happy to see the draft get fleshed out. good writeup

they really are just sitting around the campfire telling the exact same shitty spooky story, back and forth, forever, aren't they

what if we simply took the output of the easily manipulated word salad generator and parsed it into instructions for the computers that are in charge of all our communication to follow

putting my 2¢ forward: this is a forum for making fun of overconfident techbros. i work in tech, and it is maddening to watch a massively overvalued industry buy into yet another hype bubble, kept inflated by seemingly endless amounts of money from investors and VCs. and as a result it's rather cathartic to watch (and sneer at) said industry's golden goose shit itself to death over and over again due to entirely foreseeable consequences of the technology they're blindly putting billions of dollars into. this isn't r/programming, this is Mystery Science Theater 3000.

i do not care if someone does or does not understand the nuances of database administration, schema design, indexing and performance, and different candidates for the types of primary keys. hell, i barely know just enough SQL to shoot myself in the foot, which is why i don't try to write my own databases, in the hypothetical situation where i try to engineer a startup that "extracts web data at scale with multimodal codegen", whatever that means.

if someone doesn't understand, and they come in expressing confusion or asking for clarification? that's perfectly fine -- hell, if anything, i'd welcome bringing people up to speed so they can join in the laughter.

but do not come in here clueless and confidently (in)correct the people doing the sneering and expect to walk away without a couple rotten tomatoes chucked at you. if you want to do that, reddit and hacker news are thataway.

"what are you talking about? a hammer removes bolts just fine. i personally don't have an issue with the tiny bit of extra elbow grease to wedge the claw around the bolt-head and twist; if anything, it's saving me effort from having to use a wrench."

maybe you're referring to when i brought it up in last week's thread? and yeah, this is basically the same

can't wait for AI bros to invent the trolley problem

Maybe I'm missing something.

translation: thinking about this too much, or at all really, would be disastrous for my political ideology and ego, so someone else please waste their time and energy typing up a reply i won't read, so i can continue having the image of an intellectual engaged in vigorous debate without actually having to do anything

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

"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

finally... MOASS... this time for real... if January 2021 buyers sell now, they'll only be down about 70%, instead of the 85-90% it normally hovers around. i think the only hodlers that could come out positive are ones that bought in late 2022 or later, and even then, you're not up by much.

i think this, more than watching the Folding Ideas video (a must-watch for anyone out of the loop), is really kind of selling the sadness of watching people suckered into hype pour even more money down the drain. an account belonging to a guy we once liked made a tweet; this is it, liquidate your retirement and gamble it away. ugh

love If Books Could Kill. highly recommend.

i can recognize that sometimes getting away with massive amounts of fraud and theft is sometimes as easy as just being the right kind of charming and personable guy. that someone who talks smooth gets the benefit of the doubt. what i don't understand is how SBF's outstandingly bad interpersonal skills don't seem to immediately disqualify him from getting the starry-eyed treatment he got (and still gets). is it really just the fact that he's rich?

Ultimately, LLMs don’t use words,

LLM responses are basically paths through the token space, they may or may not overuse certain words, but they’ll have a bias towards using certain words together

so they use words but they don't. okay

this is about as convincing a point as "humans don't use words, they use letters!" it's not saying anything, just adding noise

So I don’t think this is impossible… Humans struggle to grasp these kinds of hidden relationships (consciously at least), but neural networks are good at that kind of thing

i can't tell what the "this" is that you think is possible

part of the problem is that a lot of those "hidden relationships" are also noise. knowing that "running" is typically an activity involving your legs doesn't help one parse the sentence "he's running his mouth", and part of participating in communication is being able to throw out these spurious and useless connections when reading and writing, something the machine consistently fails to do.

It’s incredibly useful to generate all sorts of content when paired with a skilled human

so is a rock

It can handle the tedious details while a skilled human drives it and validates the output

validation is the hard step, actually. writing articles is actually really easy if you don't care about the legibility, truthiness, or quality of the output. i've tried to "co-write" short-format fiction with large language models for fun and it always devolved into me deleting large chunks -- or even the whole -- output of the machine and rewriting it by hand. i was more "productive" with a blank notepad.exe. i've not tried it for documentation or persuasive writing but i'm pretty sure it would be a similar situation there, if not even more so, because in nonfiction writing i actually have to conform to reality.

this argument always baffles me whenever it comes up. as if writing is 5% coming up with ideas and then the other 95% is boring, tedium, pen-in-hand (or fingers-on-keyboard) execution. i've yet to meet a writer who believes this -- all the writing i've ever done required more-or-less constant editorial decisions from the macro scale of format and structure down to individual choices. have i sufficiently introduced this concept? do i like the way this sentence flows, or does it need to go earlier in the paragraph? how does this tie with the feeling i'm trying to convey or the argument i'm trying to put forward?

writing is, as a skill, that editorial process (at least to one degree or another). sure, i can defer all the choice to the machine and get the statistically-most-expected, confusing, factually dubious, aimless, unchallenging, and uncompelling text out of it. but if i want anything more than that (and i suspect most writers do), then i am doing 100% of that work myself.