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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Particularly apt given that many of the biggest problems with social media are problems of capitalism. Social media platforms have found it most profitable to monetize conflict and division, the low self-esteem of teenagers, lies and misinformation, envy over the curated simulacrum of a life presented by a parasocial figure.

    These things drive engagement. Engagement drives clicks. Clicks drive ad revenue. Revenue pleases shareholders. And all that feeds back into a system that trades negativity in the real world for positivity on a balance sheet.





  • Possibly, yes. There are models that will run on consumer-grade GPUs that you might already have or might have purchased anyway, where you might say there’s no incremental cost. But the issue is that the performance will be limited. The models are forgetful and prone to getting stuck in loops of repeated phrases.

    So if instead you custom-build a workstation with two 5090s or a Pro 6000 or something that pushes you up to the 100 GB VRAM tier, then absolutely, just as you said, you’ll be spending thousands of dollars that probably won’t pay back relative to renting cloud GPU time.


  • Yes, Ollama or a range of other backends (Ooba, Kobold, etc.) can run LLMs locally. Huggingface has a huge number of models suited to different tasks like coding, storywriting, general purpose, and so on. If you run both the backend and frontend locally, then no one monetizes your data.

    The part I’d argue that the previous poster is glazing over a little bit is performance. Unless you have an enterprise-grade GPU cluster sitting in your basement, you’re going to make compromises on speed and/or quality relative to the giant models that run on commercial services.


  • Yes, that’s it. A lot of AV systems are dependent on high resolution 3d maps of an area so they can precisely locate themselves in space. So they may perform relatively well in that defined space but would not be able to do so outside it.

    Level 5 is functionally a human driver. You as a human could be driving off road, in an environment you’ve never been in before. Maybe it’s raining and muddy. Maybe there are unknown hazards within this novel geography, flooding, fallen trees, etc.

    A Level 5 AV system would be able to perform equivalently to a human in those conditions. Again, it’s science fiction at this point, but essentially the end goal of vehicle automation is a system that can respond to novel and unpredictable circumstances in the same way (or better than) a human driver would in that scenario. It’s really not defined much better than that end goal - because it’s not possible with current technology, it doesn’t correspond to a specific set of sensors or software system. It’s a performance-based, long-term goal.

    This is why it’s so irresponsible for Tesla to continue to market their system as “Full self driving.” It is nowhere near as adaptable or capable as a human driver. They pretend or insinuate that they have a system equivalent to SAE Level 5 when the entire industry is a decade minimum away from such a system.


  • Well, the Obama administration had published initial guidance on testing and safety for automated vehicles in September 2016, which was pre-regulatory but a prelude to potential regulation. Trump trashed it as one of the first things he did taking office for his first term. I was working in the AV industry at the time.

    That turned everything into the wild west for a couple of years, up until an automated Uber killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. After that, most AV companies scaled public testing way back, and deployed extremely conservative versions of their software. If you look at news articles from that time, there’s a lot of criticism of how, e.g., Waymos would just grind to a halt in the middle of intersections, as companies would rather take flak for blocking traffic than running over people.

    But not Tesla. While other companies dialed back their ambitions, Tesla was ripping Lidar sensors off its vehicles and sending them back out on public roads in droves. They also continued to market the technology - first as “Autopilot” and later as “Full Self Driving” - in ways that vastly overstated its capabilities. To be clear, Full Self Driving, or Level 5 Automation in the SAE framework, is science fiction at this point, the idea of a computer system functionally indistinguishable from a capable human driver. Other AV companies are still striving for Level 4 automation, which may include geographic restrictions or limitations to functioning on certain types of road infrastructure.

    Part of the blame probably also lies with Biden, whose DOT had the opportunity to address this and didn’t during his term. But it was Trump who initially trashed the safety framework, and Telsa that concealed and mismarketed the limitations of its technology.