blooalien

With a nation this far endebted you'd think people might think it reasonable to question billions in grants..

One might also question the wisdom of starting yet another ongoing war, or throwing piles of money at putting a president's name everywhere it wasn't asked for, or truckloads of money "renovating" national monuments only to have to throw more money at re-doing the job because it was half-assed by an unqualified crew, or literal tens of billions at ICE (kinda sorta) doing their job worse than ever before... Guess how much money's been wasted on all that?

for the sake of the smart ones can we at least check?

> You are proving my example by presupposing there are no checks and that investigations never happen. You are the person saying “please think of the children and install smoke detectors” when they are already installed.

I think they're saying "Can we at least check the batteries in the smoke detectors to be sure everything's cool there?" without taking into account that in addition to there already being smoke detectors with batteries, there's also already multiple layers of maintenance schedule and checks in place to ensure that they always have a fresh battery and regular testing to ensure they function as expected.

Jesus, just fuck off and die already you truly worthless piece of shit. You're only here to fuck with people and further enshittify the world. Literally nobody benefits from your existence or your presence here.

People like you who actively go out of your way to make the world a far worse place than the shit-hole you've already turned it into are the "source of my pessimism".

Talk to a therapist.

Why? It might help me but it won't fix you and you're the problem here. Your whole intent is to aggravate me into hating you even more than I already do. Well, guess what. You're wasting your time at this point. I couldn't possibly hate you more than literally wishing you didn't exist at all. You've already succeeded at your goal, so you can just shut the fuck up now and go away. Congratulations. You win. Be happy and be gone.

I hate all you politics worshippers equally. You're the reason humanity has no future but extinction. Left, right, doesn't matter. You worship the cult leaders that only care about burning the Earth to the ground for money and power. Using the term "TDS" on people as you do remains a "useful tag" to easily identify you as a literal cultist. Grow another braincell to keep that other one company you cultist fucking clown. Fuck you very much.

Yeah, you can just fuck right off, too. My reply wasn't for you. It was for the person who wasn't actively trying to rub salt in the wounds and be a worthless little shit.

I don't know why you're saying you're "tired of people's hateful bullshit". I originally responded that your point was off, and you're the one writing these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886350

You really can't figure it out? Did I not make myself pretty clear in the comment I was responding to there that it's decades of shitty people like him (and apparently you) that have pushed me to this point? Funny how you point to my comment without noticing or acknowledging at all the fact that it was a response to another hostile comment that was all about just tryin' to be hateful and ignorant and push me even further into hatred.

Take a breather, my guy.

I'm not "your guy". I actively hate you.

... and actually go touch a bit of grass.

And this sorta shit right here is why I hate you and everyone like you. You know what I did yesterday? I turned my computer off and went and "touched grass" (hung out in the park away from technology and people) and just chilled out. You make it sound like I don't love nature or some stupid shit. You don't know me, so just keep your unhelpful advice to yourself.

I just think maybe you're putting intent in people's mouths where there is none.

So it wasn't your intent to make snide little insinuations and remarks in an attempt to purposely try to rub me the wrong way so as to piss me off even more after I'd finally managed to calm myself down? Yeah, sure. I believe that... It wasn't me who put those remarks in your mouth. You chose to try to rub salt in the wound. Congratulations. You're human garbage. Good for you.

To be 100% honest, I really don't want to have this (or any other) conversation with you (or anyone else) right now (or possibly ever; I'm just sick and tired of people and their hateful bullshit), but purely out of respect for your fair and balanced reply I'll try to respond here in a civil and honest way to the best of my ability. This really is the last response I intend to make to anything anyone says on the topic, so I'll try to be thorough. If you want to respond to anything I say here, feel free, but don't expect a reply after this one (I may possibly, but probably not) . That having been said, here goes...

... "impression of a mostly rational individual with whom I agree on some things while disagreeing on others."

I try, really I do. It's gotten really hard these days. You're welcome to agree or disagree; Totally normal and expected. I just get tired of getting shut-down on every little thing I say by so many people who have sometimes less than zero experience in the topic they claim absolute certainty about, no matter if I can trot out a parade of facts proving my points. This inevitably leads to stress that is no longer as easy to just "brush off" as it used to be. Sorry for that.

"You don't seem to be a raving anti-LLM crusader nor come across as a starry-eyed LLM fanboi."

You're right. I'm neither. I am actually quite impressed and amazed with what LLMs are capable of (especially in the hands of skilled and knowledgable users) but I also understand fully that there are tradeoffs involved and responsibilities involved in the usage of such tools. I do believe they (and other "AI" related technologies) have huge potential for both good and bad (largely dependent upon the user and their intent) and like any new tool, I genuinely do hope this one finds more of the good use than the bad, but more and more I'm feeling like it's just gonna get weaponized against society at large. Sad, but nothing I can say or do will change it. I'm fully convinced of that at this point.

"what makes you so sure these things don't "think"?" ... <more stuff said here> ... "If the answer is 'yes' we're back at the definitional question of what 'thinking' entails, if it is 'no' we're entering more in the realm of metaphysics and religion."

