Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@litherland Only Nixon could go to China.

@bil Via @sgillies!

@falxcerebri Ooh, this looks fun. Thank you.

@ian @migurski https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mathematicians-discovered-einstein-tile

Like, “Keeping orcas in captivity is unethical because they’re basically just hairy sharks” is not a good argument.

Actually, I’ll walk that half a step back. I think “just word prediction machines” has some value for introducing people to the idea of an LLM from scratch. But it’s a bit of a “whales are like fish that breastfeed” thing – an orienting statement that is true-ish but really not a good place to stop.

1. Without committing to any firm position, this is why “they’re just word prediction machines” is such a weak criticism of LLMs. There are things you can say about them that are both meaner and less reductive, so why turn to that one? But hey, I’m just a next-action machine, I guess.

2. More essays like this, I say. There are a lot of things I disagree with in it, but I never felt that my attention or the complexity of the issue was disrespected.

https://hachyderm.io/@jyasskin/110214994401056240

@darrell Futurists predict this may happen as soon as 2123.

If technology continues to progress at current rates – and, more importantly, current rates of acceleration – we may soon live in a world where web forms don’t show giant red warnings like DANGER! YOU SCREWED UP VERY BADLY! THIS IS FALSE! IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME TO LIE IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES! when you start typing your phone number because it doesn’t have enough digits to be a phone number yet.

@doriantaylor Haven’t read it. Was just reading https://longnow.org/essays/intelligence-emergent-behavior-or-songs-eden/, though.

@doriantaylor (I think this is one reason people get so excited about ML stuff. It feels actually new. If you look under the hood, most of it is still just new processing power, not new theory. Quantity has a quality all of its own and all that.)

@doriantaylor (I often think tech is riding the wave of Moore’s Law the way the larger society runs on the free-ish energy of fossil fuels. It’s unearned and really distortive, at best, to fundamental progress.)

@doriantaylor As Mia Doi Todd sings:

It takes such a long time
To make things happen
Such a long time
To see things through

@doriantaylor I feel like I skimmed this once a while ago based on a recommendation from you, made a note to read it more carefully, and then never got around to it. (Strictly my fault, not the book’s!)

@doriantaylor Maybe not! So I guess: it may be your first mental association, but I think it’s the product of etc.

@doriantaylor This is really interesting, and while it may seem kind of trivial to you, I think it only appears as a product of a lot of thought and experience.

@doriantaylor Is there some level of abstraction, X, at which you feel it starts being meaningful to say it’s just X, or is that formulation always not meaningful to you?

@doriantaylor That cognitive/linguistic thing is what I’m trying to point at here. It’s interesting to me.

@doriantaylor Like if you want to be reductive about computers, that’s the conventional thing to point to. Roughly comparably, if you want to be reductive about humans, you conventionally say flesh and blood or flesh and bone, not, say, “mostly water” or “a bunch of cells” or “just great apes” or whatever. There’s a conventional level to point to. Why? (Rhetorical, thoughtful, not looking for a detailed and literal answer.)

@doriantaylor Yes, absolutely. Or electrical charges, or Turing machines, or any of the other things that ordinary computers ·are·. Somehow binary is the one people always seem to point to. And it’s fun to think about the reasons for that.