Yeah, it’s not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it’s difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers’ and caching services’ IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org’s scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.

That said, I’m all for fighting ICE, even if it’s futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.

Ah, gotcha. I didn’t go too deep into the code, just did a cursory look. I think it’s still an interesting concept.

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. It seems like an interesting concept for certain use cases, and it looks like it’s just a tiny team.

This is why I am dreading when my 2017 dumb TV dies. It’s really telling that dumb TVs, which should be cheaper to produce and sell, are either not available or very expensive (as in commercial displays). Really proves the point that the consumer is really the product.

YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

This is a much better article. OP’s article just shows the author’s surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There’s way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It’s a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won’t completely subsume a human’s ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

I started using it to jump-start coding projects by writing the boilerplate that I could then fill in and focus on things that were more important. To put it in perspective, I was able to produce a prototype for a client in about two weeks rather than a month to a month and a half. I’d never use it to produce an entire project out of whole cloth, but I’ve found that it’s super useful for getting the big pieces done quickly so that I can focus on fine tuning and making a product better. I also started using it for a starting point in professional letters and other such mundane writing activities of work. So far, it’s been great for giving me a starting place that I can improve from while making my work faster.

So, I’m not surprised that those using LLMs have improved their productivity.

Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.