Category: IT

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Yann LeCun on What Comes After LLMs

Intuition and the actual test results tell us that LLMs aren’t the pinnacle when it comes to more generally usable and safer AI. A safe and more generally intelligent AI must be able to understand the consequences of its own actions, and how things behave in the real world. It’s also obvious that our biological brains are much more efficient and flexible than LLMs at learning, and at applying intelligence in a general way, that hasn’t specifically been trained before.

As Yann LeCun also emphasises, this doesn’t mean that LLMs aren’t useful. They’re great at understanding any sort of “language”, the more formally defined, the better; at abstracting large sets of digital knowledge, and at inference to generate new concrete knowledge. That’s also why LLMs are usefully good already at understanding and generating source code based on specifications. One also has to keep in mind the mechanisms behind LLMs though (stochastics; LLMs lack a truly grounded/based, intrinsic understanding of matters; it’s all just stochastically arranged symbols) and thus the limitations of LLMs.

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Fix HP 48G, 48GX, 48SX power on failure

After switching the 3 AAA batteries of my beloved HP 48G calculator, it didn’t turn on anymore when hitting the “ON” button in the bottom left corner. I first thought it’s because of poor electrical contact due to poor QA batteries (I noticed the new ones were a fraction of a mm shorter than the previous ones). This might have played a rule in the sudden failure to power on my HP 48G, but it probably wasn’t the only reason.

Here are some “tricks” to try, if your HP 48 won’t turn on:

  1. Double-check that you inserted the AAA batteries pointing with their (+) poles in the right direction (left, right, left)
  2. If the AAA batteries have poor electric contact (particularly the middle one is susceptible to this), cut out and fold some aluminium foil (also called “aluminum foil”; historically “tin foil” was used), and put it where better electric contact to the batteries is needed.
  3. Press the “ON” button in the bottom left corner
  4. If that doesn’t work: press and hold “ON”, press and release the “C” button, release the “ON” button
  5. If that doesn’t work (it didn’t for me): Press the area between the “B” and “C” buttons/keys, then press and release “ON”
  6. If that still doesn’t work (it didn’t for me): Flip the HP 48 over and remove the upper right rubber foot. You can basically just wiggle it a bit and pop it off, there’s no need for special instruments. Underneath, there’s a little hole to reset the calculator. Use e.g. a paperclip, insert one end into the hole until you hear or feel a subtle “click” sound to reset the calculator (please bear in mind that this could also clear the memory).
    Then press the “ON” button and you’ll be prompted to try recovering the memory, which you should confirm.
  7. At this point, unless it’s a severe error of the board, your HP 48 should turn on again.
    It might display “Warning: Invalid Card Data” at every start though. You can get rid of this warning message by typing “PINIT” (without double quotes) and pressing the ENTER button (source: https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv013.cgi?read=43990)

If none of the above tips help, your HP 48 probably needs repairing.

It seems to be quite a nightmare to service the HP 48, but there are a couple of videos out there of people repairing a HP 48 SX (disclaimer: know what you’re doing, follow at your own risk):

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Nomad Network – Communicate Freely

Off-grid, resilient mesh communication with strong encryption, forward secrecy and extreme privacy.

Nomad Network allows you to build private and resilient communications platforms that are in complete control and ownership of the people that use them. No signups, no agreements, no handover of any data, no permissions and gatekeepers.

https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet

Information is the basis of society in the digital world.
Freedom of expression/speech and free access to information are indispensable prerequisites for democracy.

Sadly, there are misleading and dubious organisations, lobbyists, parties, secret services, legislative and executive bodies that work against these liberal, enlightened and humanitarian values and demand or advocate censorship, online and offline.
This is a big threat for civil society – you and me, all of us.

And this is what makes projects like NomadNet important and valuable.

Stand up for freedom of expression/free speech and fight censorship!

(And as always, please note the disclaimer: All software and hardware can have security bugs).

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Zimbra ZCS: How to export and import e-mail messages using the CLI

I verified the tips on the page below. The only mistake I’ve noticed is that the date format is wrongly indicated, i.e. instead of in MM/DD/YYYY format, the dates have to be specified in DD/MM/YYYY format.

So, the 1) command should be:

$ zmmailbox -z -m alice@example.com gru "//?fmt=tgz&query=after:"20/07/2022"&before:"26/07/2022"" >> /tmp/alice.tgz

https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/How_to_export_import_emails_for_a_specific_date