I’ve tried Zerotier before and it doesn’t hold a candle to Tailscale.

Tailscale

It’s WireGuard based and it’s completely free for 100 devices.

It is very good for boilerplate code

Personally I find all LLMs in general not that great at writing larger blocks of code. It’s fine for smaller stuff, but the more you expect out of it the more it’ll get wrong.

I find they work best with existing stuff that you provide. Like “make this block of code more efficient” or “rewrite this function to do X”.

Bad take. Is the first version of your code the one that you deliver or push upstream?

LLMs can give great starting points, I use multiple LLMs each for various reasons. Usually to clean up something I wrote (too lazy or too busy/stressed to do manually), find a problem with the logic, or maybe even brainstorm ideas.

I rarely ever use it to generate blocks of code like asking it to generate “a method that takes X inputs and does Y operations, and returns Z value”. I find that those kinds of results are often vastly wrong or just done in a way that doesn’t fit with other things I’m doing.

they literally have no mechanism to do any of those things.

What mechanism does it have for pattern recognition?

that is literally how it works on a coding level.

Neural networks aren’t “coded”.

It’s called an LLM for a reason.

That doesn’t mean what you think it does. Another word for language is communication. So you could just as easily call it a Large Communication Model.

Neural networks have hundreds of thousands (at the minimum) of interconnected layers neurons. Llama-2 has 76 billion parameters. The newly released Grok has over 300 billion. And though we don’t have official numbers, ChatGPT 4 is said to be close to a trillion.

The interesting thing is that when you have neural networks of such a size and you feed large amounts of data into it, emergent properties start to show up. More than just “predicting the next word”, it starts to develop a relational understanding of certain words that you wouldn’t expect. It’s been shown that LLMs understand things like Miami and Houston are closer together than New York and Paris.

Those kinds of things aren’t programmed, they are emergent from the dataset.

As for things like creativity, they are absolutely creative. I have asked seemingly impossible questions (like a Harlequin story about the Terminator and Rambo) and the stuff it came up with was actually astounding.

They regularly use tools. Lang Chain is a thing. There’s a new LLM called Devin that can program, look up docs online, and use a command line terminal. That’s using a tool.

That also ties in with problem solving. Problem solving is actually one of the benchmarks that researchers use to evaluate LLMs. So they do problem solving.

To problem solve requires the ability to do analysis. So that check mark is ticked off too.

Just about anything that’s a neutral network can be called an AI, because the total is usually greater than the sum of its parts.

Edit: I wrote interconnected layers when I meant neurons

LLMs as AI is just a marketing term. there’s nothing “intelligent” about “AI”

Yes there is. You just mean it doesn’t have “high” intelligence. Or maybe you mean to say that there’s nothing sentient or sapient about LLMs.

Some aspects of intelligence are:

• Planning
• Creativity
• Use of tools
• Problem solving
• Pattern recognition
• Analysts

LLMs definitely hit basically all of these points.

Most people have been told that LLMs “simply” provide a result by predicting the next word that’s most likely to come next, but this is a completely reductionist explaining and isn’t the whole picture.

Edit: yes I did leave out things like “understanding”, "abstract thinking ", and “innovation”.

Now what about time travel?

Technically, Marty McFly should have appeared in space far from anything instead of old man Peabody’s Pine farm.

I can see that you don’t care about regulating the industry.

Right, because me saying that Facebook and other social media selling our data even just for advertising is not ok and we should introduce laws for strong data and privacy protection equates to me “not caring about regulating the industry”.

Sure there, bud.

You just want to punish China.

Nonsense.

But it’s a law that targets a single person or organization. And the Constitution outright bans it.

Ok, I get this, but it gets murky when the “organisation” being targeted is a corporate office of a government party.

I’m not claiming to have the answer, but as a non-American I can’t get upset at such a bill. Simply because it would push back against a country that lately had been getting away with everything and causing severe and deliberate harm in other countries, including mine and yours.

Facebook being sued for giving data to Chinese companies with tighter relationships to the CCP than Bytedance is literally headline news right now.

I looked it up, and you’re right that there’s an issue there. But that’s an issue with an American owned company giving data to an adversarial country (two actually, China and Russia). It’s 100% absurd and shouldn’t be allowed with heavy penalties. But that’s still a different issue than the one we’re talking about.

The fact is you’re bending over backwards to defend an unconstitutional law with unprecedented powers

Two things: I’m not American, and it’s not unconstitutional anyways. There’s nothing in the bill that says no one is allowed to use it. And the first and preferred option of the bill is to sell ownership of TikTok to an American firm, essentially to divorce control and influence of China from the largely American userbase. If, and only if, the transfer of ownership is not possible then the app is to be delisted from all app stores.

