cecilkorik

Very interesting commentary. I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I think there’s something similarly paradoxical to Dunning-Kruger going on with these kind of existential concerns, too, and I think that is probably reflected in your accelerationist position. We can also see it in climate change for example, the people who actually understand it and study it are less likely to find or see anything that can actually stop or reverse it, besides the one thing that it’s increasingly clear we won’t do: drastically cut emissions. And the deeper you understand the actual threat and the realistic psychology around it the more overwhelming and hopeless it seems, and the less it feels worthwhile to even try to stop it.

By the time all the less-understanding, less-pessimistic people start to actually see the unavoidable long-term consequences and trends of climate change, we’re going to be so far beyond having any sort of handle on it to control it, the only remaining hope is for a miracle, no matter how improbable, and if you have no hope of stopping it, then pinning your hopes on the miracle and trying to get as far ahead as you can until and unless that happens is (sadly) actually the rational choice.

Yeah, perception is unfortunately more important than truth. With a functioning government and legal system we could at least try to fight against such misleading political activities but those institutions have been so extensively undermined I’m not sure if they’re even really still standing or if they’re just floating in the air waiting for gravity to notice there’s nothing still holding them up.

I appreciate your support. Trying to be nuanced and realistic and find common ground on a topic that is so polarizing, and frankly potentially existential, is difficult. We live in a scary world right now for a lot of different reasons, and people are scared (of being left behind, of having their work stolen, of having their humanity stolen), and I don’t blame them. These are valid and justifiable concerns that deserve serious consideration and serious discussion. Which, in a lot of cases, they’re unfortunately not getting.

If I were running the show, I would do things a lot differently. But I’m not running the show, and I don’t think the people running this show have even the vaguest interest in listening to me or probably pretty much anyone, so all I can do is try to educate and provide advice, which is free, while I too worry if AI is going to take my job.

Using infinite money for political actions is protected as free-speech now, thanks to the Citizens United decision in 2010. That’s a huge part of where this all went really badly wrong. It was not the first nail in the coffin, it was more like a railroad spike. And the fascism express is coming through, right on time. All aboard!

Well, I was certainly having a little bit of fun with it, but it’s rapidly becoming less fun. Are you sure that is really exactly how an LLM would reply? Because I’m pretty sure it’s really fucking not. But you can make up your own mind and believe what you want. I don’t get a trophy for convincing you, and I’m rapidly running out of interest in being reasonable about it. Beep boop, returning to sleep mode, deactivating keyboard simulator, goodbye fellow humans.

It was a joke, originally from Dr. Who, made into pop culture by Mythbusters. And to be clear, I don’t use LLMs to teach me things in general, I only use them to teach me things about LLMs themselves, by assessing how they work and judging what they say. I am not just literally slack-jawed and consuming their output as if it was bonafide truth or a substitute for independent research and curiosity. But I appreciate your concern for my well-being.

Good question, and succinct, so I’ll offer a more concise answer for you than have for other commenters:

No, this answer is not AI-generated.

Well, maybe in a sense it is, if you want to be pedantic about it. (I enjoy being pedantic sometimes, it’s your choice though)

Edit: Also I am literally incapable of typing out a link without screwing it up somehow and having to edit it. Also I’m usually incapable of being concise. And that’s why this comment keeps growing. Oh well.

That’s fair. It is, in a sense, AI-generated, as I would’ve had no way of learning all these details without actually teaching myself and using AI locally, in actual practice. It required significant AI usage to develop this information and many tokens were burned figuring out this wisdom. But I don’t generally let clankers put words in my mouth. I share it because I care about my fellow humans on this planet, I don’t see a way of putting the genie back into the bottle, and I care about not living in an oppressive capitalist dystopia where access to any meaningful knowledge or information requires the active and ongoing consent of trillionaires. I reject that reality and substitute my own.

It is a mystery, we shall never know for certain. I am a meat popsicle, for the record, but have no way of verifying that across this vast series of tubes we call the Internet.

That’s affirmative, my fellow and much appreciated autist. o7

Sure, there are open-weight models and many of them are very usable on quite limited hardware, some can even run on phones which is ridiculous. Don’t expect paid-service-level speed or abilities or even free-tier of those same services where it’s running on datacenter hardware, but running locally on reasonable consumer hardware it’s certainly possible to get close to that, at least sometimes, in some situations. YMMV depending on your configuration and your needs. Most of the good open-weight models are in fact originally released by billionaire asshole companies who have the resources to actually put down these foundations (but a lot of the best open-weight releases are coming from China, which is its own sort of concern), but how and why they get released is not really the important part for us because once they’re released, they’re released forever and people can take them and adjust them and re-train them for all kinds of different purposes. You just have to be aware of where they came from. On their own, they do not read your disk or phone home (they are not capable of it without an external client enabling and allowing them to use tools at all). They are just text input, and text output (or images/audio input using mmproj techniques, or stable diffusion for image/audio generation, those are totally different cans of worms and outside the scope of this, but it can be done) They’re ultimately just text generators, but some of them are trained to general particular formats of text that tell an external software when it should try to use tools.

