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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Unix is the single user version of Multics, an operating system for that could handle multiple users simultaneously. The multi user stuff didn’t actually work great, but the other tech it had was great, so they made a single user version. The name was made to sound like it was Multics without the “Multi”.

    Unix became a proprietary, paid operating system. Linus Torvalds took a Unix course at university and became interested in operating systems. He didn’t like that rules prevented him from actually modifying the Unix system even if he knew how. So he made his own free and open source version of the Unix operating system and named it after himself, because of his “big ego” as he puts it.

    Now this is where I have to interject for a moment because, actually, Linus only wrote the kernel of the operating system. He didn’t write any of the common programs and tools. For that he used GNU software, which are all free and open source themselves.








  • why don’t they program them

    AI models aren’t programmed traditionally. They’re generated by machine learning. Essentially the model is given test prompts and then given a rating on its answer. The model’s calculations will be adjusted so that its answer to the test prompt will be closer to the expected answer. You repeat this a few billion times with a few billion prompts and you will have generated a model that scores very high on all test prompts.

    Then someone asks it how many R’s are in strawberry and it gets the wrong answer. The only way to fix this is to add that as a test prompt and redo the machine learning process which takes an enormous amount of time and computational power each time it’s done, only for people to once again quickly find some kind of prompt it doesn’t answer well.

    There are already AI models that play chess incredibly well. Using machine learning to solve a complexe problem isn’t the issue. It’s trying to get one model to be good at absolutely everything.