ace
1yr ago
Russia
China
Having friends like these compromises one's values. Marginally higher economic growth isn't worth abetting genocide. I'm quite happy to see them take their ball and go home.
ace
1yr ago
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
ChatGPT's words are not even close to equivalent to a human's words. You have peek under the hood a little bit to understand why. ChatGPT is a prediction engine that predicts the next word in a sequence (as would be typical in its training corpus), and then applies that capability over and over again. ChatGPT has zero capability to abstract and apply its reasoning to its own thought process. ChatGPT can't wait and think about a question for a while before it starts answering.
The LLMs will continue to get better as researchers throw more parameters at the problem, but this avenue is ultimately a dead end for pursing general intelligence. ChatGPT is a neat parlor trick, but it can only make impressive-looking tech demos so long as the context is kept very narrow. Play around with it a little, and the cracks start to show.
All this is not to detract from your main thesis. Artificial general intelligence is still coming for lots of jobs at some unknown point in the future, but don't confuse ChatGPT with the herald of the jobs-apocalypse.
ace
11mo ago
Then your post has zero entropy. The world would have been a better place had you not bothered.
ace
1yr ago
Agreed that unwanted sexual advances can be frightening and quite unpleasant. But this is not that. If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim. It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls. No doubt the girls in the story experienced suffering, but you and I don't see eye to eye on whether they should have any recourse beyond social shaming. They're victims in only the loosest literary sense of the word.
ace
1yr ago
... because of hostility to religion.
Maybe, but I think you need to show more work here for your conclusion? Eucharist involves taking off a mask and eating something that someone hands to you or places directly in your mouth. Even pre-COVID, I remember thinking this was not particularly sanitary. A secular gathering might not involve taking off a mask at all. The risk profiles are different. And while terrible, the pandemic gave people a stake in others' private sanitation habits. (Whether or not you think that stake thereby gives the general public the right to restrict behavior, the stake exists.)
ace
11mo ago
To many of his voters, Covid was Trumps fault
You say this as if it's not true. I thought it was common knowledge amongst the people who cared enough to look into it. In 2017, Trump lifted Obama's ban on gain of function research, and subsequently the NIH funded gain of function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
ace
1yr ago
No, I just think you're not very astute.
This was unnecessary to your otherwise very good points.
ace
3mo ago
Trump lifted Obama's ban on gain of function research which directly led to COVID. So he gets the blame.
ace
1yr ago
This kinds of concern-trolling to attempt to reduce voter participation among the Democratic voters is what Russia, specifically, has attempted in the past. I have no idea how successful it is.
ace
2yr ago
If momma is mentally ill, the game is over already. This is not the legal system's fault.
When two parents split, one parent must have ultimate authority over the kid. For well and good reasons, this is usually the mom. For there never to be an bad outcome like this, courts have to be able to divine who is sane with 100% accuracy, which is obviously impossible.
ace
2yr ago
No discussion about fishing would be complete without a fish's perspective of course,
Did you originate this turn of phrase? It's brilliant.
ace
2yr ago
It's telling that we'd have to tack on a calculator module to get ChatGPT to be able to do arithmetic reliably. There are probably a lot more less well-defined tasks, no more complicated than arithmetic, that ChatGPT can't do on its own, but the arithmetic is just the most glaring to see when it gets wrong.
My certainty is more of a gut feeling informed by Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and the connection between strange loops and cognition. You're of course right that if you can predict the next word in a sequence well enough, you can do any intellectual task, including human cognition. But "well enough" can be a stand-in for arbitrary amounts of computation, and the transformer models don't do the necessary work. In particular, they're not reasoning about their reasoning faculties, which I believe is a key component to any general intelligence. And more parameters isn't going to get us there. We're at least one more big theoretical breakthrough away from useful machines that reason.
ace
11mo ago
While hilarious, this is wildly inappropriate to say under most any circumstances imaginable. These are people going through the same struggles we all go through.
ace
1yr ago
Fair enough. But you're the one who brought up the Obama administration by specifically claiming it used "torture and executions" (plural) as methods of political repression. To me "political" implies intra-country, not extra-national, but maybe you meant a more expansive definition of that word?
You talk abstractly about vague notions of 'political repression', but I have no idea who, concretely, you're talking about.
ace
1yr ago
Oh thank you for being the lone voice of reason on this page and explaining so well.
I was shocked when I found out how many people in my workplace were religious. (Not interested in doxxing myself, but it’s a place strongly selected on analytical thinking ability, though now that I think about it maybe not enough.) And now I guess I can be shocked at the purchase religious ideas find here. I had thought atheism thoroughly won the religion-vs-atheism wars of the 2000s, but I guess I was watching different screen from everyone else.
ace
1yr ago
It might be an interesting question if the typical American isn't a trainwreck appearance-wise. Without objective data backing up the comparison, this comment is just "boo outgroup".
ace
2yr ago
Original humor. I don't need the same tired movie quotes I've been hearing for a decade.
ace
2yr ago
I own 1 suit I've worn twice in ten years (weddings). And I feel a sense of mistrust for people who spend more than a de minimus amount of time thinking about their clothing.
ace
9mo ago
Do you smoke? I couldn’t stand the attitudes towards smoking there, and I couldn’t wait to get out. The only place in the world that was worse was Montenegro. Beautiful country, though, once you get away from the people.
The reason for the choice of pronoun is obvious: That's the pronoun Sarah would want us to use. If you have a point to make, speak it plainly rather than asking stupid rhetorical questions.
Should you use the pronoun Sarah wants you to use or the pronoun for the gender you think Sarah is? If Sarah isn't in the conversation, does Sarah's preference even matter? Is there a "correct" language? Or is a word's correctness judged only on whether it facilitates a common understanding between speaker and listener? You obviously understood who all those "she"s and "her"s referred to, but would "he" and "his" have been a marginally easier read for you and other Motte readers?
I honestly don't know anymore.
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