So, in my mind, "thinking" is a much more "active" process than the "calculation" done by a machine just mechanistically working through a bunch of math. Does a desktop calculator "think"? Does a mechanical device like an Abacus or anything else that can "do math" without electronics? Calculation isn't necessarily "thinking", even though thinking can (and often does) result in calculation.

Now, where I'm coming from with my assertion that LLMs don't actually think is due to a few factors. First off, I've been learning the mathematics involved in how these things work for a very long time (decades now actually; as "neural network" technology and ideas is truly not a new thing), and while it's really amazing stuff, it's not magic. It's just math. Really fancy and complex math, but still just math. As soon as the math stops being done, the "thinking" stops. Does a brain ever stop thinking? I get the impression that until death it's kinda always active, even when you sleep. Not so with an LLM. You give it input, a buncha fancy math gets done by a really powerful "calculator" (computer), it responds with output, then it stops until it gets another "trigger" to start calculating some more.

There's some very real flaws in seeing that process as thinking however, even if you're only talking about that time during which the calculations are taking place. The problem I see there is that the LLM cannot "second guess" itself or worry about whether it might be incorrect about something. It just forges ahead with the calculations and gives the end result to the user, right or wrong, as it was designed to do. It has no "skin in the game" or reason to care (even if it had the ability to care) and it's got no real sense of "self" or the world or anything. It's just doing some really amazing math that results in an illusion of a thought process.

That having been said, I'm firmly convinced that even as these things stand now, they can absolutely assist humans in their thought processes if used properly and judiciously with full understanding of their limitations and weaknesses taken into account. I just don't believe that "more of the same" will somehow magically become "sentient" someday without a huge advance in both the hardware and software technologies it's built upon (on the level of the "positronic brain" or some kinda hand-wavy "quantum technology" science fiction concept). Pretty darn certain that more massive "AI data centers" aren't gonna lead to a "magical thinking machine" with the current forms of "AI" we're working with.

"Those observations and that knowledge lead me to conclude that, absent some metaphysical or religious veto these models can be made to 'think' and might already be doing so."

Now, this here I can actually agree with, other than the "might already be doing so" part. They're not (yet). I'm really quite sure of that, knowing what I know about how these things work. They really are fantastic at faking it these days though, as evidenced by how many people truly are buying into the AI company CEO hype about AGI/ASI. I think that LLMs can absolutely be one part of a machine that's capable of a simulation of "thought" that could really be good enough to qualify as some form of "the real thing" on some level, and that may even someday (soon even?) surpass the capabilities of humans in that regard. It'll require some different ways of doing things though, and some combinations of classic traditional computing with a wide range of related "AI" technologies including LLMs, neural nets, vision models, etc, etc, and it'll have to be put in some sort of active state of operation where it's capable of doing the "thinking" and "learning" process continuously the way an actual brain does. I think it'll also help to give it access to a continuous input stream similar to how a brain has access to near constant input as well.

Anyone that wants to really know how this stuff works "under the hood" is welcome to ask an LLM about it. Many of 'em are actually quite good at explaining themselves, starting from "first principles" if you ask 'em to "keep it simple" all the way down through the deep mathematics involved. I encourage folks to have that discussion with several of their favorite LLMs if for no other reason than more knowledge about the topic is a good thing. Just be aware that they can at times say things that are actively incorrect and they will often say such things with great certainty (and sometimes even try to argue with you about it if you call them out on it). Always check your own (and the LLM's) knowledge against known verifiable provable facts. This stuff is all heavily documented and readily available "out there" on the Web with not too terribly much heavy searching required.

To summarize; I don't think it's impossible to create a "thinking machine" using these technologies. I just don't believe we're even remotely nearly as close to it as the AI mega-corporations would have us all believe. I might be wrong about everything I've said here, or I could be 100% correct. Dunno; No longer care either way really. I've said my piece and I'm done now. Bring on our AI overlords, for better or worse. I can't stop it either way.

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Do we see signs of reasoning or is it anthropomorphism?

This is the part that so many folks just don't seem to understand (probably because it's been labeled as "thinking" or "reasoning" mode, and people assume that words have meaning). It's not reasoning or thought. It's spewing tokens pretending to "think", but it's actually just generating extra "context" to help the final answer be more coherent. The model isn't doing anything it doesn't already do. It's just doing more of it to improve the quality of the final answer displayed to the user.

Almost as good as when they call everyone else "NPCs" and claim they're all performatively "virtue signalling".

Yeah. The more of that sorta thing I see (and I see more of it daily these days) the more convinced I am that humanity is a "dead end" species. Here's hoping the cockroaches and tardigrades ("water bears") take better care of the planet than we did... :fingers crossed:

Thank you.

Why is it not part of the punishment?

Indeed it is part of the punishment. As an earlier comment in this thread points out from the 13th amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime" (emphasis added by me)

Every single time someone mentions "TDS" all I can think is how much you sound like a literal cult member worshiping "Dear Leader". If you're incapable of independent thought using your own "God-given brain", that's not a thing to be proud of. It's a level of childish ignorance on-par with "Okay, Boomer" but much worse due to the "cult-mind" aspect of it.