That means that it’s still possible for existing users to use the app and it’s still possible to install the app through official means without either thing being illegal.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/proposed-us-tiktok-ban-not-fair-chinas-foreign-ministry-says-2024-03-14/

Another interesting thing is that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said it will protect its rights and national security interests (paraphrased). What on earth does TikTok, an app that’s Chinese owned and banned in the very country that owns it, have to do with Chinese National security?

That a very telling thing to say.

Make it illegal on pain of ban to give, or sell American data to a sensitive country; or otherwise cause American data in your company’s control to come into their possession.

I can agree with this, but the TikTok bill has nothing to do with xenophobia. If China wasn’t an adversarial country actively bullying and threatening other countries with war and annihilation then it wouldn’t be an issue.

In fact, let’s go a step further and implement sweeping data protection laws so that our data can’t be sold for any reason.

The question of what’s the difference isn’t some cute gotcha thing.

No, it’s not a “cute gotcha thing”. It’s pointing out the difference between passive data collection and active control to influence content.

And you need to look up targeted advertising.

I know very well what it is. I work in the tech sector (IT/programming) adjacent to cyber security.

It’s literally creating a custom algorithm on everything from Reddit to Facebook to Google Search. Which is why it was used by the Russians to impact our 2016 elections via Facebook.

Right, so if you think targeted advertising is bad when company A sells data to company B, who then builds algorithms to target people for political party C, imagine how bad it is when that entire process is vertically integrated and directly controlled by a foreign adversary. And to add to that, we’re not even just dealing with ads anymore, we’re dealing with grassroots-like influencer content with talking points from the CCP.

You gave me an example of one really bad thing and said it’s the same thing as a different and extremely bad thing.

Both of them are bad need to be addressed. But with TikTok being run by a CCP-influenced company in a country that laughs at American laws, there’s little recourse to deal with it.

If that needs to be spelled out to you, then that explains your position.

You’re either not too smart to understand, or you’re a tankie of some kind.

You also completely dodged the part where you need to backup your claims about Facebook selling data to China.

But this doesn’t accomplish that goal

That’s partially true. But there’s a difference between having access to a dataset vs having direct control over an app, which includes the algorithms and content being shown.

In any case, if it goes through to a full ban, you can still use the app. It just cannot be distributed on any app stores. It would still be possible to sideload it (on Android).

And that will discourage a lot of people from using it, which would be the point.

I also would like to see any reports or studies showing China buying data from other social media platforms.

They’re getting fucking shot at when they go to school.

American Defaultism

You or your family can pay an exorbitant sum of money to have you “redeemed”

Why exorbitant? The Catholic Church did indulgences centuries ago.

The only thing that matters in stopping American Consumer Data from being collected by the CCP is stopping American Consumer Data from being collected by the CCP.

And how is this accomplished when the CCP has direct control and direct access to the company that develops the app collecting the data?

And you’re worried only about Tiktok.

Well that’s a massive assumption. Please show me where I said “I’m only worried about TikTok”.

At least the ingredients are being honest. It’s a massive problem around the world. They even have insanely sophisticated testing machines that are even fooled sometimes.

Sean Bean humourously being killed off in LOTR

But… that’s literally the story. The events around his death are absolutely critical in setting up the events in the next book/movie.

It’s the same thing in Game of Thrones. It’s almost identical to the books.

I really don’t see your point with these examples.

While it may not be directly controlled by the CCP

It basically is. The concept of a “company” in China is different than in democratic countries. They’re effectively CCP corporate offices.

You sound like a Wumao

To a degree, yes. But nowhere near the same context or scale.

In democratic countries people have the ability to choose their opinions and voice them loudly. This allows many different groups to hold different viewpoints and then express them to other people. And yes social media has been used as propaganda platforms by those groups. Yet none of those groups have full unilateral control of a country under dictator-like rule.

The difference is that the CCP is a single party government. Xi Jinping has recently abolished term limits, effectively making himself a defacto dictator. The I-Soon leaks also demonstrate that the CCP is actively trying to disrupt society in other countries (not just the US). They have secret police stations in places like Canada, UK, and US where they monitor and track Chinese people and even intimidate them if they do or say anything the CCP doesn’t like.

Then there’s the constant attacks on military and fishing ships from countries like the Phillipines and Vietnam. The constant threats of annihilation of Taiwan. Etc etc.

You cannot equate the two.

You’re just spouting whataboutism. It’s not an argument, it’s a deflection tactic.

I have no love for Instagram or Facebook. IMO they should both be banned and have all data erased. The planet would be better off without them.

But that’s not the topic of conversation.

The US isn’t an adversarial country to itself. The CCP is an adversarial country to the US, and most of the world.

which has a more violent history

Ah yes, so the CCP is A-OK because you claim they have a “less violent history”. Makes perfect sense.

Tell me, how many people died during the Long March and the “Great” Leap Forward?

In any case, the bill is not about banning TikTok. The bill is about selling ownership of TikTok to a US owned firm to take away control from the CCP. And then only if a sale cannot be arranged, to ban it as a last resort.