Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@jkottke @nelson Cf. this, which is extremely silly but also, I have to admit, a little bit intriguing: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17071

@jkottke @nelson It certainly knows at a verbal level (the front end is explicitly sampling from distributions) but I think you would have to get pretty clever with ensembles or something to even halfway do the kind of semantic error bars that a reasonable person would want.

If I ever finish this, it’s over for all my haters.

@sabrina @nasser “Nanaimo of the Valley of the Wind” too.

Even as a sports-negative person, I have to admit there’s a lot of truth in this. https://saturation.social/@bdeskin/110126857940803015

I like process videos, I like time lapse videos, and I like videos that get to the point (unless they are deliberately atmospheric, which I also like). But I just don’t have the brain gear necessary to watch a 2× (or heaven forfend a 4× video) of someone making something.

Social media video apps do not believe me when I try to explain this to them.

@urschrei You expect people to wake up, have a cup of coffee, and face the world without trying to self-mystify up a big wad of manichean metanarrative to live inside? On a Saturday?

We used to have free speech in this country!

(There was something about zoo + earthquake that was ringing a dusty bell, and it’s exceedingly satisfying to actually remember it instead of wondering all day “why did that seem slightly more interesting than it should have?”)

Remembering: One of the last crowded things we did pre-pandy was ZooLights 2019 with friends. At the end of the evening, we’re on the balcony of the upper gondola station as the café staff is closing. There’s a rumble from some equipment and I say to a friend, who works in disaster management, that part of my brain irrationally worries that any big noise is an earthquake. She cocks her head and says brains are weird. Today’s earthquakes were (± margin of error) directly under us at that moment.

Good to have a “We know what we’re doing if the Hayward Fault goes today, right?” conversation after a filling breakfast.

The modeled hypocenter of the tiny earthquake just now was 7.5 km directly below the zoo: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73865490/executive.

This reminds me of how, if I recall, the HayWired scenario put its nominal epicenter on some random private property. You have to wonder how the people who live there felt about that, and what it might have done to their property value.

(Another one as I was typing this.)

@ted https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73865490/executive – we just barely felt it in North Oakland (I didn’t notice it but my partner did).

Can’t believe this absurdly puritanical interference with my artistic vision.

Had a lot of fun with @salkjorts on the other site, where I posted bad ideas run through Midjourney-or-whatever, so please welcome @salkinjorts. Or block it, if you don’t like this stuff. I’m seeding it with a few redos of classics from the old account.

@tjl I think I will decline this welcome based on the recollection that you and I actually disagree very sharply about what good faith discourse on issues of corporate governance might look like.

@allafarce Ish? But also in that the things people were most loudly for and against with smartphones early on were mostly not the issues I think we ought to have been focusing on.

I continue to feel pretty alone in the interpretation that these models are neither trivial nor conscious; that they are neither nukes nor penicillin; that practically all the urgent questions about them are really the same urgent questions we’ve had about political economy, offshoring, and corporate governance for decades; and so on. I finally get to be a filthy centrist on an important issue and it turns out it’s boring.

This statement combines a lot of what I think is good and less good about the thread of LLM criticism it’s from. I don’t think the stochastic parrot interpretation is more than one interesting model, I believe the relevant problems with longermism are almost completely disjoint from the ones mentioned, and I am unconvinced that marking media by consciousness of author is either philosophically clear or practically useful. However, I agree firmly with the tl;dr. https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

If you know where to get originals of these terrestrial-but-field MSS images, I strongly encourage you to share.