That is the biggest hurdle, in my opinion. If we could even reply with, "sorry, I don't know about that", it would be such an improvement over what we have today. Sadly, from what I understand, the only way to say "sorry, I don't know about that" is to just say that to every single question?
There's no specific reason why LLMs couldn't be trained to say "Don't know" when they don't know. Indeed, some close examination shows separate calculation patterns when it's telling the truth, when it's making a mistake and when it's deliberately bullshitting, with the latter being painfully common.
The problem is we don't train them that way. They're trained on what data is on the internet, and people... people really aren't good at saying "I don't know".
Applying RLHF on top of that at least helps reduce the deliberate lies, but it isn't normal to give a thumbs-up to an "I don't know" response either.
> There's no specific reason why LLMs couldn't be trained to say "Don't know" when they don't know.
Yes there is, it's that we don't know how. We don't have anywhere close to the level of understanding to know when an LLM knows something and when it doesn't.
Training on material that includes "I don't know" will not work. That's not the solution.
If we knew how, we'd be doing it, since that's the #1 user complaint, and the company that fixed it would win.
Do you think it's really a training set problem? I don't think you learn to say that you don't understand by observing people say it, you learn to say it by being introspective about how much you have actually comprehended, understanding when your thinking is going in multiple conflicting directions and you don't know which is correct, etc.
Kids learn to express confusion and uncertainty in an environment where their parents are always very confident of everything.
Overall though, I agree that this is the biggest issue right now in the AI space; instead of being able to cut itself off, the system just rambles and hallucinates and makes stuff up out of whole cloth.
> Do you think it's really a training set problem? I don't think you learn to say that you don't understand by observing people say it, you learn to say it by being introspective about how much you have actually comprehended, understanding when your thinking is going in multiple conflicting directions and you don't know which is correct, etc.
I really do think it's a training set problem. It's been amply proven that the models often do know when they lie.
Sure, that's not how children learn to do this... is it? I think in some cases, and to some degree, it is. They also learn by valuing consistency and separately learning morals. LLMs also seem to learn morals to some degree, but to the degree they're even able to reason about consistency, it certainly doesn't feed back into their training.
---
So yeah, I think it's a training set issue, and the reason children don't need this is because they have capabilities the LLMs lack. This would be a workaround.
> The Free Software community has made it clear from day 1 that the GPL can only achieve its goals through enforcement of copyright
We should mention when we say this, although I think it is self-evident, that the preferable alternative is reducing the scope of copyright across the board -- be it with shorter time frames (I'd argue even twenty years total is too long!) or some other means.
To programmers and developers, remember the core of free software is NOT the commercial developer / programmer and it NEVER has been. The core is always the user and what they need. This is so important that it needs to be repeated every time someone talks about free software because free software is NOT about open source. Open source code is a necessary part of free software but it is NOT sufficient.
Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s
I agree that user centric developement should be the goal, but I hardly see it implemented. Free software programmers almost allways solved their own needs first, which is alright, because usually no one paid them to serve other peoples needs, but I seldom see this goal met.
I was referring to this and the main thing users need, is software they can use to solve their problems. If they have to study IT to do so, or hire programmers first, then this would be primarily a new (and big) problem to them, before they even can start working on their problem.
Free software isn't about solving your problems, it's about solving mine and enabling you, and others, to solve yours, and theirs. It's about if I've been generous enough to give, anyone who takes can't undermine my generosity by not also sharing. You having a problem that isn't solved by what I've made available, or is bigger/different than the problem I was solving, isn't my problem to solve or even know about. If you want to make your problem mine to solve, you can hire me. Everyone has problems, some of those problems are exactly the same, some of them overlap, and some are completely disjoint. If we have the same problem and my software is useful to solve that problem, you are welcome to use it, but you may find out that the problem I set out to solve for me does not exactly overlap with your problem.
Well, let's put it like this. I did study IT and even I struggle at times. Or quite often, if I want to do something new.
And I absolutey would have no idea, how to do anything serious, without the terminal. But a terminal is programming. So yeah, even a newb can learn to paste some commands quite quickly - but troubleshooting even trivial things, gets you into highly technical stuff very quickly. Do you consider man pages to be written beginnerfriendly?
You know, simple examples of common use cases right on top? Not my experience. I experienced it as a system written by and for hackers. And everything else an afterthought at best. I remember my first real life linux hardcore enthusiasts: "I have to free myself from the GUI"
So your issue is that someone who solved their problem didn't solve it in a way that you want or expect? Why does your opinion about their problem matter at all? Why does it matter to the person who makes their solution available that the common people won't?
