altruios

What are you even trying to say: "undercut the professor"...

The further you try to constrain this topic into this illformed analogy the weirder it becomes. If we start off with a better analogy...

This is a silly perspective, inaccurate, and out of bounds framing.

Public libraries, in this instance, is curated data from all the internet, obtained through not legal means (I don't have a problem with this other than lack of attribution, being copy-left). Just to be clear.

But in answer to your incredibly leading and inaccurate framing... they are required (by their job title) to teach to those who who show up in the classroom, it's not their place to discriminate against anyone/thing (even those like itself (other robots)) that also show up in the classroom.

But you can't teach at a university using only knowledge learned from the library. you need a degree. You are free to teach at the park, where anyone can hear you. public in -> public out.

"...I am a computer program that generates responses to your prompts based on what my training data tells me is most likely to be correct and sensible."

This is correct only for a toy mental model of what an llm is capable of.

However it gets murky once you realize that (on a per token level) the llm is capable of changing it's temperature (rng %'s on picking the next token) top_k/top_p (how many options are shown per token). Adding in that bit of control to it's own output muddies that statement, as this, in effect, renders a 'mood'/'mode' in the LLM's response. so 'correct and sensible' are no longer the correct adjectives (well... unless you consider the 'me' in that statement to be a 'reasoning agent'... the fact is we don't have good words to work with here), but 'realistic / agentic' might be more in tune.

I agree with this. And also think that we should train and select for trustworthy models. I also agree that these models may never truly be trustworthy.

Regardless of how correct they are, they assume liability: which is a metric that you do not improve with more bookkeepers.

does this assume a maximum of one malicious bookkeeper?

...again: liability is the key issue. Cost savings a not exactly an isolated issue here.

Why would I want both a less accurate book keeper and to incur all of the liability of doing the books myself?!

AI only needs to be better than a human, which is also fallible.

But I would only accept AI note taking if it was reconciled (in a timely manner) by a human listening to the audio recording and verifying accuracy. Without that, it's an unacceptable loss of accountability. Even with that, privacy concerns are abound with frontier models.

STT local models offer different concerns, but generally are pretty good at transcribing in a quite environment.

Capitalistic pressures reduce quality of health care far too often. Everything from artificially limiting how many doctors get degrees, to pushing doctors to see more people per day from such tech. The enshittification will continue until moral improves.

Besides the reward of a more capable brain, the reduced effects/risks of dementia, the contrarian need to argue, the altruistic desire to help neighbors with difficult problems, the selfish urge to daydream... yeah, there are people for whom none of those are motivating factors.

The most compelling reason to learn to code is exactly the same reason to read lots of books (fiction or otherwise). It exercises your brain. A brain that can easily sort, parse, and understand basic logic and control flow is more resistant to propaganda and influence. Which is the same benefit a lot of reading does, but for different avenues of thinking (more worldviews exposed to -> more critical thought of each of those views -> more critical thinking in general).

If AI was a productivity boon: wouldn't a company employ the same or more employees to capture more market share at a competitive edge. Shedding employees because they are more efficient seems like shooting yourself in the foot to try and stand in the same spot in a race.

AI should have caused a job market boon: because less skilled employees would have been more hirable/useful. That this is not the case leads me to suspect that AI is an excuse to reduce employee count, but not the root cause.

...well actually...

There are more combinations than merely having only X, or an XY combination. And there is more fuzziness even in the Y and X expression, as you said. It's fuzzy all the way down. The tale of Binary results has always been from compression of reality: Always has been.

I do not believe it exists. If it is never, then it must not exist.

proofs I would accept:

(for Christianity)

Biblically accurate angels descend onto earth, to everyone, and submit themselves to scientific testing, which conclude they are made of something non-physical.

Divinity is proven to be a measurable and testable attribute of reality.

Reality warping magic, demonstrated to not be any sort of trick or technology, and limited to those devout to said religion.

God shows his ass to everyone, the only part of him that - according to the bible - won't make a human insane.

the basis of these proofs can be distilled down to some basic requirements: - It must happen in 'reality' not 'in my head'. - It must be testable, and repeatable. - It must have no 'natural/scientific' explanation. - It must be viewable by everyone.

That's not 'all' of the requirements, but regardless of which religion we are talking about: those are the common primitives.

Nothing I've encountered have met these standards. But if those standards of mine are met...

