Most if not all leading models use synthetic data extensively to do exactly this. However, the synthetic data needs to be well defined and essentially programmed by the data scientists. If you don’t define the data very carefully, ideally math or programs you can verify as correct automatically, it’s worse than useless. The scope is usually very narrow, no hitchhikers guide to the galaxy rewrite.

But in any case he’s probably just parroting whatever his engineers pitched him to look smart and in charge.

I had some similar and obscure corruption issues that wound up being a symptom of failing ram in a main server node. After that, only issues have been conflicts. So I’d suggest checking hardware health in addition to the ideas about backups vs sync.

Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They’re a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.

Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they’re a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you’d have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.

So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.

Was about to post a Hugging Face link til I finished reading. For what it’s worth, once you have Ollama installed it’s a single command to download, install, and immediately drop into a chat with a model, either from Ollama’s library or Hugging Face, or anyone else. On Arch the entire process to get it working with gpu acceleration was installing 2 packages then start ollama.

Orthokeratology lenses reshape your cornea overnight. Been using them for years, heartily recommend.

Key detail: they’re not dropping it because they’re giving up, the judge dismissed it without prejudice, which means that in 4 years they can pick the case back up. Under a Trump DoJ the case would likely have ended with prejudice, closing it permanently.

Stories like this are sometimes more complicated than they appear. The infamous examples of $500 hammers, for example, were anti sparking hammers for working around flammables or munitions, hence requiring special materials, certification, and low production runs.

For this case, we have liquid hand soap dispensed by a pump. Pumps require a sealed vessel. Unlike commercial planes, military planes are required to anticipate prolonged operation with an unpressurized cabin. At max altitude of a C17, atmospheric pressure is only 20% of sea level. Off the shelf dispensers are unlikely to be designed to withstand that pressure difference, let alone function normally. In a high demand environment like aerospace, even apparently minor failures like an exploding soap container needs to be taken seriously due to the possibility of unexpected cascading failures. Why not use bar soap, then? Unfortunately this too has complications, like not being able to be securely mounted, liquid soaps having superior hygiene and cross contamination characteristics, and necessity for military standardized soap, sometimes designed for heavy metal, eg lead, which is likely if the cargo were munitions.

This unusual set of requirements unlikely to be seen outside the military context, so whether designed by Boeing or off the shelf the unit would likely have low quantity manufacturing runs, significantly increasing per unit costs. Combine that with the necessary certifications and the per unit costs balloon even further.

While a soap dispenser having an 80x markup seems absurd, it might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance. To be clear, there absolutely is military contractor graft. I just don’t expect even a $10,000 soap dispenser would be a substantial proportion if it even within the C17.

I haven’t gone through all their work, but some of the delisted maintainers were working on driver support for Baikal, a Russia based electronics company. Their work includes semiconductors, ARM processors. Given the sanctions against Russia, especially for dual use stuff like domestic semiconductors, I would expect that Linus and other maintainers were told or concluded that by signing off and merging their code they’d be personally violating sanctions.

I recently removed in editor AI cause I noticed I was acquiring muscle memory for my brain, not thinking through the rest past the start of a snippet that would get an LLM to auto complete. I’m still using LLMs, particularly for languages and libraries I’m not familiar with, but using the artifacts editors in ChatGPT and Claude.

Given the ease of implantation of end to end encryption now, it’s a reasonable assumption that anything not e2ee is being data mined. E2ee has extensive security benefits, for example even if your data is dumped the info is still useless. So, there has to be a compelling reason to not use it.

People haven’t really changed. As always, power corrupts. When the rewards are great enough, it seems people are often enough willing to compromise their integrity.

KDE Connect and Syncthing do the trick for most stuff. For all else, all hail the USB C M.2 NVME enclosure.

For people lacking context, Boeing split off and sold their division that became Spriti Aerosystems. The theory at the time was that Boeing’s core competency wasn’t building airplanes, it was managing relationships with other vendors. In particular, the actual plane manufacturing part of the company was undesirable due to perceived poor “Return on Net Assets.” The theory they pitched to shareholders was they should sell off non obviously profitable divisions so they reduced asset liability while keeping the same or better profits.

That was their explanation, of course it was a terrible idea.

Title worried me for a moment that they were dropping Steam Input; happy to see they seem intent on the opposite.

Well this is a tremendous step in the wrong direction. The economic problem is the ad supported model in the first place, no matter how it’s run. This is the same thing Google does, they keep user data to themselves and sell the ad placement. So now Mozilla has the same economic incentives as Google. Unfathomably bad move.

If you read carefully this is actually very similar to the Steam news. I doubt Valve or GOG care, but generally the games are “sold” by the publisher as non transferable licenses for you to play them. So the part that matters isn’t up to them.

Have you tried recent models? They’re not perfect no, but they can usually get you most of the way there if not all the way. If you know how to structure the problem and prompt, granted.

Them using Google indexes anonymously isn’t intending to solve the problem you think it is. It’s more about incentive structures. Google’s “free” search optimizes for ad revenue now. The API access doesn’t as much, and Kagi certainly doesn’t have an ad incentive. So privacy is a nice bonus, but the real benefit is a customer serving incentive structure.

Wonder how we should interpret the country “XD” being on the list. As far as I can tell its never been used for any real country.

Codeberg is run off of donations, they have no service contract revenue. Nobody, much less a volunteer, wants to commit to a 5 or 10 year service plan like that, it’s not sustainable for a small project from a non profit.