Using the terminal is not "programming". Non-programmers can use the terminal for many non-programming tasks. Imagemagick and netpbm-progs require no knowledge of programming to use, although it may require knowledge manipulating files and some graphical theory. The only difference from GIMP or Photoshop is that the UI/UX has a different efficiency metric (mainly because interactive image manipulation is more efficient when you are interacting visually). But the operations are just as discoverable: reading and navigating help text/man pages in the former (the man pages for Imagemagick and netpbm-progs are relatively decent), and reading and navigating menus and dialog boxes in the latter.
"The only difference from GIMP or Photoshop is that the UI/UX has a different efficiency metric (mainly because interactive image manipulation is more efficient when you are interacting visually). But the operations are just as discoverable"
I know. Which is why the year of the linux desktop was such a success.
"Why does it matter to the person who makes their solution available that the common people won't?"
They have all the right not to care, but it still is not helping the goal of being useful for normal people.
Maybe, but your goal is irrelevant to the authors of the GPL.
> The question here is, how is it for GNU in general.
The goal for the FSF and their GPL is, and always was, freedom for the user of the software.
Ease-of-use was never an important consideration, much less a goal. This whole discussion from you in this thread is bizarre, TBH. You are projecting your goals onto the FSF's GPL, and judging it to be a failure based on your goals.
Your goals are irrelevant to them, just as their goals appear to be irrelevant to you.
You think troubleshooting on any other OS is less technical? Isn't my experience unless you count the OS refusing to give you information required to troubleshoot at all as user friendlyness.
Yes, I do think that. My father for example as a german electro engineer can use windows with ease and tries since years to establish Linux. It works enouhh for my mother for internet, as long as I come regulary to fix some update big. My father is a highly technical person, but no programmer. Also his english skills are very limited, so he does not really stand a chance in my opion with linux, despite him trying.
Maybe their target user isn't the one you're basing your opinion of what a user is?
Take vi(m). It's not intuitive to your suggested target user and has a learning curve shaped like a cliff. So it fails to provide for what you consider a "user". However it serves it's actual target users very well.
Arch doesn't position itself towards what you have presented as a user, Mint might however as they have very different target audiences. Not everything has to be designed to the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, a code editor is by definition for developers.
The question here was about the OS in general. And it is a pretty established fact, that linux is popular with developers, but not with mainstream normal people. Unless linux comes in the shape of android, where everything linux is hidden and locked down.
> Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s
Have you used modern Fedora? I have an old Thinkpad at home that I put Fedora on last year as our "sofa" laptop for web shopping etc. I took careful note of what I needed to do to set it up and that involved nothing on the command line to get to something good that my wife could happily use (not a techie, never used Linux).
Yea, the parent poster starts with a false premise. There are many Linux distros these days that laypeople can and do easily use: Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, just to name a few.
False premise, well, I installed many people linux over the years and I personally use Arch. But my experience is apparently wrong.
And just because you can use something for internet, does not mean it satisfies user need in general. It satisfies some users needs. Those who need a little - those who understand the system. But the mainstreamusers in the middle .. continue to stay away for a reason. But hopefully more will invest in the change, with the forced win 11 change.
Copyright duration is not really a factor in the FSF’s actual goal, which is for software to be distributed with user-modifiable source code. Copyleft licenses are a means of achieving this through the existing copyright system with its ludicrous durations. But making copyright terms much shorter would help, yes, because any released source code or even binary files could be used, reverse-engineered, and modified without permission.
Even if you reduce copyright to a year, it still requires waiting through that time before you can actually use the code. And even if you were free to use Windows’ source code a year after release, it still wouldn’t give you access to the source code itself. Meanwhile Microsoft would be free to use any GPL code a year after its release without worrying about any licensing requirements, since they have the source code freely available.
> NPM wants to have its cake and eat it too, which is the problem here. The solution is just to say that if you publish a package to NPM you give it the perpetual right to distribute it as-is, and then remove the ability for users to delete their packages at-will.
Yes, exactly!
Kind of unrelated, but I think it is important to remember
that the left-pad was also ENTIRELY npm team's fault.
You can't just take away a namespace from someone
just because some startup like kik comes knocking.
Toyota does not have a right to my domain dot tld slash toyota
The correct answer would have been npm to tell kik to pound sand.
> (1) We need 240V outlets for EV charging (costs cents at construction time, costs $3000 - $8000 later)
My understanding is that there needs to be some kind of upgrade on our grid so everyone can charge their cars. This would likely involve increasing its capacity to handle the additional load from widespread EV charging.
