Do tell about the lasers…

I’m imagining IR would be best, 20 to 40 watts focused. You’ll still stand out to any CCTV nearby but that camera will have a wicked blind spot.

For most solid state diodes I think they max out at ~3 to 5 watts, still enough to damage with a good focus from 10 meters or so but they’re visible and you look like someone who forgot to put a regulator on their lightsaber…

And will it hopefully support some sort of tap and pay in the US?

Asking is fine, telling people preemptively to not use the services is dangerous and spreads fear about VPNs with the less technical crowds.

Huh… The Grand Old Pedophiles want to spy on you at the service provider.

The Dems want you to avoid using things that may protect you from that.

Fun.

Senators

• Ron Wyden (D-OR)
• Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
• Edward Markey (D-MA)
• Alex Padilla (D-CA)

Representatives

• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)
• Sara Jacobs (D-CA)

The lawmakers are seeking clarification on whether Americans using VPNs (especially those routing through overseas servers) are being classified as “foreigners” under U.S. surveillance law. This classification would effectively strip them of Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless government spying under Section 702 of FISA and Executive Order 12333.

It was bullshit prosecution, and should have been open sourced before trial.

How does novel information differ from hallucinating? It doesn’t really, it’s a Bob Ross happy accident aided by the large amounts of information making it mostly reasonable most of the time.

When it gets it right, like really right and you wonder if it’s really thinking, that’s the same amazing moment as when it repeats ‘echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;echo;’ forever.

You’re spot on for all of that. Context windows have a lot to do with the unhinged behavior right now… But it’s a fundamental trait of how LLMs work.

For example, you can tell it to refer to you by a specific name and once it stops you know the context window is overrun and it’ll go off the rails soon… The newer chat bots have mitigations in place but it still happens a lot.

These are non-deterministic predictive text generators.

Any semblance of novel thoughts is due to two things for modern LLMs:

• Model “temperature”: a setting that determines how much “randomness” there is… with a value of 0 it will generate exactly what it can find that exactly follows what you gave it the best it can. Note it often breaks when you try this.

• It has more information than you: I’ve had interesting interactions with work where it came up with actually good ideas. These are all accounted for by MCPs allowing it to search and piece things together or the post training refinements and catalog augmentation though.

An LLM will only know what it knows.

AGI will be able to come up with novel information or work though things it’s never been trained on.