The potato plant is a nightshade, closely related to the tomato. All nightshades contain poisonous alkaloids, including small amounts in tomato fruits and green potato skins.

The potato is still a vegetable though… Vegetable is a culinary term and can apply to any part of a plant, including roots and tubers.

I think it helps to understand that when some people say “chemicals” in the context of highly processed foods, they mean “industrial additives”.

But nobody means selective breeding when they say GMO. That term emerged specifically to describe the products of genetic engineering. There a plenty of legitimate concerns.

I’ve previously argued that current gen “AI” built on transformers are just fancy predictive type, but as I’ve watched the models continue to grow in complexity it does seem like something emergent that could be described as a type of intelligence is happening.

These current transformer models don’t possess any concept of truth and, as far as I understand it, that is fundamental to their nature. That makes their application severely more limited than the hype train suggests, but that shouldn’t undermine quite how incredible they are at what they can do. A big enough statistical graph holds an unimaginably complex conceptual space.

They feel like a dream state intelligence - a freewheeling conceptual synthesis, where locally the concepts are consistent, while globally rules and logic are as flexible as they need to be to make everything make sense.

Some of the latest image and video transformers, in particular, are just mind blowing in a way that I think either deserves to be credited with a level of intelligence, or should make us question more deeply what we means by intelligence.

I find dreams to be a fascinating place. It often excites people to thing that animals also dream, and I find it as exciting that code running on silicon might be starting to share some of that nature of free association conceptual generation.

Are we near AGI? Maybe. I don’t think that a transformer model is about to spring into awareness, but maybe we’re only a few breakthroughs away from a technology which will pull all these pieces off specific domain AI together into a working general intelligence.

Squeezing a metal cylinder out my chute sounds a lot less pleasant than just pooping poop.

A long list of refurb and land work, but my main focus the past couple weeks has been getting a kitchen garden growing in my new place. It’s been a few years since I’ve had my hands in the soil and it feels great to be growing again. Just a few beds for salad and greens right now, with a few new fruit trees, canes and bushes. I’d love to get my hands on a rotovator/cultivator to get some bigger bits of land in cultivation, but there’s limited cash and a long list of expenses.

The warning is specifically for trans folk.

The government’s website issued guidance for transgender travelers, saying that U.S. ESTA and visa application forms require travelers to declare their sex, which should reflect their biological sex at birth. Travelers with an “X” marker on their passport or whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth are advised to contact the U.S. Embassy in Dublin for further information on specific entry requirements.

Ah yes, one of my favourite quotes by Orreleeise: “Overcomine challenges and oeeence ine teisge and rivively renence verover re rescience”

So unrealistic

I read a series of super interesting posts a few months back where someone was exploring the dimensional concept space in LLMs. The jump off point was the discovery of weird glitch tokens which would break GPTs, making them enter a tailspin of nonsense, but the author presented a really interesting deep dive into how concepts are clustered dimensionally, presenting some fascinating examples and, for me at least, explained in a very accessible manner. I don’t know if being able to identify those conceptual clusters of weights means we’re anywhere close to being able to manually tune them, but the series is well worth a read for the curious. There’s also a YouTube series which really dives into the nitty gritty of LLMs, much of which goes over my head, but helped me understand at least the outlines of how the magic happens.

(Excuse any confused terminology here, my knowledge level is interested amateur!)

Posts on glitch tokens and exploring how an LLM encodes concepts in multidimensional space. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldmagikarp-iii-glitch-token-archaeology

YouTube series is by 3Blue1Brown - https://m.youtube.com/@3blue1brown

This one is particularly relevant - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8

I’ve never heard of Macs running embedded systems - I think that would be a pretty crazy waste of money - but Mac OS Server was a thing for years. My college campus was all Mac in the G4 iMac days, running MacOS Server to administer the network. As far as I understand it was really solid and capable, but I guess it didn’t really fit Apples focus as their market moved from industry professionals to consumers, and they killed it.

Explanation: “serverless” hosting platforms like Vercel and Netlify offer generous free tiers, with extremely expensive overage charges for bandwidth and processor time. When a small project suddenly goes viral, bills of tens of thousands dollars per day rack up.

I’ve never not haven’t neither

Oh noooo, the coal existing because of evolutionary lag theory is one of my favourites. Continents colliding and creating wet topical basins is cool too, but it’s not such a good story to tell.

The meat industry is a huge driver of climate change. If you don’t want to stop eating meat, you can also choose to eat meat from local farmers. It will probably mean eating less of it, because sustainably farmed meat is necessarily expensive.

🛼 Yeah, RISC is good ⚗️🔥

Oh ouch. Haven’t experienced that.

This used to happen to me regularly with a Dell panel. It would turn anything white pink. I found creating a custom colour profile and playing around with it until the whites were white again solved it. Then occasionally it would decide to revert to the default colour profile for no reason.

Stupidly frustrating but I’m passing on the tip incase it helps.

Thank youuuuuu. Totally agree. It was a fun contemporary king fu movie with some great visual effects. Everyone I spoke to about it thought it was a groundbreaking masterpiece.

If it’s trained on the average Reddit reply: $420.69, nice.