ebu

i suppose there is something more "magical" about having the computer respond in realtime, and maybe it's that "magical" feeling that's getting so many people to just kinda shut off their brains when creators/fans start wildly speculating on what it can/will be able to do.

how that manages to override people's perceptions of their own experiences happening right in front of it still boggles my mind. they'll watch a person point out that it gets basic facts wrong or speaks incoherently, and assume the fault lies with the person for not having the true vision or what have you.

(and if i were to channel my inner 2010's reddit atheist for just a moment it feels distinctly like the ways people talk about Christian Rapture, where flaws and issues you're pointing out in the system get spun as personal flaws. you aren't observing basic facts about the system making errors, you are actively in ego-preserving denial about the "inevitability of ai")

i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".

like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"

i cant stop scrolling through this hot garbage, it just keeps getting better

Wait a year and see how kids get on blockchain to sell and buy GPU resources for rendering ‘trans furries’

excuse you, i render my fursona with my own GPU

i'll take trolls "pretending" to not understand computational time over fascists "pretending" to gush over other fascists any day

i prefer P=N!S, actually

Instead of calling you a misogynist pig

no one said this

this isn't TiA, you don't have to make up angry feminists to be mad at anymore. you're free now

i can't tell if this is a joke suggestion, so i will very briefly treat it as a serious one:

getting the machine to do critical thinking will require it to be able to think first. you can't squeeze orange juice from a rock. putting word prediction engines side by side, on top of each other, or ass-to-mouth in some sort of token centipede, isn't going to magically emerge the ability to determine which statements are reasonable and/or true

and if i get five contradictory answers from five LLMs on how to cure my COVID, and i decide to ignore the one telling me to inject bleach into my lungs, that's me using my regular old intelligence to filter bad information, the same way i do when i research questions on the internet the old-fashioned way. the machine didn't get smarter, i just have more bullshit to mentally toss out

"Of course, this flexibility that allows for anything good and popular to be part of a natural, inevitable precursor to the true metaverse, simultaneously provides the flexibility to dismiss any failing as a failure of that pure vision, rather than a failure of the underlying ideas themselves. The metaverse cannot fail, you can only fail to make the metaverse."

-- Dan Olson, The Future is a Dead Mall

syncthing is an extremely valuable piece of software in my eyes, yeah. i've been using a single synced folder as my google drive replacement and it works nearly flawlessly. i have a separate system for off-site backups, but as a first line of defense it's quite good.

bash.org died!? damn...

If the house doesn’t have a roof, don’t paint the walls.

i adore this line. because yeah, what i see the rest of the tech industry doing is either:

• scrambling to erect their own, faster, better, cheaper roofless house
• scrambling to sell furniture and utilities for the people who are definitely, inevitably going to move in
• or making a ton of bank by selling resources to the first two groups

without even stopping to ask: why would anyone want to live here?