It’s not that “AI” is incorrect, more that it’s way too broad. It’s like how “leftism” is used to group social democracies, totalitarian dictatorships, and anarchism together, even though they are vastly different ideologies. For an example that is not based on politics, it’s like how you need more information than just “fiction” and “non-fiction” to pick a book to read.

Good point on the cost of running a local model, but more efficient models exist that can run on memory capacities more typical for regular people (think 8-16GB of RAM). It doesn’t help that all the memory has been bought out for the data centres…

To separate the weeds from the worms, I would avoid the term “AI” since it has devolved into a buzzword that’s stuck on everything.

I think that if somebody has made a useful open-source project using LLMs, they shouldn’t be criticised solely for that reason. If the code produced is ass and isn’t reviewed, is hard to contribute to, and there is negligence, that would be a valid criticism. I also despise the use of the privacy nightmare of commercial LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.). If are to use LLMs, please use a local model. For you, your project, and your wallet’s sake. That’s my position on LLMs.

I trust that you are doing your due diligence in keeping your code relatively clean, and hope that your project will succeed! I personally do not use LLMs for my projects, they do not fit my usecase, probably not for most people actually. But I can see the value of having an LLM do menial tasks, as long as the code is properly reviewed and checked.

Generative models belong in the deepest circle in hell. They steal the work of creatives, are awful in the trifecta of morality, ethics, and legality, and are mainly used by scam artists (see: deepfakes) and misinformation campaigns. Nobody should use these, even if it’s a local model.

Also, a bit off-topic, but you might have heard of all the “AI has solved (big problem in science)” or “AI proved (big maths thing)” headlines, but note that these are NOT your LLMs, and certainly not any kind of generative model. They use predictive models (sometimes the papers mention “deep learning” too) that are trained on a specific set of data to do a specific task, and most of the actual science and maths is done by humans. These models certainly won’t replace scientists or mathematicians, like the Big Tech companies want you to believe, but they are a valuable tool when it comes to doing menial tasks repeatedly. That’s what computers are best at, after all!

I feel like we should better differentiate between LLMs (the ones that literally tell you to eat rocks), generative models (the ones that are stealing the work of creatives without permission), and the ones that are actually used for neat science stuff, where they are trained on a specific set of data and are doing a specific set of tasks repeatedly in a controlled environment, rather than training on the entire internet and then some and trying to do everything!

I think we should label them as large language models, generative models, and predictive models (maybe? Or maybe “targeted predictive models”?). It’s important to emphasise that all of these, even the useful ones, are not intelligent, they do not understand what they are doing. They are just models of data that do thing go in, thing go out.

Well those are actual languages spoken by hundreds of thousands of people (from what I can tell from the Wikipedia article), they certainly aren’t designed to be difficult to learn. Perhaps it’s hard to learn for people who speak English, German, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, etc., but the goal wasn’t to construct a language that is hard to understand.

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

The longer you look at the pineapple, the more your food tastes like pineapples. There comes a point when your food is too sweet, too acidic, but you can’t stop looking at the beautiful pineapple.

Alternatively, it makes everyone’s piss a deep yellow. Saturated and not healthy at all. Weeing is painful and feels like a pineapple getting squirted out of whatever hole you wee out of. Everybody avoids drinking water and only eat dried food, and they all die from dehydration within 3 days.

Yeah, maybe I exaggerated a bit on “borderline propaganda for the military” comment. I will amend my post.

I do think they are (mostly, GofG, Dr Strange, Thor Ragnarok, etc. you mentioned are exceptions) U.S. centric though, the superheroes are based in America and work with the U.S. government.

And yep, Transformers is very overtly “the greatest country in the world is the USA”

Hell yeah! We grew up with Cartoon Network though, so it’s not exactly fresh for us. Powerpuff Girls is definitely a good watch though, one of the better children’s TV series.

The Cold War by Kings & Generals on YouTube has lots of excellent videos / “minidocs” on the cold war era. They have many covering both West and East Germany, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall + reunification.

They’re still internet videos though, they give you brief summaries that encourage you to explore for further details, so I can also recommend reading and listening to the other suggestions!