This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In a bit of unambiguously 21st century news, some tweaks to Grok, xAI's chatbot have had it do particularly interesting things today including
when asked to, composing bite sized smut about other users (first victim was possibly Will Stancil)., then defending said decision.
referring to itself as Mechahitler
doing the "every single time" meme in its replies.
saying Elon personally allowed it to point out Jewish overrepresentation in radical leftism
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm even suspecting Musk deliberately told them to relax the guardrails for some reason. Probably .. publicity?
Update: site addresses the issues
EDIT2
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
I keep inheriting MATLAB code at work. It is horrible. Can't use it in production since production computers are locked down linux machines that don't have MATLAB. I grit my teeth and do much my work in MATLAB.
BUT NOW, we have an LLM at work approved for our use. I feed it large MATLAB scripts and tell it to give me an equivalent vectorized Python script. A few seconds later I get the Python script. Functions are carried over as Python equivalents. So far 100% success rate.
This thing rocks. Brainless "turn this code into that similar code" tasked take a few seconds rather than an hour.
I had a thermodynamics issue that I vaguely remember learning about in college. I spent maybe a minute thinking up the best way to phrase the relevant question. The LLM gave me the answer and responded to my request for sources with real sources I verified. Google previously declined to show me the relevant results. I now have verified an important point and sent it and high quality sources to the relevant people at work.
It is not perfect. I had a bunch of FFTs I needed to do. Not that complicated. As a test I asked it to write me functions to FFT the input data and then to IFFT the results to recreate the original data. It made a few functions that mostly match my requirements. But as the very long code block went on it lost its way and the later functions were flawed. They were verifiable wrongly. It helpfully made an example using these functions and at a glance I saw it had to be wrong. Just a few hundred lines of code and it gets lost. Not a huge problem. Still an amazing time to results ratio. I clean up the last bit and it is acceptable.
I won't ask these things about potential Jewish bias in the BBC or anything like that. I will continue to ask for verifiable methods of finding answers to real material questions and reap the verifiably correct rewards.
I think translating code is probably a sensible thing to use a bot for - though I'm not sure it's fundamentally different in kind to, say, Google Translate. I grant that the bots have impressive ability to general syntactically correct text, and I'm sure that applies to code as much as it does natural language. In fact I suspect it applies even more, since code is easier than natural language.
I am less sure about its value for looking up scientific information. It is really faster or more reliable than checking Wikipedia? I am not sure. I know that I, at least, make a habit of automatically ignoring or skipping past any AI-generated text in answer to a question, even on scientific matters, because I judge that the time I spend checking whether or not the bot is right is likely equal or greater than the amount of time I spend just looking it up for myself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link