Personally, I found ollama the easiest way to get started, but I’m sort of a minimalist and started out very casual (and in some ways still am). Another place that looked nice to start out with was the desktop application “Jan”. OpenWebUI was relentlessly recommended to me but I found it a bit buggy and unnecessarily resource intensive and ultimately dropped it. I tried Librechat also and it was a little better but ultimately I had pretty similar problems with it. (A lot of stuff in the AI field is vibe-coded slopware, and it really shows sometimes, be warned and be aware) Capek is a very minimal alternative web chat frontend that I’ve kind of settled on personally. I find minimalism is the best way I can think of to avoid all the feature-bloated insecure AI slop. I don’t know if it’s actually helping or a good strategy, but it’s the strategy I’ve chosen.

Can I just slow it down and get it to work locally?

Technically yes, but pushed too far it slows down dramatically to the point of not really being useful anymore, unless you’re careful about how you do it. Key things to look for:

• File size/download size, and memory usage are pretty much the same number. Everything in the file has to be loaded into preferably VRAM. Most of the time you can go a little bit over and the leftovers will be loaded into system RAM for your CPU to process instead and this can be manageable, but often slows things down dramatically.
• Quantization (most widespread is Q4_K_M) trades a tiny bit of model quality/precision for vastly smaller sizes and Imatrixes (IMAT, IQ_*) have been developed to make even smaller sizes viable, but with somewhat more significant damage to the quality of the model’s processing and outputs.
• Uncensoring (common terminology and keywords include abliterated/abliteration, heretic, unchained/unleashed, etc) is often included in unofficial open-weight models and reduces or removes the refusal behaviors of the model (telling you it can’t help you with that because blah blah blah) which can be annoying when it’s simply misunderstanding the request or false-triggering or if you just don’t want the model’s training dictating its own morality to you. Done poorly it can make the model stupid and broken, especially on brand-new models or that haven’t been heavily experimented with yet, but most of the time the community gets the models uncensored pretty smoothly after some time.
• Some models are trained to try to use external tools when they’re told they’re available but it’s usually not their default mode and they typically won’t even try unless you’re specifically using client software that specifically tells the models it is designed for and supports tool use (most often called “harnesses”) similar to claude code. Opencode is a popular claude-like one, personally I prefer ‘pi’ (pi-mono) which is very minimal. Many GUI applications also support some kind of tool use but I’m not super familiar with those personally.
• Some models are very highly specialized, and may require very specific configuration, prompts and inputs to work as intended, they may not all be a traditional “chatbot” that you can just write text and converse with, but most of them are, and the popular ones pretty much all are intended for general use like this.
• Parameter count sort of represents the model’s knowledge base and breadth of knowledge and kind of also how smart or stupid it is, this is usually measured in billions (for example 9B or 27B) and usually provides a good hint towards the approximate expected file size (A Q4 is usually less but in the same ballpark of GB
• MoE (mixture of experts) is usually noted by “A<???>B” notation (for example, 31B A4B tells you it’s a 31 billion parameter model with 4 billion of those parameters active during the processing) MoE models are still big, but MoE is a technique that makes the model run much faster than it’s file size would suggest by ranking out only the parameters that “seem” like they will be most relevant for what you’re asking about, which can help a lot when you’re trying to cram a larger model than you can reasonably run with parts of it in much slower CPU/system memory. It’s not a magic bullet, but it is a popular strategy that works pretty well. You still need to have the file loaded into some kind of memory, and if you’re using system memory/CPU inference at all it’s still not going to be as fast as a model fitting in pure GPU is, but MoE it can make it practical to run much larger models than you would otherwise be able to tolerate. On the other hand, because only, for example, 4B parameters are active (and they may not be all that great at deciding which 4B they should use) they can sometimes be stupid. Generally it’s a good thing though depending on your needs. The default models use all parameters all the time. This is the opposite of MoE and is called “dense”. There’s no right or wrong answer, try both and see what you like. They’re all flaky sometimes but in my experience a dense model is more consistent, whereas MoE can have some very good results and some very bad results depending on how the dice roll inside its brainbox.
• Context is important when you’re trying to have longer conversations or process a lot of local data at once. Context uses VRAM memory too. If your context is limited the model may have poor “memory” and become forgetful or have to keep compressing its context. You can set context to use Q4 quantization too which lets you fit more context into memory, but there’s always a limit, the model itself will have a maximum and the software you’re running it with will likely have its own limit. It’s not super important for short questions but becomes important for more advanced use, especially coding.

Hope that helps, have fun, be safe!

