Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Got that feeling I got when I saw the video of the first trucks full of covid vaccine heading for the highway. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(23)00026-9/fulltext

@kissane @ted @meetar @dansinker Muting this thread without looking at the rest of it.

@tim You’ve gone and reinvented actual clouds, Tim.

@natevw They rolled out a replacement for Euclidean distance and it’s about 0.661. Makes a lot of things easier.

Sitting here angrily remembering the time I guessed that the distance between two randomly chosen points in a cube might be 1/√2, looked it up, and learned that it’s (1/105) × (4 + 17√2 - 6√3 + 21×ln(1 + √2) + 42×ln(2 + √3) - 7π) ≈ 0.661 and this was only worked out in 1978.

@migurski Yeah. Try “Revolutions” from the beginning, and if it doesn’t take, try an episode from somewhere in the middle. And if that doesn’t take, never mind.

@migurski Have you tried Mike Duncan’s podcasts?

@migurski Yeah, I have a recommendation: GET A JOB, HIPPIE!

@kissane @ingrid Ladies love foundational trip-hop group Morcheeba (LLM).

@ingrid @kissane Industrial Might and Logic (LLM).

@ingrid @kissane Not a valid roman numeral – please try again (LLM).

@ingrid @kissane Looking up how to mute particuLar keywords on Mastodon (LLM).

@kissane @ingrid Loud Lipes save Mives (LLM).

@ingrid Lucky lunar module (LLM).

@ingrid Limited liability mumpany (LLM).

LLMs don’t actually know English grammar, they just abstract patterns from many examples of utterances in English. You and I, of course, humans, with a conscious mind that we can see and understand via the simple expedient of naïve empiricism, we simply read that book that fully enumerates the rules of English grammar (you remember? the book?) when we were infants. QED.

There are a lot of people who think they are making really impressive critiques of LLMs when they are doing the equivalent of saying “Dogs can’t eat chocolate because truly experiencing chocolate requires a spark of the divine, and as as we all know, dogs do not have souls. So don’t feed dogs chocolate.”

You have arrived at the correct conclusion that maximalist claims about LLMs are very wrong. But you did it with reasoning worse than the LLMs can do.

If I were a journalist covering the balloons, I would be talking to Ben. He seems to be finding them in open data, which provides some actual facts in a story that’s very short on them. https://mastodon.social/@benelsen/109881189772230247