phlummox

But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"

How does it contradict that? It sounds like you're saying "The system is, in fact, stacked in favour of the accused", but I'm not seeing that here.

In principle, the system _should_ be stacked in favour of the accused - it's a high bar to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred, using only legally obtained evidence. But the examples from the article seem to suggest that in most cases, police and prosecutors have it much easier than that.

Hahaha, that's awesome. A nice adjunct to "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" [1] (to take another example of a riff on a classic speculative fiction piece, that exposes the concepts to modern sensibilities).

[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

... is there any reason why I shouldn't be visiting Aphyr's site directly?

archive.is: https://archive.is/e701M

you must surely be guilty of something. Otherwise, all offers would be meaningless and worth nothing.

You don't have to be "guilty" of anything to be liable in civil law (which contract law is a part of). "Guilt" is a concept from criminal law. It isn't required for contracts to be enforceable.

In general (there are exceptions) offers alone aren't enforceable and don't result in a contract. You need other elements (agreement by the parties, plus something done in return for what's offered) for a contract to be formed - and then it's enforceable.

> Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent

This means exactly that no representation should exist in the activation states about what the model wants to tell, and there must be only a single token probabilistic inference at play.

That's not correct. It's clear from the surrounding paragraphs what Bender et al mean by this phrase. They mean that LLMs lack the capacity to form intentions.

You are doing the big error that is common to do in this context of extending the stochastic parrot to a non scientifically isolated model that can be made large enough to accomodate any evidence arriving from new generations of models.

No, I'm not. I haven't, in fact, made any claims about the "stochastic parrot". Rather, I've asked whether your characterisation of AI researchers' views is accurate, and suggested some reasons why it may not be.

For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say.

But did any AI researchers actually claim there was no representation of meaning? I thought generally, the criticism of LLMs was that while they do abstract from their corpus - ie, you can regard them as having a representation of "meaning" - it's tightly and inextricably tied to the surface level representation, it isn't grounded in models of the external world, and LLMs have poor ability to transfer that knowledge to other surface encodings.

I don't know who the "certain AI researchers" are supposed to be. But the "stochastic parrot" paper by Bender et al [1] says:

Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind.

That's a very different objection to the one antirez describes - I think he's erecting a straw man. But I'd be happy to be corrected by anyone more familiar with the research.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

gtk-vector-screenshot (<https://github.com/nomeata/gtk-vector-screenshot>) will do this, but for GTK apps only. It relies on a custom protocol layered on top of X Window, and I think traverses the tree of GTK widgets to create a vector representation. For a general screenshot program to work, I imagine it would need some sort of hook into every GUI framework used on your system.

The whole point of corporations is that they can sue and be sued like a natural person can - they have legal personhood, and can pursue and defend actions in their own name.

I assume the portion of the first link you're referring to is the section that starts

Courts have also split on whether corporations may be held liable under the ATS.

This is a question about the ATS and its scope specifically; the source is not discussing the nature of corporations generally.

It sounds like the scope of the ATS is fairly ill-defined, and that at various points courts have looked for whatever reasons they could to limit its scope, and whether a corporation was involved has just been one of those reasons.

Romans didn't use chariots, except for chariot racing. For military purposes, they used cavalry and footsoldiers. For domestic transport, they used wagons. And as far as I'm aware, they never constructed "tunnels" for transport - are you referring to mine tunnels?

What? No, it's a Latin word, and not a distortion of anything. It's a conjugation of the verb 'gero', which has several meanings - but when put next to 'bene', most likely means 'to behave, conduct oneself, comport oneself'. You can see the conjugation table here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gero#Latin. And it forms part of the legal Latin phrase 'Quamdiu se bene gesserit', or 'So long as he shall behave himself properly'. (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...).

Huh. You're right, and it's a WONTFIX: https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=485.

I hadn't even noticed, because I tend to automatically reach for rsync instead, even for single files.

The Sunk-cost fallacy is when you weight the value of something disproportionately because of effort or expense you've put into it.

But if you've got an OS that's certified for the work you're doing, and it's not costing you extra to work on that OS, then there's no fallacy - you're getting more value out of the cost of certification you've incurred, and shifting to some other OS would presumably require you to incur the expense of certification again.

That said, the skills needed to work with a legacy OS will tend to become rarer, so you ought to factor that into your calculations.

As someone who ran Linux on Windows 3.1 era hardware, perfectly well.

Besides the archive.is link already posted, you can find it on the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...

The ultimate set of laws governing narrative, the universe, and, well, everything. Larger image here: https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FDtr9A-WXgAAE_aG.jpg

Author's tweet here: https://www.twitter.com/humphd/status/1121075799539486720

Archived at https://archive.is/SLPXr/.

Ah well, I can dream, I guess :)

Every now and then, I ponder putting some of my scripts together into something I could actually hand over to someone else, but have not yet had the time.

Interesting! I use a very similar process for creating exams and student projects, but am the only one in my department who does so. Are any of your processes/tools publicly available? (Mine are basically cobbled together in Haskell and Python.)

Might I email you as well? I'm a regular lobste.rs reader, but not yet a member.

re: "I don't think there is a core calculus that specifically incorporates generics as in Java": doesn't Featherweight Java [1] already include generics? (Though a simplified version.)

[1] https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/fj-toplas.pdf

I kinda liked XQuery, but it seemed to never have got much traction.

What's the next step, make your title bold or twenty lines long for an unfair click advantage?

Hm. Not a bad idea.

Files away as an Unethical LifeHack

You can expect a bold, Cyrillic, ZALGO!͇̺̫̞̤͇̼͋̆̂-fied post about my next paper shortly.

It's the Cyclopean, non-Euclidean display names that really grind my gears.