V0ldek

joined 1 year ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

It's reacting to the presentation, not you specifically. I think many of the other comments hit on how he goes waaay too far in his criticism, but I wouldn't have written what I wrote if it wasn't a wider sentiment I encountered a few times already.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The attitude to theoretical computer science re quantum is really weird. Some people act as if "I can't run it now therefore it's garbage" which is just such a nonsense approach to any kind of theoretical work.

Turing wrote his seminal paper in 1936, over 10 years before we invented transistors. Most of CS theory was developed way before computers were proliferated. A lot of research into ML was done way before we had enough data and computational power to actually run e.g. neural networks.

Theoretical CS doesn't need to be recent, it doesn't need to run, and it's not shackled to the current engineering state of the art, and all of that is good and by design. Let the theoreticians write their fucking theorems. No one writing a theoretical paper makes any kinds of promises that the described algorithm will EVER be run on anything. Quantum complexity theory, for example was developed in the nineties, there was NO quantum computer then, no one was even envisioning a quantum computation happening in physical reality. Shor's algorithm was devised BEFORE THAT, before we even had the necessary tools to describe its complexity.

I find the line of argumentation "this is worthless because we don't know a quantum computer is engineeringly feasible"

  1. Insulting,
  2. Stupid,
  3. Lacking whimsy,
  4. Unscientific at its core.
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The reason is that any government mandated ID is clearly the Mark of the Beast and will be used to bring upon a thousand years of darkness.

You think that's fringe nonsense and you'd be right on the nonsense part, but that's literally what Ronny Reagan said while he was president

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago (5 children)

1970s probably?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 6 days ago

Self-reporting studies are, in fact, studies.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

In case of the revolutionary LLM technology we have quality in = garbage out also!

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

a thermodynamics startup

what

Like what do they do, find ways to increase entropy faster? Or are they bootstrapping thermodynamics from first principles to disrupt the field of physics with blockchain-powered quantum synergy

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

Correct answers are correct answers. The only thing LLMs typically are bad at, are things that are seldom discussed or have some ambiguity behind them.

Lol what, how many questions you ask in your life are entirely unambiguous and devoid of nuance? That sounds like a you issue.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

but i still think that it’s a little suspect on the grounds that we have no idea how many times they had to restart training due to the model borking, other experiments and hidden cost

Oh ye, I totally agree on this one. This entire genAI enterprise insults me on a fundamental level as a CS researcher, there's zero transparency or reproducibility, no one reviews these claims, it's a complete shitshow from terrible, terrible benchmarks, through shoddy methodology, up to untestable and bonkers claims.

I have zero good faith for the press, though, they're experts in painting any and all tech claims in the best light possible like their lives fucking depend on it. We wouldn't be where we are right now if anyone at any "reputable" newspaper like WSJ asked one (1) question to Sam Altman like 3 years ago.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Okay I mean, I hate to somehow come to the defense of a slop company? But WSJ saying nonsense is really not their fault, like even that particular quote clearly says "DeepSeek said training one" cost $5.6M. That's just a true statement. No one in their right mind includes the capital expenditure in that, the same way when you say "it took us 100h to train a model" that doesn't include building a data center in those 100h.

Beside whether they actually lied or not, it's still immensely funny to me that they could've just told a blatant lie nobody factchecked and it shook the market to the fucking core wiping off like billions in valuation. Very real market based on very real fundamentals run by very serious adults.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

It also takes literally 1.5s to search and find out what it was

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago

I didn't read it because I don't think there's much emphasis on it in school outside of the anglosphere, but the 2005 movie was a classic, must've watched it a dozen times. Now that I recall who the director was, though, I kinda understand why you don't talk much about it anymore...

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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