down the OS, like Apple does, and required everything to go through their 'app store'. I don't doubt we would have ended up with a similar browser engine restriction that Apple has, with all browsers being effectively a wrapper around the exact same underlying browser.

Why would company A need to accomodate any other "app store" in their product, especially if one of their product's selling point is how streamlined it is?

Why should Microsoft allow for other browsers to be installed on Windows? Why should Google allow for other search engines being selectable on Android and in Chrome? The reason in all these cases is the same: it is anti-competitive, and creates a monopoly. This results in unfairly high costs to users, where these users are 3rd party software developers or end users. Due to this countries have laws against this.

Companies obviously wouldn't want to accommodate others in ways that cost them money, but that does not make it morally acceptable from a societal point of view.

Yes, true, but that is assuming:

1. Any potential future improvement solely comes from ingesting more useful data.
2. That the amount of data produced is not ever increasing (even excluding AI slop).
3. No (new) techniques that makes it more efficient in terms of data required to train are published or engineered.
4. No (new) techniques that improve reliability are used, e.g. by specializing it for code auditing specifically.

What the author of the blogpost has shown is that it can find useful issues even now. If you apply this to a codebase, have a human categorize issues by real / fake, and train the thing to make it more likely to generate real issues and less likely to generate false positives, it could still be improved specifically for this application. That does not require nearly as much data as general improvements.

While I agree that improvements are not a given, I wouldn't assume that it could never happen anymore. Despite these companies effectively exhausting all of the text on the internet, currently improvements are still being made left-right-and-center. If the many billions they are spending improve these models such that we have a fancy new tool for ensuring our software is more safe and secure: great! If it ends up being an endless money pit, and nothing ever comes from it, oh well. I'll just wait-and-see which of the two will be the case.

Not quite, though. In the blogpost the pentester notes that it found a similar issue (that he overlooked) that occurred elsewhere, in the logoff handler, which the pentester noted and verified when spitting through a number of the reports it generated. Additionally, the pentester noted that the fix it supplied accounted for (and documented) a issue that it accounted for, that his own suggested fix for the issue was (still) susceptible to. This shows that it could be(come) a new tool that allows us to identify issues that are not found with techniques like fuzzing and can even be overlooked by a pentester actively searching for them, never mind a kernel programmer.

Now, these models generate a ton of false positives, which make the signal-to-noise ratio still much higher than what would be preferred. But the fact that a language model can locate and identify these issues at all, even if sporadically, is already orders of magnitude more than what I would have expected initially. I would have expected it to only hallucinate issues, not finding anything that is remotely like an actual security issue. Much like the spam the curl project is experiencing.

The key point that is being made is that it you are doing de facto copyright infringement of plagiarism by creating a copy, it shouldn't matter whether that copy was made though copy paste, re-compressing the same image, or by using AI model. The product being the copy paste operation, the image editor or the AI model here, not the (copyrighted) image itself. You can still sell computers with copy paste (despite some attempts from large copyright holders with DRM), and you can still sell image editors.

However, unlike copy paste and the image editor, the AI model could memorize and emit training data, without the input data implying the copyrighted work. (exclude the case where the image was provided itself, or a highly detailed description describing the work was provided, as in this case it would clearly be the user that is at fault, and intending for this to happen)

At the same time, it should be noted that exact replication of training data isn't exactly desirable in any case, and online services for image generation could include a image similarity check against training data, and many probably do this already.

At least the AI runs locally, as opposed to sending everything to someone else's computer for processing. Local translation in Firefox actually works quite well.

Add binary compatibility issues to that list: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The moment you need software that is not packaged by your distro you either need to be lucky that whomever compiled it accounted for your setup, or compile it from scratch yourself (if open source and publicly available). Especially with closed source software (like most games) the latter isn't even an option.

Mattermost does have an Github Repository with a choice of three licenses: MIT (if using versions compiled by them), AGPLv3 (if compiled by you) or an Enterprise license. I would count that as open source.

A more general business management application like Odoo could work?

Fair, though I don't think rallies are a good indicator for enthusiasm in the general voting public. If you have access to polls you may be able to judge things somewhat better (even if polls have their own problems). I like to believe that a politician like Bernie is smart enough to have at least given the option a thought, and figured that running would guarantee a DJT win.

With hindsight, it may be easy to say that it would have been worth a try anyway (given who won in the end...).

Even so, even if he won, it would not be easy to be a president without backing in the US. The only reason DJT is not in prison is support from the other branches of the US government.

