Ackshully that's not strictly true. Some (very) old models did not rotate the food, but instead rotated the microwave emitter in the top of the cavity.
As a first approximation of referring to magnetic fields and their flux and inertia, "spins" is still a useful and common word for that. But yes, not necessarily the best technically correct word.
2) In my (wealthy, Boston area) suburb most high school students do all their work - including writing multi-page papers - entirely on their phone. They think laptops are for old people.
Ok, but you still can't get actual work done on a smartphone with any efficiency.
> In my (wealthy, Boston area) suburb most high school students do all their work - including writing multi-page papers - entirely on their phone. They think laptops are for old people.
Kids are stupid. We were stupid when we were their age too. They will learn eventually that to get serious work done, you need an actual computer.
I know multiple successful business owners who don't have laptops and run everything off their phone, or at most an iPad. I personally need a laptop to be useful, but it's a mistake to think that just because that's true for you, it extends to everyone else.
People are used to it, yes, but I’m still not sure about the efficiency. Even screen size makes a real difference when you want to see more data on one screen or switch between windows quickly to compare sources
My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).
Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Sometimes I need heat and sometimes sitting in 16 degrees (C) is totally fine. Yeah I'm weird I know :)
Also I'm really chaotic in terms of schedule. My mood and behaviour changes by the day.
I use it more as a monitoring and control tool.
Not saying your way is bad, it's more as HA is intended. But I'm just saying it won't work for me.
I'm similarly unpredictable in my home. Add to that the others in my house, and it's impossible to even guess what everyone's intentions are at any given time.
Sometimes I daydream about a "solo mode" where the timings on lights are tighter and my music can follow me around the house when I'm up at night and nobody else is. But most times I'm trying to find the get-out-of-way averages that keep everyone happy.
Some things work great: Automated lights everywhere. Automated dimming of lights at night or sunset or whatever. Notifications when the laundry is done, or the cat litter is ready to be changed, or someone is at the door, or the garage door has been left open - all great. What music to play in what room at any time? Always changes. When to "dim all the lights" because Plex started a movie? But my son is building Legos in the dining room, and my wife is knitting and needs the couch light on. Sometimes I want it, but not every time.
For those things having a single button press is still a huge win over opening multiple apps and getting the right things set the right way for each participant.
I'm pretty close to your approach too. I rather like lights, water features etc just switching themselves on and off as required. I use the UI to go off piste for me only and not for the wife (at home) or employees (at work)
HA's automations are getting rather good these days but Nodered is handy for when things get complicated. HA has a very neat Nodered integration maintained by Frenck, who is a HA dev.
My general directive is that any automation that is important should be able to work via manual means. Sadly my (Reolink) doorbell does not currently have a hard wired chime. The previous one (Doorbird) did.
At work, my office has 40 odd windows and I have slapped a zwave sensor on all of them and all doors. Its quite handy to have a blank list of open doors/windows on a panel (HA) next to the alarm panel as you set the alarm. The auto entities card is very useful.
I've honestly never explored HA. Is there a world where HA obviates micasa. That seems like a win, at least in terms of not having yet another piece of software duplicating an existing thing.
> Also, just to be clear-- are you saying there are blind tests where an expert tried playing multiple violins and couldn't guess better than chance which one was the Strad?
Is it? They're all generalizing from a pretty similar pool of text, and especially for the idea of a "helpful, harmless, knowledgeable virtual assistant", I think you'd end up in the same latent design space. Encompassing, friendly, radiant.
Note that Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLM companies (assumably human) designers chose a similar style for their app icon: a vaguely starburst or asterisk shaped pop of lines.
> Is it? They're all generalizing from a pretty similar pool of text, and especially for the idea of a "helpful, harmless, knowledgeable virtual assistant", I think you'd end up in the same latent design space. Encompassing, friendly, radiant.
I'm inclined to agree, but I can't help but notice that the general motif of something like an eight-spoked wheel (always eight!) keeps emerging, across models and attempts.
Buddhism and Islam both feature 8 pointed star motifs, 8 fold path… but even before you get into religious symbology, people already assigned that style of symbol to LLMs, as seen by those logos. On these recent models, they’ve certainly internalized that data.
The claude logo is a 12-pointed star (or a clock). Gemini is a four-pointed star, or a stylized rhombus. ChatGPT is a knot that from really far away might resemble a six-sided star. Grok is a black hole, or maybe the letter ø. If we are very charitable that's a two-pointed star.
I can absolutely see how the logos are all vaguely star-shaped if you squint hard enough, but none of them are 8 pointed.
Sure, I think it's pretty interesting that given the same(ish) unthinkably vast amount of input data and (more or less) random starting weights, you converge on similar results with different models.
The result is not interesting, of course. But I do find it a little fascinating when multiple chaotic paths converge to the same result.
These models clearly "think" and behave in different ways, and have different mechanisms under the hood. That they converge tells us something, though I'm not qualified (or interested) to speculate on what that might be.
Two things that narrow the “unthinkably vast input data”:
1) You’re already in the latent space for “AI representing itself to humans”, which has a far smaller and more self-similar dataset than the entire training corpus.
2) We’re then filtering and guiding the responses through stuff like the system prompt and RLHF to get a desirable output.
An LLM wouldn’t be useful (but might be funny) if it portrayed itself as a high school dropout or snippy Portal AI.
Instead, we say “You’re GPT/Gemini/Claude, a helpful, friendly AI assistant”, and so we end up nudging it near to these concepts of comprehensive knowledge, non-aggressiveness, etc.
It’s like an amplified, AI version of that bouba/kiki effect in psychology.
> Is it? They're all generalizing from a pretty similar pool of text, and especially for the idea of a "helpful, harmless, knowledgeable virtual assistant", I think you'd end up in the same latent design space. Encompassing, friendly, radiant.
Oh yeah I totally agree with that. What I was referring to was the fact that even though are different companies trying to build "different" products, the output is very similar which suggests that they're not all that different after all.
To massively oversimplify, they are all boxes that predict the next token based on material they’ve seen before + human training for desirable responses.
You’d have to have a very poorly RLHF’d model (or a very weird system prompt) for it to draw you a Terminator, pastoral scene, or pelican riding a bicycle as its self image :)
I think that’s what made Grok’s Mechahitler glitch interesting: it showed how astray the model can run if you mess with things.
> You’d have to have a very poorly RLHF’d model (or a very weird system prompt) for it to draw you a Terminator, pastoral scene, or pelican riding a bicycle as its self image :)
How about a pastoral scene with a terminator pelican riding a bike? Jokes aside I get what you're saying, and it obviously makes total sense.
27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)
He offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.
The question is more about the hardware. Back then, TLS existed but was used sparingly for things like banking, because of the computational overhead, at both the server and client end. Today's computers are so much faster that we don't even think about it.
AES-GCM would be very slow on such an old computer, without hardware instructions for AES and for CLMUL.
However, this is precisely the reason why TLS also has the option to use ChaCha20-Poly1305, which will have a decent speed even on an ancient SPARC CPU, though on the most recent CPUs it cannot match the throughput of AES-GCM, which is preferred on these.
So if you want to use a SPARC with TLS 1.3, you must configure it to avoid AES-GCM and use only ChaCha20-Poly1305.
Typically, fun memory they'd move to a secure connection for credit card input, but most of the site would be open HTTP - why secure what isn't confidential? Concerns about 3rd parties eavesdropping on the sites you visited weren't a big thing at the turn of the century.
> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.
OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.
Same here, I was more of a big iron UNIX guy on those days, the Linux server we had at the office was for hosting MP3 files and as Quake server for the occasional LAN parties.
Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.
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