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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

11–20 of 121 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#11
post #5
post #4

This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let's keep in mind that 50% of the world's population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts). On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting & maintaining a Raspberry Pi or a Linux machine is difficult in remote communities - where finding reliable access to a network or electricity can be tricky. Still, you will se…

I know this will get absolutely smashed but is this such a bad thing anymore ? If you can’t connect to the internet you’re immediately protected from a lot of garbage information, attention hijacking, scams and hacking, child grooming, IP theft, you’re job is probably a lot more secure etc. I know there is access to information which is beneficial but at some stage I’m not convinced having internet access will necess…

This is an outrageous claim lol.

Re: Internet in a Box

#13

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…

In my experience LLM's hallucinate a lot.

Often giving "plausible but entirely wrong" output that is hard to discern from factual, real output.

Re: Internet in a Box

#14
You arrive at the village. You've been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.

Re: Internet in a Box

#15

You arrive at the village. You've been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.

[dead]

Re: Internet in a Box

#16
post #5
post #4

This is a fantastic project, and we need more of those. Let's keep in mind that 50% of the world's population did not connect to the internet in the last three months (last un UN starts). On my end, I worked on an Android version since getting & maintaining a Raspberry Pi or a Linux machine is difficult in remote communities - where finding reliable access to a network or electricity can be tricky. Still, you will se…

I know this will get absolutely smashed but is this such a bad thing anymore ? If you can’t connect to the internet you’re immediately protected from a lot of garbage information, attention hijacking, scams and hacking, child grooming, IP theft, you’re job is probably a lot more secure etc. I know there is access to information which is beneficial but at some stage I’m not convinced having internet access will necess…

The internet may be full of scams and IP theft, but it also allows people to fulfill their impulse to post, so who is to say that it’s bad?

Re: Internet in a Box

#17

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…

In my experience LLM's hallucinate a lot . Often giving "plausible but entirely wrong" output that is hard to discern from factual, real output.

Yes.

At the moment they are great for entertainment.

But for factual information, you are better off just grabbing a copy of Wikipedia.

Re: Internet in a Box

#18

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…

LLMs are not magic.

If wikipedia takes up 100GB of space and your model trained on it is only 5GB big, there is NO WAY it will hold all the original information.

Re: Internet in a Box

#19

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…

LLMs are not magic. If wikipedia takes up 100GB of space and your model trained on it is only 5GB big, there is NO WAY it will hold all the original information.

Furthermore, LLMs are good at condensing information, but terrible at knowing which information will actually be important or true. This is an obvious problem in a life or death medical situations.

Re: Internet in a Box

#20

Imagine an LLM that is trained on public data like the internet archive and it is made available on these boxes without the internet, now we can have almost the entirety of human knowledge accessible on a single box. I know that LLMs sometime hallucinate and practical limits of computation power availability etc. but imagine how quickly we can spread the knowledge. It is almost like the printing press during the rena…

LLMs are not magic. If wikipedia takes up 100GB of space and your model trained on it is only 5GB big, there is NO WAY it will hold all the original information.

I'm not sure this is true.

Lossless compression algorithms exist, and HTML compresses almost absurdly well. A 20x compression rate would be quite impressive, but I don't think it's impossible, since 10x compression is fairly common in this domain, and there are reasons to expect wikipedia to compress even better given the significant amount of markup on each page.

I've worked with cleaning up rendered wikipedia texts, and if you strip the mediawiki class names and cruft, the uncompressed HTML shrinks a lot, often from hundreds of kilobytes to tens of kilobytes. You can then probably compress that quite a lot as well since plain text compresses very well on its own.

Basically, mediawiki uses this much markup to say Assessment:

  
  
   
   6Assessment
  

  
  
 
So yeah. 20x isn't too far fetched.
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