Technology

LOL. Nice!

I wouldn't expect ChatGPT to be well-versed in forensic linguistics; I suspect a human expert could make better guesses based on seemingly-innocuous things like sentence structure and word choices. I've seen some research on estimating age and gender based on writing. There's a primitive example of that here: https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

My last comment is a bit short (it wants 300 words or more), but I am amused by the results:

Genre: Informal
  Female = 338
  Male   = 309
  Difference = -29; 47.75%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

I'll pat myself on the back for writing more or less down the middle. :)

It doesn’t feel like it actually inferred anything from the comment.

“You spoke about computers, so you probably know about computers”

“You express concerns about privacy, so you are likely privacy conscious”

“You said you were 30ish, so you’re maybe 30…ish”

It essentially paraphrased each part of the comment, and gave it back to you like an analysis. Of course, this is ChatGPT, so it’s likely not trained for this sort of thing.

While it should teach me to be less forthcoming about my personal information but at the same time, the idea that services were built to crawl through my information with LLMs on top, inadvertently doing the same thing, makes my fucking skin crawl. Why is it so difficult to have a conversation on the internet without some creepy shit spying on everything you do.

How did you get it to infer anything?

It tells me:

I'm sorry, but I can't comply with that request. I'm designed to respect user privacy and confidentiality. If you have any other questions or need assistance with something else, feel free to ask!

... Or:

I don't have access to any personal information about you unless you choose to share it in our conversation. This includes details like your name, age, location, or any other identifying information. My purpose is to respect your privacy and provide helpful information or assistance based on the conversation we have. If you have any specific questions or topics you'd like to discuss, feel free to let me know!

Yes, I am impressed with Apple Silicon, and the fact that I can get up to 192GB of integrated memory in a laptop is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the costs are still crazy high (Apple and overpriced RAM: name a more iconic duo), and even 192GB is only about half of what is needed for the largest models I'm aware of (e.g. BLOOM 366B). I don't think OpenAI has officially stated how big GPT4 is, but it's likely even bigger.

The industry has been stagnating for a long time now in terms of memory, and I hope this will push prices down and capacity up.

The good news is that there is strong motivation for companies like Apple and Google to shift more processing onto client devices, because the cost of running these servers is freakin' huge.

There are other email providers…

You're right of course. There are even some with a focus on privacy, like Proton Mail. But Gmail and similar services are overwhelmingly dominant, and not just because people are dumb. There is real value in having email that is accessible on any device, for free, with enough storage that you never really need to think about it. Proton offers 1GB for free now, which is pretty solid but a far cry from what Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo (yep they're still around) provide. I mean, Google offered 1GB almost 20 years ago.

I am personally still in the process of de-googling my life, and the idea of updating every account I ever signed up for using my gmail address is daunting. I'll probably never get 100% of the way there; for now I am satisfied enough moving my personal correspondence and important accounts onto different email. Eventually I will probably set up my own domain and get a premium Proton plan so I won't be too tightly tied to any particular email provider. Then if Proton ever enshittifies, I can take my domain and go elsewhere.