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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2024

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  • You’d get even more savings using something like bees because it does block level deduplication.

    What bees does is build a hash table of every block on your ssd, and compares them. If it finds any matches, it will delete one and just place a pointer to the other where the deleted one was, the pointer being much smaller than the duplicate data block.

    Functionally, any installed games with shared assets get space savings. It’s particularly helpful on with Steam games because of all the proton prefixes. Lots of opportunities for finding duplicate data blocks.

    If you use snapshots, it can save even more.






  • There’s a difference between ‘language’ and ‘intelligence’ which is why so many people think that LLMs are intelligent despite not being so.

    The thing is, you can’t train an LLM on math textbooks and expect it to understand math, because it isn’t reading or comprehending anything. AI doesn’t know that 2+2=4 because it’s doing math in the background, it understands that when presented with the string 2+2=, statistically, the next character should be 4. It can construct a paragraph similar to a math textbook around that equation that can do a decent job of explaining the concept, but only through a statistical analysis of sentence structure and vocabulary choice.

    It’s why LLMs are so downright awful at legal work.

    If ‘AI’ was actually intelligent, you should be able to feed it a few series of textbooks and all the case law since the US was founded, and it should be able to talk about legal precedent. But LLMs constantly hallucinate when trying to cite cases, because the LLM doesn’t actually understand the information it’s trained on. It just builds a statistical database of what legal writing looks like, and tries to mimic it. Same for code.

    People think they’re ‘intelligent’ because they seem like they’re talking to us, and we’ve equated ‘ability to talk’ with ‘ability to understand’. And until now, that’s been a safe thing to assume.





  • You don’t have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.

    It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.

    The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?

    Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.

    If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I’m financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.

    Full stop.





  • Unfortunately, they’re aren’t many options in the 2025 internet browser market.

    Unless something has changed, the gecko engine Firefox uses is the only distinctly different engine from Chrome, and I don’t think writing a browser engine from scratch is easy. So if the solution is to hard pivot away from Firefox entirely, I don’t know how you don’t end up using some Chrome based browser.

    At least Mozilla hasn’t tried to kill adblockers like Google clearly is trying to.

    Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.





  • It’s got intern-level intelligence

    The problem is, it’s not “intelligence”. It’s an enormous statistical based autocorrect.

    AI doesn’t understand math, it just knows that the next character in a string starting “2+2=” is almost unanimously “4” in all the data it’s statistically analyzed. If you try to have it solve an equation that isn’t commonly repeated, it can’t solve it. Even when you try to train it on textbooks, it doesn’t ‘learn’ the math, it tries to analyze the word patterns in the text of the book and attempts to replicate it. That’s why it ‘hallucinates’, and also why it doesn’t matter how much data you feed it, it won’t be ‘intelligent’.

    It seems intelligent because we associate intelligence with language, and LLMs mimic language in an amazing way. But it’s not ‘thinking’ the way we associate with intelligence. It’s running complex math about what word should come next in a sentence based on the other sentences of that sort it’s seen before.