It is surprising how many people don't realise the spoiler effect inherent in first-past-the-post makes running as an independent an bad idea: you are more likely to split the vote with a candidate who agrees with some of your points, causing both of you to lose, than being able to bring change.

As a past customer of Gandi, they have been bought out and have been significantly increasing their prices (renewal this year would have cost me twice what I paid a couple years back) while reducing the value proposition of their offering (e-mail is no longer included...)

Note that while entering the Schengen area does not require a visa for USA citizens, you do have to get a visa waiver which is subject to limitations. See this document.

You’re failing to acknowledge that “these types of people exist” are largely a product of anti-educational resources like this particular LTT video. I’ve daily driven Ubuntu based oses for about 4 years solid now and never saw a warning like he saw. That is an extreme outlier, but his video presented it as common in the minds of probably a couple million people.

His specific instance was an outlier of what can happen yes, but it happened naturally during the creation of a video. While I can completely understand the annoyance - this was not faked for the video, and was something that happened. Calling it anti-educational is a rather conspiratorial take. Cutting it out would hide an issue that occurred! A rare issue may not be an issue for you when encountered, given your experience with Linux (we are on a linuxmemes community after all!), but can be problematic for the average Joe. Rather than being overly defensive and than waiving the issue because idiocy - improvements to avoid this from happening in the future are key in my view.

As for things being plug and play, Windows isn’t either. I’ve used all versions of that OS except 8 and 11 and I’ve had problems as bad or worse than anything on Linux plenty of times. Updates have trashed my ability to boot on a few occasions. Yet to hear folks like you tell it, windows just works but Linux is only usable if you’re willing to fix major problems all the time. That was probably true 15 years ago but it just flat out isn’t anymore. You’re not doing anyone any favors except Microsoft by continuing to spread the misinformation that windows is nearly flawless but Linux is unapproachable.

Thanks for putting words in my mouth: I haven't even named Windows, let alone called it better! I have had my fair share of problems with Windows, but technical issues have been rather unmemorable. Most recently the text selection cursor would be the wrong color for whatever reason. I've had an update fail once - but it did not mess up the machine, and the built-in system restore got it working again automatically. The biggest problem I have with Windows is with Microsoft: ads, telemetry, and the fact that updates are pushed without consent.

For Ubuntu I have seen my colleague stuck on the login screen after updating graphics drivers trying to get hardware acceleration to work (Nvidia, who else...) - took well over a day to resolve after things went wrong (colleague was considering a reinstall!), had an update of packages on my RPi mess up timezones resulting in database issues (took me a week to find the responsible package, luckily a hotfix had been released. but had to recover my database from a backup.). I've actually seen this prompt when I was trying to reproduce results from a scientific paper that used an older package (ended up having to do that in a container.). The WiFi dongle was just a more minor issue but one that could occur for the average Joe that would have been a major roadblock for most people.

All these examples occurred within the last 6 or so years. I love Linux on my servers & RPi, and would NOT want to use Windows there. But issues do occur, even when doing otherwise ordinary things, and that has ruined my day a few too many times.

I don't disagree, but the fact is that these people exist (see Linux TT for proof). When things go wrong in Linux, people often end up being directed towards a terminal, even if they shouldn't be there for plenty of reasons. If you want to be accessible to a layman, largely plug and play is insufficient: it needs to be plug-and-play. I've had a wifi dongle not work, I had to compile a kernel module! Those kinds of experiences will cause people that try a flavour of Linux as a desktop os to go elsewhere. Furthermore, I have seen this warning pop up with colleagues when updating software. While they were smart enough to not continue, this stuff does throw up a massive roadblock when it does, especially if you are a layman. If the instructions tell you to install using apt - and this pops up, what would you do? You still want to install the software. It is just a massive source of frustration when something like this happens, even if rare. Doing something sensible (like installing or updating software) should never result in stuff like this popping up.

The moment you need to enter a terminal to fix something - the OS would be irreparably damaged for the average Joe. I would love an immutable distro that would be usable by these people without the risk of harming themselves.

A layman would think: I am installing steam, I want to install steam. What do you mean potentially harmful? Steam ain't a virus. I have no clue what pop* is and what it does. -> do as I say.

While the prompt is perfectly adequate for those that are technically experienced enough to recognize it is about to uninstall your desktop environment, that isn't the case for someone who doesn't know what their desktop environment is. Especially since there is an expectation that installing software does not break things (but, because shared libraries are shared more often than not in Linux, it could!)

Thunderbird has RSS integrated, which could be quite neat once that synchronizes.