It’s an illusion. People think that because the language model puts words into sequences like we do, there must be something there. But we know for a fact that it is just word associations. It is fundamentally just predicting the most likely next word and generating it.

If it helps, we have something akin to an LLM inside our brain, and it does the same limited task. Our brains have distinct centres that do all sorts of recognition and generative tasks, including images, sounds and languge. We’ve made neural networks that do these tasks too, but the difference is that we have a unifying structure that we call “consciousness” that is able to grasp context, and is able to loopback the different centres into one another to achieve all sorts of varied results.

So we get our internal LLM to sequence words, one word after another, then we loop back those words via the language recognition centre into the context engine, so it can check if the words match the message it intended to create, it checks them against its internal model of the world. If there’s a mismatch, it might ask for different words till it sees the message it wanted to see. This can all be done very fast, and we’re barely aware of it. Or, if it’s feeling lazy today, it might just blurt out the first sentence that sprang to mind and it won’t make sense, and we might call that a brain fart.

Back in the 80s “automatic writing” took off, which was essentially people tapping into this internal LLM and just letting the words flow out without editing. It was nonesense, but it had this uncanny resemblance to human language, and people thought they were contacting ghosts, because obviously there has to be something there, right? But it’s not, it’s just that it sounds like people.

These LLMs only produce text forwards, they have no ability to create a sentence, then examine that sentence and see if it matches some internal model of the world. They have no capacity for context. That’s why any question involving A inside B trips them up, because that is fundamentally a question about context. "How many Ws in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries” is a question about context, that’s why they screw it up.

I don’t think you solve that without creating a real intelligence, because a context engine would necessarily be able to expand its own context arbitrarily. I think allowing an LLM to read its own words back and do some sort of check for fidelity might be one way to bootstrap a context engine into existence, because that check would require it to begin to build an internal model of the world. I suspect the processing power and insights required for that are beyond us for now.

I’d be happy to help! There are 3 "w"s in the string “Howard likes strawberries”.

I don’t even know if that would be legal, but that doesn’t matter. The fee creates a little bit of disconnection so both parties can assume that questions of legality are the others’ responsibility.

This doesn’t make it legal either, it just makes it more likely to happen, and slightly harder to prosecute.

This is an extra twist on the concept that they’re not real.

This is great too, thanks!

There’s nothing wrong with saying clip in this context. The only reason to object is if you’re being annoying and pedantic and you’ve forgotten that there can be more than one term for the same thing.

Nobody is confused by saying “clip”, nobody thinks you’re charging a glock mag with a clip from the open ejection port. There’s like one gun in history that uses both clips and detachable magazines, so if we’re talking about that specific gun and the difference is operative to the point, then you can complain.

This is similar to people insisting on “firearm” over “gun”, or “suppressor” over “silencer”, or “round” over “bullet”. Some of them might be more technically rigorous terms but unless you’re discussing the finer points of gunsmithing or ballistics you usually don’t need to care.

Also, remember the golden rule of pedantry: if you understood well enough to correct them, you don’t have to correct them.

Yup, I agree with all of that. Also though from the perspective of the artist, I prefer to think of the act of creation as not coming fully from the artist, but moving through them.

Like people used to not say someone is a genius, but that they have a genius. It was basically the same thing as a genie - a helper.

Also the book Steal Like an Artist has a lot about how you should stop trying to be totally original and just accept that your work is and will always be a mish-mash of different influences. It even advises you to simply try to emulate your heroes, and in failing to do so accurately, you’ll find your own unique voice.

Another way to think of creativity is that it’s like a kind of temporary possession that you have to exorcise by creating the thing, I call this the “taking a shit” model of creativity.

This isn’t to demean artists or their work, I find it takes the pressure off of me presonally.

That’s actually a beautiful saying. I’m gonna hang onto that for a while and if it continues to ring true I’m gonna start using it.

You’d have to abandon all of your ethical principles, and then you’d face the problem of how to keep the wealth you generate rather than having it sucked up by all the existing billionaires who would chew you up, extract every penny they could then spit you out, which is extra difficult because now you’re in an intersection of minorities.

And even if you succeeded you’d be a billionaire, and I don’t think those people are actually very fulfilled.

The Well There’s Your Problem podcast has an excellent episode about traffic engineering where they go into diverging diamonds a bit.

I think this is also the episode where they lay out essentially the mission statement of the show, that engineering decisions reflect the politics of those who mandate them, and how the hard sciencey disciplines we think of as “objective” are anything but.

It’s a shame they haven’t put it on their main channel, which is here: https://youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

Oh yeah, there’s a lot of badass action hero types saving the world on a daily basis, it really restores my faith in humanity.

(though some might consider this an anti-feature)

To be fair, not everyone would say that, and the only reason you would call it an “anti-feature” is if you had an accurate understanding of the issues.

I’ve been watching some dashcam compilations lately, and one thing that I find very comforting is that regardless of who is legally at fault, almost every accident could’ve been easily avoided if anyone involved had just slowed the fuck down and chilled the fuck out, and since that’s how I drive it makes sense I don’t get anywhere near having accidents. The freak accident that you couldn’t have avoided is rare.

If someone is tailgaiting and making things unsafe, don’t brake check, just slow down gradually. If they won’t make you safe by backing off, make yourself safe by reducing your speed. Look to get out of their way, move over, pull over, whatever, and try to let them past. It’s real simple, you just need to let go of the idea that you have a right to the spot in front of them.

There’s even one road I used to use a lot that was high speed with no passing for several kms, and if I got tailgated, I’d slow down and pull over to the shoulder. Sometimes they got the message and backed up before I pulled over so I’d speed back up and we’d be on our way, but I always took a decent amount of pleasure in taking my time to pull over safely, which usually meant delaying them a lot.

It’s okay to accept it’s got a bunch of plot holes and enjoy it for what it is: grungy WWII fighter pilots/samurai/wizards/Vietnam war allegory in space.

Edit: also nukes

On lemmy I’ve been accused so many times of reverse-racism and reverse-sexism, where advocating for minorities brings out the trolls who want to muddy the waters and claim that noticing bigotry is the real bigotry actually, and they had big vote pile-ons to go with those comments.

This is largely from big instances with open sign-up. I assume lemmy attracts the right wing trolls who tend to get banned from other places, which is one downside of being a viable alternative that isn’t yet mainstream. Also I’m sure they target this place because it is generally left-leaning.

Because the decision of which politics is disallowed is a political discussion, and those people will bring their politics of bigotry to the table and argue that “no politics day” means minorities should be silenced.

Uh oh, you got politics in your no politics.

Thanks, I hope they don’t do it. I would expect the security community to be able to find something like this, since it’s not hard to hook up some devices and do packet sniffing to detect if they’re talking to each other.

This would be an excellent use case for LTT’s faraday cage room for instance.

I’d be interested to see more information on that. I don’t doubt companies would do that, but some good information on when it happens and how to prevent it would be useful.

See, I just don’t connect it to the network. It complained when I set it up but now it just works as a screen.

I’ve got a raspberry pi steaming my desktop to it with gamestream/sunshine/moonlight, and it’s now as smart as my computer. It can even stream from different computers no matter where they are in the house, watch anything with stremio, and play games from them too. It’s way better than using the youtube or netflix button on the TV, most of the services it offers I don’t use anyway.

But actually pihole does sound like a good idea and maybe I should get that set up one of these days.

I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.

They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.

At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I’d get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn’t grow successfully and remained near that site.

It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven’t had a pins & needles experience for a few years.

The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right… yeah I don’t see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.