> (2) We need electric panels and wiring future proofed and can also seamless upgrade to solar, battery, complete electrification of home with heat pump water heater and heat pump instead of a separate gas furnace (fridge and AC use heat pump already), induction stove.
I remember seeing a social media post urging people to check their electrical panel and if it was a specific name, “Federal Pacific Electric” for instance, to call an electrician and plan to have it removed because they were known to cause fires. I absolutely agree though. The future is all electric and the sooner we can drop natural gas to homes, the better.
>(3) Home electrification should allow power intake from car, eventually everyone is going to have electric cars. This will serve as emergency power, no need to buy a separate gas generator.
Ideally, we would all live close enough to free-of-cost to the rider public transit but yes, we should allow power going back and forth between car and house. Maybe we can skip the battery in the house altogether, send all power from house solar panels to (in order of priority) the car if connected, the grid if car is not connected, the house locally if grid is not connected. This could be implemented practically with the right infrastructure and technology.
> (4) Indoor air needs a lot of work, in addition to heat pump for heating and cooling, we have to consider heat recovery, enthalpy recovery, humidity, UV and most importantly particulate matter. And mold prevention. Recent discussion on mold, lots of people reporting problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543229
I don’t have a link but I remember reading a few years ago about how in places with low pollution such as Colorado and where days are hot but nights are pleasant in the summer, perhaps one way to cut costs could be to over ventilate at night in the summer (after measuring temperature) forcing (filtered) cold air from outside into the house and forcing the existing warm air out. This would also require a good insulation system to maintain the temperature balance. Thoughts?
> (5) Homes can be built with solar shingles. Right now, we install a roof, then we install a structure to support panels and then panels. If we can just install solar shingles, it is just 1/3 of materials and far more importantly 1/3 of labor and a lot less than a third in time. We now have nailable solar shingles: https://www.gaf.energy/timberline-solar/
I am all for it if solar shingles are cheaper than solar panels on top of roofs. While the upfront cost of solar shingles might be higher, the long-term savings and aesthetic appeal could make them a worthwhile investment.
> (6) Electric utility (or the city) can lay electric and fiber at the same time. Either the city or electric provider can provide internet or give equal access to providers. We don’t need any gas connections, homes can be completely electric.
Yes, absolutely agree. I used to love gas until I learned that gas leaks and gas connections going to homes leak A LOT. Now, I am all for all electric. And yes, we need fiber everywhere please. High-speed internet access for all is especially important in the context of remote work and online education.
Does this mean we don’t need step down transformers? Is it simply moving the step down transformers from the street into the house? The potential benefits of 48V POE could include increased efficiency and safety.
> My understanding is that there needs to be some kind of upgrade on our grid so everyone can charge their cars. This would likely involve increasing its capacity to handle the additional load from widespread EV charging.
It might help that most home EV charging will likely occur at night, when home power use tends to be at its lowest.
A home level 2 charger has a load comparable to an electric clothes dryer plus an electric water heater, and so is comparable to someone in an all electric household doing laundry. The average such household even does laundry for about as many hours a week as a typical EV in day to day use needs to charge.
That suggests that at least the parts of the grid nearer the end users, which would probably be most of the grid in most cities, should be fine as least as part of the grid's maximum capacity goes. If laundry during the day doesn't push them over, then home EV charging at night probably will not.
There may not be enough total power available per week to handle the EV load, but at least for that where upgrades would be needed would be at the power sources and maybe at some long distance distribution parts of the grid.
That's probably good news if true. I'd expect "we need to upgrade or build some long distance transmission lines" and/or "we need to upgrade or build some power plants" is probably going to be more feasible than "we need to update most of San Francisco's electrical system".
> perhaps one way to cut costs could be to over ventilate at night in the summer (after measuring temperature) forcing (filtered) cold air from outside into the house and forcing the existing warm air out.
Setups like this are fairly common, especially in commercial construction. There are “economizers,” various forms of “whole house fan,” and a few HRVs/ERVs with a built in bypass feature. Also windows. HRV bypasses are not especially high flow.
Sadly, most whole house fans are designed quite specifically for houses with vented attics. While most house do have vented attics, there is very little excuse these days to build a vented attic, especially in wildfire-prone areas.
I think the difference is I don’t have kids. I would like to think I want kids but there is no way I can afford having kids especially given I’m not sure if I can even afford to retire.
I don’t understand the way of thinking of people millennials and later who aren’t at least millionaires who choose to (not counting accidental pregnancies) have children.
You could choose to live somewhere where you don't have to be a millionaire to have children. Lots of people move out of San Francisco around the time they are starting a family, for example.
