There is an experimental distributed open source search engine: https://dawnsearch.org/

It has a series of issues of its own, though.

Per-user weighting was out of the reach of hardware 20 years ago… and is still out of the reach of anything other than very large distributed systems. No single machine is currently capable of holding even the index for the ~200 million active websites, much less the ~800 billion webpages in the Wayback Machine. Multiple page attributes… yes, that would be great, but again things escalate quickly. The closest “hope”, would be some sort of LLM on the scale of hundreds of trillions of parameters… and even that might fall short.

Distributed indexes, with queries getting shared among peers, mean that privacy goes out the window. Homomorphic encryption could potentially help with that, but that requires even more hardware.

TL;DR: it’s being researched, but it’s hard.

The basic algorithm is quite straightforward, it’s the scale and edge cases that make it hard to compete.

“Ideally”, from a pure data perspective, everybody would have all the data and all the processing power to search through it on their own with whatever algorithm they prefer, like a massive P2P network of per-person datacenters.

Back to reality, that’s pretty much insanely impossible. So we get a few search engines, with huge entry costs, offering more value the larger they get… which leads to lock-in, trying to game their algorithms, filtering, monetization, and all the other issues.

The “straight” community would also benefit from “places for public sex”…

Just saying, less pearl-clutching would do everyone some good.

China has been building massive “coal to fuel” conversion plants for over a decade now. Their main goal has less to do with Russia, or caring about the climate, and more with reducing the extreme pollution levels they used to have in those mega-cities.

Same thing with electric vehicles. China has a massive population, with growing energy requirements. They’re building everything they can to catch up with expected per capita energy demands.

For reference, in 2022:

• United States: 78kWh
• Germany: 40kWh
• China: 31kWh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita

Reddit’s moderation bots have been extremely trigger happy for many years.

I got my main account, 10+ years club, suspended… appealed it, and got banned. Then every account I had ever logged into with the same IP, app, or browser as the banned one, at any moment in the past, got banned in cascade.

Once you get on Reddit’s bad side, there’s no going back. Suspensions add flags to Reddit’s internal “shadow profile” of every account ever linked in any way. They all become more likely to get flagged and suspended, which gets them flagged even more in turn, until Reddit’s ban-evasion system kicks in. Then, they’re all toast.

To add insult to injury… once triggered, the bots go back checking your history, applying the most recent moderation guidelines retroactively. Over the following months, the account kept getting notifications about old comments being removed, followed by subreddit bans.

There’s a good commentary about that in here:

AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers

“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”

“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”

https://www.itpro.com/software/development/aws-ceo-matt-garman-just-said-what-everyone-is-thinking-about-ai-replacing-software-developers

Here we go, more Mickey Mouse fueled BS. Instead of fixing the preposterous “until author’s death + 70 years” copyright term, the result is a world where tearing up books to train AI is legal, and a class lawsuit settlement with “7 million claimaints” who will get none of it.

Lawyer circus, is what this is.

US-based nodes

Tor has nodes all over the world: https://tormap.org/

Probably more helpful to say “Stop using VPNs to watch porn”… helpful for VPN providers’ sales, I mean.

Could be. Don’t worry anyway, we’ve been in Ministry of Truth territory since the moment news outlets started going online. I’ve checked on Archive.org, and the only snapshot is from after the update, so… yes, that’s the world we live in 🤷

It made me wince too. But right now, the article’s headline says:

‘It just breaks my heart.’ Death of man fleeing immigration raid at Home Depot sparks anger, grief

Was it different before (it says “Updated Aug. 15”), or is it heavily edited in this post?

Education is supposed to teach “how to learn to learn”.

Left to his own devices, then, without knowing quite what to ask or how to interpret the responses, the man in this case study “did his own research”

The whole thing with “do your own research”, is kind of funny:

• some use it to avoid explaining their points
• others use it to come up with a lot of nonsense
• while the proper way to begin any “research”, is to… ask an expert.

Nobody has ended up in a psych hold, just by reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles, asking ChatGPT… then consulting a doctor.

Not sure if I’m not explaining myself, or you’re choosing to not understand me. I’m going to leave it here.

Kind of like saying that ChatGPT is people adding an AI player to the deterministic program of a chat… nah, I’m not going to discuss that. Tic-tac-toe is a classical example problem for neural networks 101, kind of a “hello world”.

Good news: advances in medicine have reduced “physical” natural selection so much, that “intellectual” natural selection is overtaking it.

Now, if only all countries could say the same.

TACO Tuesday?..

(sorry, it’s hard to read this with a straight face)

Keywords: NPU, unified RAM

Apple is doing it, AMD is doing it, phones are doing it.

GPUs with dedicated VRAM are an inefficient way of doing inference. They’ve been great for research purposes, into what type of NPU may be the best one, but that’s been answered already for LLMs. Current step is, achieving mass production.

5 years sounds realistic, unless WW3.

If the current rate of execution of Project 2025 is an indicator… no, there are no “decades” left.

chain-of-thought models

There are no “CoT LLMs”, a CoT means externally iterating an LLM. The strength of CoT, resides in its ability to pull up external resources at each iteration, not in dogfooding the LLM its own outputs.

“Researchers” didn’t “find out” this now, it was known from day one.

As for who needs to hear it… well, apparently people unable to tell apart an LLM from an AI.

It still is: https://www.google.com/search?q=tic+tac+toe+ai

Plenty of examples out there.