Someone who does not believe in god will not be convinced to believe by a proof of god's existence.

But of course that's not true. I would believe in a God with proof of their existence. I simply have not encountered such proof that hold up to my standards of proof of such an extraordinary claim.

One idea that stuck out to me was an array of giant thin solar powered spinning metal Crookes radiometers magnets in a line to make a railgun-like launcher. Materially cheap to do.

Related, but not exactly what I was thinking of: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/05/a-rotating-probe-... The original source I'm thinking of may be lost to time :( I'll keep hunting.

edit:found!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDM1COWJ2Hc

Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories

... Then how do we, as a society, determine how much a dollar is worth?! We do use force to enforce the stories we tell about fiat. But 'believe this story about how much a dollar will buy you and how much you owe, or else we will send thugs to your house' isn't disproving the point at all.

Thank you for the clarification. Music is weird. My understanding was the well-tempered clavichord was one of the oldest deviations (that was written) from the concept of just intonation: you learn something everyday.

We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.

For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).

Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p

Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.

Reading causes your brain to hallucinate. Visualization is a muscle: reading is the weights at the gym.

My assumption with their intent: is that red tokens come in 'slot' a-b, and blue tokens go in 'slot' c-d - Positional encoding determining data/text.

I don't think is guaranteed to actually work, it's a hypothetical after all, but maybe it's better than the current setup of pushing instructions and data into the same slot.

The response is to refuse to use Microsoft software. Use a Mac

Or Linux: an actual FOSS OS.

What money is, what it represents, is value. But value is a complete opaque quality. At best we have an approximation: an 'expectation' of value. Expectation results in people paying for more for misprinted coins. Expectation is the same reason that drives people to stocks, to silver/gold, to oil. Expectation can be manipulated. If you can make others expect greater value of an item (and then they exchange such a value to you for that item) than what you are giving them: that difference is profit.

To be clear, I don't like this outlook. But I've found it to be accurate to how people behave around money. It's not a sign of a healthy society.

I thought the ridiculousness was plain to read, still included the /s at the end, and yet...

Can you elaborate more on what a token looks like as a pixel patch/sound/general signal as it currently is (in this model)?

My understanding of pixel representation is: slice a grid in an image, each square slice gets projected into a number array of x long (not sure how long x is, or if it's variable), which then gets projected down to a token representing that space (3-4 long as alpha-numeric) and AGAIN gets passed into "position detector" which outputs a token representing that pixel/position. which gets passed into the lmm (at a significantly reduced/translated signal into token space).

First, before continuing: do I have that mostly correct?

cognitive aether

We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s

Tokens are such a strange base unit. Couldn't we do something that naturally conforms better to reality than such choppy units that cause all sorts of artifacts? making everything 'language based' prevents true multi-modality. Thinking isn't done in language. Thinking outputs language, but its far more like multiple waves of data coalescing into an 'idea', internal... subjectively (n=1) at least. I think wave/signal based transformers are the next jump.

After that a s1/s2 system: fast generation, slow wave correction / observation operating over the fast generation seems like the next leap forward.

Tokens create and hide too many problems to be the 'optimal' solution.

...just half?

I would just say something outside our current capacity for understanding. How does that quote go...something like "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

So your definition is merely that the supernatural is the natural we have not been able to measure yet? That's just the 'god of the gaps' by a different name.

isn't right because we clearly detect it in some way since we are discussing it now.

We could be discussing invisible pink unicorns. so those must be real since we are able to discuss them, right? (obviously not: the same reasoning holds true for why the soul {probably} doesn't exist).

In this domain the idea of "proof" becomes less relevant.

This is counter to your earlier stance that the supernatural is the natural we haven't yet been able to measure. either proof exists or you have to accept things on faith: you can't have it both ways. this is poor reasoning.

My guess is our brains act as a receiver for some "field" of consciousness

Not impossible, and could in theory be testable and falsifiable.

There is a lot of conflicting thinking here. Very muddy.

"Matter" is an abstaction. Mind, properly considered, (i.e. not with words) is not.

...wat?

Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.

No: you have that reversed. Matter can be reasoned about, matter is a useful abstraction, e=mc^2. energy = matter*speed of light^2. No such formula exists for the mind.

I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counterweight.

Why is insistence a useful counter weight to factual arguments?