Incidentally, these areas might also be less likely to be hit by nuclear bombs.
I'm a millennial with kids. I've been predicting that the world ends in nuclear holocaust for the last 15-20 years or so, since I was a teenager. My wife and I had the "If the future is going to be as bad as you predict, why bring someone new into this world?" conversation before we chose to have kids.
The simple reason is that if we don't, we lose by default. Survival is the Great Game, the one that has been going on throughout history and will continue to go on for as long as life continues to exist. In the U.S. we've been lucky enough to not need to play the game for the last 3 generations or so, with survival basically assured, and so a lot of people have forgotten how to play. In its absence, we've made up a lot of other games, like "Will I get more karma on Hacker News?" or "Will I get promoted at work?" or "Will I get rich by picking the right cryptocurrency?" But it's worth remembering that these are games, on some level their results don't matter (certainly not if there's a nuclear holocaust), and we may be once again called on to play the Great Game again.
So I just try to be grateful that I don't have to play the survival game right now, while keeping perspective and remembering that that can change in an eyeblink, and trying to keep my wits and skills sharp enough that I could pick it up again if needed.
I'm a millennial and have also chosen to not have kids (vasectomy) for similar reasons - it's expensive, the world feels unstable, and mental illness is pretty bad for both me and wife. However I don't fault people who highly value having kids, and I think it's an extremely human trait to want them with a higher priority than anything else.
Unstable is the default state of the world. Throughout history there have only been a few brief periods of relative stability. Now we are living through a reversion to the mean.
If I didn't have kids I think I would still want to live. In this scenario worst case I could voluntarily check out. You don't need to be rich to have kids friend. Don't get me wrong they are definitely a cost of living increase but all they really need is attention and to feel loved. Everything else takes care of itself. Of course they need food and shelter but housing is affordable away from major urban areas.
This is not to underplay the difficulty raising kids on a below average wage job.
You might say that well I’m no worse off than before which is true but still feels weird that I was unable to use my existing riot im account when I wanted to sign into Mozilla’s riot server. I ended up creating a different login for Mozilla’s riot.
I think of myself as a technophile but element/matrix/riot made me eat the humble pie.
Is it possible you were trying to login without the full path? You're email isn't minot, it's minot@hckrnews.com. Similarly, on Matrix, your username isn't minot, but minot@matrix.org. Trying to sign in with your provider can be non-obvious, and would also cause the issue it sounds like you were having :)
> Saying them introduces legal liability onto the company in future lawsuits.
My first thought was ExxonMobil when I read this comment.
> In July 1977, a senior scientist of Exxon James Black reported to the company's executives that there was a general scientific agreement at that time that the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was influencing global climate change.
> According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "The funding of academic research activity has provided the corporation legitimacy, while it actively funds ideological and advocacy organizations to conduct a disinformation campaign."
Nothing has happened to Exxon Mobile. None of the executives are in prison as far as I know. You'd think the company would be bankrupt by now...
> "Most of the world" has a hard time understanding hierarchical structure like files and directories.
That is an excellent point that I think deserves expanding.
I submit that files and directories ARE difficult concepts. Pretty much everything is difficult when you look into it enough.
I remember of the time they pointed the Hubble Telescope into a seemingly empty patch in the sky and with long exposure or something, we saw tens of thousands of galaxies from billions of years ago.
Back to the subject at hand, I tried installing gentoo one time and it prompted me for something. I only vaguely remember the word "inode". Here is the first paragraph from the wikipedia from the article on inode:
The inode (index node) is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object's data.[1] File-system object attributes may include metadata (times of last change,[2] access, modification), as well as owner and permission data.[3] Directories are lists of names assigned to inodes. A directory contains an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children.
Files and directories may be an easy concept to understand if you have been exposed to them long enough (not sure how long is long enough) BECAUSE we have a good abstraction. I never had to learn what inodes are or how a filesystem works to use a computer. Can we accomplish something similar with version control?
I don’t remember exactly what I hated about school but I remember promising myself no matter how bad things will get in high school or beyond, nothing in life will ever compare to the insanity of middle school.
College was a lot less productive than high school in terms of academics for me but it was also a lot more fun.
Even high school wasn’t so bad. I’d realized toward the end of high school that I never had an original idea of myself and was at peace with being mediocre.
That is the biggest hurdle, in my opinion. If we could even reply with, "sorry, I don't know about that", it would be such an improvement over what we have today. Sadly, from what I understand, the only way to say "sorry, I don't know about that" is to just say that to every single question?