"get your popcorn out. the git wars are on."

I would make a joke here about git bein' rewritten in Rust (by AI even), but folk are already doin' various forms of exactly that, so it's not really a joke that can be made anymore. :shrug:

We have the resources, science, technology and people to live in an approximation of utopia, but instead we have.... this.

I've argued this exact thing (and been ridiculed as "naive" and "tree-hugging hippie" for it) most of my adult life (until recently where I no longer care because humanity has already made the choice now and nothing I can say or do will change it). We've had the technology, and we've been adding to it for decades now, but still we choose to use it in the worst possible ways, to (further) enrich the worst possible people and burn the world to the ground.

and it almost always comes across as preachy and just plain wrong

This is the half of that sentence that gets you an upvote from me.

I'm not as sure about the first part of your comment though, because it's really only a certain subset of users here doin' it. Most of the rest of us don't really seem to care nearly as much about such petty things as hunting down users of "AI" to publicly shame them for it as that small group does. Now actual "slop" (often obvious) is maybe a bit more universally hated here (and elsewhere, I'm sure), but that's a whole different phenomenon from the AI "witch hunters".

I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. ...

That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.

... could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc.

Which is why you can take my adblocker from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Much of the modern web is largely straight-up hostile without a proper adblocker these days.

In the end, there's always [at least the potential for] some amount of misinformation in any source. You read it while cross-checking with your own knowledge [and the knowledge gathered by others].

I wish they still taught this in grade-school like they did when I was a kid. Clearly research skills are not so common these days. "Common sense" is not common.

I wonder what those original AI were used for.

Inventing, learning about, and exploring new technology and ideas, just as many experiments we do today are. :)

It could just be proving out other aspects. It could also be completely innocent too, but I don't think this is quite conspiracy level thinking.

This honestly strikes me as an innocent test of one random idea/technology. The whole "conspiracy level" thing (if it were to ever happen at all) would come later on, and most likely from entirely different people usin' the things discovered from experiments like this one in wholly unacceptable ways because they simply have too much power, money, and time, and not nearly enough good sense between their ears.

Sad though that as other folk have pointed out, if the technology were to work as expected, then it could also be used to help mitigate global warming by reflecting a specific amount of sunlight away from Earth, too. The sad part is that's likely not what such experiments will lead to initially. The "bad people" tend to be pretty quick to try to weaponize or monetize (or both) anything they take an interest in.

I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

They didn't have LLMs but they did have "AI" already (for a fair while by then). It wasn't much anything like what we have now really, but it did exist and by the current standards of that time period it was pretty much straight out of science fiction. (Imagine how shocked they'd be seeing what all we have now. "Supercomputers" in nearly every pocket, widespread broadband Internet, LLMs, etc, etc.) You're definitely right though in thinking that they had technologies far beyond what they told the public about. That's been the case since before my own lifetime at least, and absolutely certainly still true today.

It's actually more'n a little bit scary how much of modern "politics" seems as if it could be driven by having watched any of a number of movies and thinking "We should do that!" When I hear people talk about politicians bein' like spoiled brat children in adult bodies, I tend to think that sounds like exactly the type of mentality that could see something all messed up and scary in a movie and want to try to do it in the real world. What makes it even more scary in my mind is that we've allowed those type of people to gather entirely too much money and power such that they have the option available to them to seriously consider trying such horrible ideas.

"Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city."

I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).

What's the problem exactly? Is using AI for visualization considered a bad practice?

Some people just assume that anything "AI" has touched is automatically "slop" because ... AI! Probably at least partly due to how much actual "AI slop" is out there produced by people "holding the tool wrong". When used judiciously and properly, some of these language models can really be a useful tool and help create some quality stuff, but they're no substitute for a knowledgable human using the tool correctly to achieve the desired result (which is why so many people who misuse it to do all their thinking and work for them (without doing any of their part) inevitably produce the typical "slop" result).

My thoughts on reading it (and looking around your site) was that you were building these explanations to help cement your own understanding of the topics and that you were just sharing the results because you thought it might be helpful to others as well. Knowing that you actually built it with the intent to teach just makes me think that it's nice of you to try to be a teacher even if there's a few folks who want to be jerks about your efforts. The world needs more teachers (and learners, too). Gaining, improving, and sharing knowledge is one of humanity's true super-powers. Without it, we'd all still be living like animals in the wild. Thank you for your efforts to contribute in a positive way. At least you're actually making stuff, unlike many of them what gotta always just complain about the things other people make and never actually make anything themselves.

My own personal "pet peeve" cliche phrase is anything that is "literally" (except it's really figurative) something. So many people for so very long have used "literally" to mean the literal opposite of it's actual meaning. Even when they don't use it to mean it's actual opposite meaning, they'll still often use "literal" to describe a thing that is in no way actually literal. It just "grinds my gears" to hear it.

"Still, some points are explained quite clearly."

My experience with "AI" is that if you ask the right questions in the right way (and give it access to accurate information to build it's answers from) it's actually really good at explaining things "quite clearly".