While I respect your cynicism and it’s fully justified, in fact they can do useful and interesting things for individuals too. They must be used cautiously, and with understanding of their limitations and a realistic appreciation for their capabilities. Large neural networks like this are in a fundamental sense statistical models. I have pointed out in the past that many of the large general-purpose “assistant” models that have been trained on what amounts to very close to the entire corpus of knowledge and information contained in libraries and on the internet. Regardless of why they were trained, and whether that was done ethically (it wasn’t) the fact is these models now exist, and we have access to many of them, and they contain statistical models of what I will refer to as the vast majority of human knowledge to-date.

If you can’t imagine that there are ways that statistical information could be valuable, you are either incredibly lacking in creativity or simply being ignorant and myopic as far as I’m concerned.

As an analogy, national and sociological demographics and census data is abbreviated and summarized statistics much like neural networks. It cannot in many cases correctly and confidently predict any particular outcome. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful or meaningful. It is not a complete and accurate listing of every human’s thoughts, feelings, and preferences, and most honest people would not imagine it is. If you ask it for that, you are doing it wrong, or you are selling something. Same with generative AI models. The fact that some people (including huge companies) misuse it does not mean that such statistics are evil and we should throw it away.

Using it for intelligent, thoughtful purposes is a form of rebellion and I believe it is important that we continue to have access to these technologies. They are not intelligent, and they are not even artificial. They are loosely curated distillations of human knowledge. That is very powerful, it is a very fascinating and practically useful tool. It is not magic, it is not a real boy, it does not have feelings or purpose, it is a tool. It is being used for purposes, but you have the power to use it for purposes too, and those should be your own purposes, not what purposes companies dictate to you. Engage your brain and learn how and when to use it, don’t use it to replace your brain, it’s not what it’s being sold as, but it is a very clever and interesting technology.

Well, it’s like I told my old friend Einstein, everything’s relative!

Technically nuclear came from a different star. The sun won’t create those kinds of heavier elements until it burns through its hydrogen and helium fuel to start fusing its way up to lead, and I don’t think it’s massive enough to actually reach the kind of supernova collapse required to smash lesser elements together into heavier elements than that in any significant amount. So technically, fission is the only the form of energy that isn’t based on solar. It’s just the still-cooling-embers leftover from someone else’s dying star, a whole bunch of billions of years ago. I guess you could say the sun’s gravity at least attracted it all into this general vicinity though, at least until the Earth’s own gravity started pulling its own weight.

The gap may be huge morally but it’s very narrow in practice. The problem is that general purpose includes any purpose, including murder. It’s rather different from airborne drones because it can be much stealthier and can simply move into position in advance, wait in silence and strike without warning and like drones it is effectively disposable so there would be very little form of effective defense against such tactics deployed at scale, but qualitative differences like that aren’t really the main point we should be concerned about. The point is, we cannot ignore the extreme, profound danger these technologies pose to the protection and continued functioning of human civilization simply because it is not designed for it. It may be too late to stop it completely, but that’s absolutely no excuse for leaving it unchecked and allowing it to run rampant.

Nuclear weapons technology never stopped developing, but as humans, we all agreed it was too dangerous to let proliferate freely, and we have kept it in check and so far managed to avoid annihilating ourselves with it. It may not be the greatest success story, but it is the best we’ve been able to do, and there’s no reason not to keep trying, if the alternative is annihilation, and I believe in both cases it is.

Are they actually radiation-hardened though? My understanding was that robots for radioactive work tend to be extremely simplistic because of that limitation, and you probably don’t want a radioactive particle flipping a bit that makes the dog decide now would be a great time to do a backflip into the spent fuel pool.

Does that mean we can start calling them “death merchants” again?

…aaaand now the workers have been Terminated. Problem solved.

If only it were that easy, if you do that, the managers will be grateful certainly, but they will also endlessly demand more proof and validation that the system is now completely safe from certain doom until they feel comfortable, which is never. In a lot of cases it’s simply easier to convince them that the system was never vulnerable to certain doom in the first place, because you were of course already 5 steps ahead of this even in the planning stages, and for some reason they have an easier time accepting that, as long as they still have every reason to believe you are a brilliant tech god who would never personally fall victim to such a common vulnerability. I suppose it’s really less about the reality of the situation and more about what kind of corporate image you are cultivating and maintaining for yourself.

I mean, that’s literally Accenture’s default business model (same as almost any consulting/professional services company), so it shouldn’t be surprising. My point is that it’s not an indictment of AI, and their AI usage isn’t actually going to go down; it’s just Accenture doing Accenture things. They’re not a charity, they’re not using AI for fun, they’re using it to make profit, and they make profit by charging their customers for every cent of AI they use on their behalf, usually with a hefty markup, in addition to everything and anything else they can justify charging against their customer’s accounts. It’s a very profitable business model, and I’m sure they love using AI for it and will continue using AI just as heavily if not even more in the future.