queerlilhayseed

I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹

The first trillion is the hardest I guess.

Sure have. LLMs aren’t intrinsically bad, they’re just overhyped and used to scam people who don’t understand the technology. Not unlike blockchains. But they are quite useful for doing natural language querying of large bodies of text. I’ve been playing around with RAG trying to get a model tuned to a specific corpus (e.g. the complete works of William Shakespeare, or the US Code of Laws) to see if it can answer conceptual questions like “where are all the instances where a character dies offstage?” or “can you list all the times where someone is implicitly or explicitly called a cuckold?” And sure they get stuff wrong but it’s pretty cool that they work as well as they do.

It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.

No one ever got fired for buying IBM.