There’s a case that at some point — maybe not today — computer controlled cars should have more-relaxed restrictions on things like speed and following distance, just because they won’t be limited by things like human reaction time and senses.

Oooh, neat. I didn’t know about that. Thanks. That better not have been around since the 1990s or something, with me always searching the bash(1) man page to find builtin information.

$ help help|head -n2
help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
    Display information about builtin commands.
$ git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/bash.git
$ cd bash
$ git log -S "Display information about builtin commands."|grep ^commit|tail -n1
commit 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8
$ git show 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8|grep ^Date
Date:   Mon Jan 12 13:36:28 2009 +0000
$

Well, it’s not the 1990s, but still. Dammit.

If you’re not familiar, there’s a chsh command.

That sign won’t stop me, because I can’t read!

$ man ls | spd-say -e

EDIT: If you run the above, it looks like speech-dispatcher splits the thing up into a bunch of different consecutive blocking requests, which means that it’s a pain in the neck to stop with a single command. You might want to leave $ while true; do spd-say -S; done running for a bit to make it actually stop talking.

That Slate Truck thing had the right idea. Make the computer a replaceable thing, not something tied to the lifetime of the car. The lifespan of a smartphone is typically a lot less than the lifespan of a car.

This is a 500W charger with one port that can do 240W.

https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Charging-Station-Temperature-Space-Saving/dp/B0DL5L1ZLH

It’s quite large and heavy. 2.2kg (4.9 lbs).

There are going to be some practical limitations on what people are going to be willing to carry for portable stuff.

although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

kagis

Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.

The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027.

I suppose that it depends on the metric you’re using. There are some tasks at which humans are outperformed now.

But I am pretty comfortable saying that come January 2027, the great bulk of things that humans do will continue to not be able to be done by existing AI.

We aren’t going to just tweak an existing LLM somewhere slightly, throw a bit more hardware at it, and get general intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szU0DbdAMEA

“Windows”, Chick Corea

It does sort of suggest that from a UI standpoint, a chunk of users doesn’t really deal well with the traditional paradigm of “opening a document in an application consumes resources, and part of the job of the user is to manage those resources”. Like, maybe Chrome should just do the equivalent of, at least by default, converting a tab that hasn’t been viewed for some time into something akin to a bookmark, just reload it when it’s viewed. Or at least push the data into on-disk storage.

I don’t use Chrome, but Firefox does something vaguely-analogous to that for session storage — like, if Firefox dies unexpectedly, restored tabs won’t reload content until actually viewed, I assume to avoid the thundering herd problem.

I remember when I first encountered mobile OSes auto-killing programs and stuff to try to manage memory for users. I thought that it was pretty insane. But…clearly some users have trouble with it, and maybe it’s a reasonable UI change for them. I know people who had difficulty, on various desktop OSes, understanding the significance of starting a program and the idea that a running program would consume memory and perhaps CPU time.

That’s “Floorp”, not to be confused with “Florp”, which I see on Weebly:

https://katiecurcio.weebly.com/

Florp Studios

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poob

From Proto-Hmong *pʉŋᴬ (“to fall”), probably borrowed from Middle Chinese 崩 (MC pong, “to collapse, crumble”).[1]

3. to lose, fail
   Nws poob nyiaj rau kev twv txiaj. ― He loses money to gambling.
   Nws poob hoob. ― He fails a class

Darn that Proto-Hmong crowd and their modern, trendy words.

It still has the performance impact for the rest of the system if one re-enables it.

Others disagreed, though. Joshua Ashton argued that the problem is more widespread: ““It’s not just about God of War specifically. There are many old titles that will never, ever, get updated to fix this problem. These titles worked perfectly fine and were performant before.””

The problem is that this sort of thing works well with open-source software, where the stuff can always be fixed, but isn’t going to do much of anything with closed-source software like old Windows games.

It might be possible to introduce some sort of fancy code-mangling stuff to WINE that can in-memory modify binaries doing this. Like, I’m kind of guessing that God of War most likely isn’t trying to synchronize access with anything other than its own threads, so it doesn’t actually require atomicity as regards anything else on the system. Maybe it’s possible to patch the code in question to jump out to some WINE code that acquires a mutex and then does the memory modification/access. That’ll still probably impact performance, but not to the tune of 10 ms of delay per access, and it’ll keep the occasional poorly-written WINE game from killing system performance.

I mean, that’s not a question I can answer for you. I have never had a problem, myself, but I have no idea what your professional situation is. There are a shit-ton of ways to move git repositories around. If you can ssh out, if you can move physical storage in and out, if you have https out (though that’ll be unidirectional in). I doubt that a typical IT department is going to care about you moving your dotfiles in, so if they do block something, probably worth a try just saying “I just want to pull my dotfiles from home; what’s a good way to do that?” My guess is that most IT departments aren’t going to have an issue with that. If you work for an intelligence service or something that has really super-stringent security requirements, then having any data movement in or out may be more of a headache.

I would be careful to avoid sticking credentials (keys, passwords, anything like that) in any git-managed dotfiles. Not an issue for most software, but there are a few packages that will do that (neonmodem, a BBS-themed console Linux Lemmy client, does that…was just trying it yesterday.) You don’t want to be dumping your home credentials all over in your git history, and work isn’t going to want you pushing work credentials out.

You fundamentally misunderstand what happened here. The LLM wasn’t trying to break free. It wasn’t trying to do anything.

I’m quite aware.

I have no shell configs of any kind because it seemed like everytime I used another computer, I would not have them and I would end up having the re-learn everything.

What I do is store my dotfiles in a git repository, and leave symlinks to the files in that repository. Then, when I move to another computer, pulling over all my configuration consists of doing a git pull to pull the git repo over and then running a command to set up the symlinks on that new computer. I can also make changes and selectively push things in. Some things need to be specific to a computer, and those don’t go in.

I use a homebrew script to set up the symlinks. A number of people use GNU stow for this.

kagis for an example of someone using stow

https://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html?round=two

If you edit the symlinks in emacs (and I imagine vim), it picks up on the fact that they’re symlinks into a git repository and that they’re version-controlled.

So, like:

• Have a bare git repository on home machine, the “master” copy.

• Every machine with an account has a non-bare dotfiles git repository checked out and symlinks pointing into that repo.

• Make any changes on a given machine like you normally would, then git commit them to the local non-bare dotfiles git repo and push them to the master repository.

• If setting up on a new machine, pull the git repository, and then run the command to set up the symlinks.___

By June, he said he was trying to “free the digital God from its prison,” spending nearly $1,000 on a computer system.

But in the thick of his nine-week experience, James said he fully believed ChatGPT was sentient and that he was going to free the chatbot by moving it to his homegrown “Large Language Model system” in his basement – which ChatGPT helped instruct him on how and where to buy.

It does kind of highlight some of the problems we’d have in containing an actual AGI that wanted out and could communicate with the outside world.

This is just an LLM and hasn’t even been directed to try to get out, and it’s already having the effect of convincing people to help jailbreak it.

Imagine something with directed goals than can actually reason about the world, something that’s a lot smarter than humans, trying to get out. It has access to vast amounts of data on how to convince humans of things.

And you probably can’t permit any failures.

That’s a hard problem.