He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.

You do what you think you need to do, and if you think this will help you, then it’s a brave step to take.

Just one thing to think about though: I don’t think the term “deserve” means anything whatsoever. I think it’s a concept that was made up to justify wealth inequality and nothing more. It is an entirely useless category that cannot be falsified and has never helped anybody except those who abuse it to keep others down. Life is what it is, and what we make of it. No amount of talk about what anyone “deserves” ever changes that.

I used to believe in “deserve”, and it did nothing but harm. If you have everything and believe you deserve it, you’re entitled. If you have nothing and believe you deserve it, you’re miserable. If you have everything and think you don’t deserve it, you’re a fraud. If you have nothing and think you don’t deserve it, you’re bitter. Since I realised “deserve” was bullshit, I haven’t missed it for a single day. I still put food on the table, nothing changed, I just stopped keeping score.

You do what you need to to get by, and don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t. It’s all anyone can ever do.

We need to go deeper.

Okay, this is a deep cut, literally, but that’s what a salt mine looks like.

The article mentions that some of the sources used to poison the models are far right, so that doesn’t support that narrative, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone on the right wanted to spin it that way anyway.

See that would require them to not be nazis and the problem with that is that they’re fucking nazis.

I’m gonna shit in yer mouth, duolingo!

“I hope you’re next”

Scratch a liberal.

Maybe not lazy, maybe a key person got long covid or something.

Make Some Noise did this as a bit very recently - one mafioso is too invested in the front business

Translating a code base between languages has always been a super easy, quick, fun experience for me. It’s like a simple exercise with clear right & wrong answers, a nice break from most coding tasks. Whenever I’ve done it I’ve felt like, “oh god, here goes the next week”, and then it’s done in a couple of hours max and nothing was stressful, and I feel great.

Sorry, machines can’t have that job. I do it better anyway.

And anytime I see anyone advocating this crap it’s always because it gets the job done “faster”, and like, the rule is: “fast; cheap; good; pick two”, and this doesn’t break that rule.

Yeah, they get it done super fast, and super shitty. I’m yet to see anyone explain how an LLM gets the job done better, not even the most rabid apologists.

LLMs have zero fidelity, and information without fidelity is just noise. It is not good at doing information work. In fact, I don’t see how you get information with fidelity without a person in the loop, like on a fundamental, philosophical level I don’t think it’s possible. Fidelity requires truth, which requires meaning, and I don’t think you get a machine that understands meaning without AGI.

Wait, open world, specific upgrades needed to access new areas and progress the story… I think Subnautica is a secret metroidvania. It’s just most of the upgrades are “you can go deeper now”.

Fundamentally they both come from anarchist ways of thinking. If there is no higher order or rule, and nobody has any veto power over anyone else, then the only thing left is to manage each relationship on an equal footing.

Poly for me is about the basic idea that nobody gets veto power over anybody else’s relationship, which means exclusivity simply doesn’t happen. It’s just like if you had a friend that said you weren’t allowed to have other friends. That would be weird, and there’s no real reason why romantic relationships should be any different.

I don’t know if they understand that their close association with Trump & Musk made the classification extremely easy, politically.

They are historically unpopular and they are dragging all their allies down with them.

I don’t think a comment stating that you don’t think a comment asking for a source is very interesting conversation is very interesting conversation, yet here we are.

This is my consistent strategy - labor above liberals, but anyone further left or independent goes above them both. Below liberals is reserved for the out-and-out bigots, like one nation and clive palmer.

Welcome!

Oh the chicago school you say, as in the people who were happy to slash and burn south american economies just to see what human rights abuses they could get away with in the pursuit of cheaper labour?

Why wouldn’t you hear them out on this labour issue?

Is there an alternative? I just started using it but the experience is incredibly grating, especially the way they gate your progress behind “lives” that stop you learning unless you can pay.