I use copilot on a daily basis for programming. It has made me much more productive and it’s a real pleasure to use it. Nothing overhyped about it.

Curious to see what it will bring for other domains, e.g. for dealing with emails.

I do agree that there’s a lot of filtering happening. Not a huge deal for more applications. Luckily you can run your own models that are not filtered. I can definitely see a future where you run your own models locally. Afaik Apple recently did some stuff around that.

Netherlands too. Amsterdam is even planning to change major inner city roads to 30km/h (minor roads already are).

Correct, it’s not just regurgitating words, it’s predicting which token comes next. A token is sometimes a whole word, but for longer ones it’s part of a word (and some other rules that define how tokenization works).

How it knows which token comes next is why the current generation of LLMs is so impressive. It seems to have learned the rules the underpin our languages, to the point that it seems to even understand the content. It doesn’t just know the grammer rules (without anyone telling it, it just learned the patterns), it also knows which words belong to each other in which context.

It’s your prompt + some preset other context (e.g. that it is an OpenAI LLM) that creates that context. So being able to predict a token correctly is one part, the other is having a good context. This is why prompt engineering quickly became a thing. This is also why supporting bigger contexts is another thing (but a larger context requires way more processing power, so there’s a trade-off there).

It’s btw not just the trained model + context that gives you the output of ChatGPT. I’m pretty sure there are layers before and after, possibly using other ML models, that filter content or make it more fit for processing. This is why you can’t ask it how to make bombs, even though those recipes are in its training set and it very likely can create a recipe based on that.

Looks like it does: https://chat.openai.com/share/1b487711-c1be-468a-877b-98091449b55e

I asked it to translate ‘meeting agreements’ to Dutch and it came up with the word ‘bijeenkomstafspraken’, which is a valid but very uncommon Dutch word (I’m native Dutch and don’t think I’ve seen it before). If I throw it into google with quotes around it, the first page is results with ‘bijeenkomst afspraken’, where ‘afspraken’ is used as the past tense of ‘afspreken’ (to agree) instead of as its noun (agreements).

It btw also suggested ‘vergaderafspraken’ as a translation, which is a way more common word.

ChatGPT speaks other languages. It’s actually a really good translator.

I just asked it to describe an organization using UK English and it indeed used ‘organisation’ instead (didn’t check for other words).

Imo the fediverse should not try to compete with the big commercial networks on their terms. It will be much healthier when it grows slow and steady with people who want to be here because it is the fediverse. A place of freedom and lack of controlling evil players who will use your data to control your behavior (to get more ad revenue or worse, to make you act against your best interests, such as happened on facebook with Cambridge Analytica).

We’re not gonna win from big dollars and vested interests. Let’s not play their game. Let them play their game and let us be a safe haven for anyone who is done with being a pawn in that game.

The fediverse is already a really nice place to be. You don’t need 100s of millions of users to have the network effect that creates a successful platform. We’ve already reached that critical mass.

NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.

Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.

Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it’s enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.

Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).

Please just donate… No need to invite ads here.

Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.