By slightly modifying the output based on a set function

Not if you make the watermark part of the output itself

the primary motivation behind this decision was. Obviously it wasn’t building public housing

That doesn’t mean the intent behind the CCP policy isn’t good, well intentioned, or positive

Can you see how I’m confused, do you think the primary intent is for public housing, or for some political drama?

It could be some political drama, we’ll never know what goes on in the HK city council, but if you read the article you’ll see this site wasn’t selected so much as it’s lease was up and the city would be taking back control of it and they needed to do something with it. Yeah some high official could’ve been waiting for the course to come back into city hands so they could build public housing over it and snub a rival, but I think it’s far more likely that the property fell into the cities hands and they decided to turn it into affordable housing because that’s what the city needs, no sinister or alterior motive is needed.

the CCP can’t possibly do something in the interests of the people, their must be something dastardly behind this.

Your just as bad as the tankies who think u.s. aid is just a CIA front, or the Republicans who think welfare is just Democrats keeping black people poor and dependent.

The u.s government and CCP aren’t just full of villains trying to oppress people, both have the capacity for empathy and compassion and do exercise it often.

Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using more tried and tested technology and methods in a significantly less populated area on an established corridor, while hsr is building from scratch through the heartland of California.

It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.

Oh definitely, I don’t see it getting to SF before the bright line opens and I don’t see it getting to la in the next decade. But the bright line is using tried and tested technology and methods, while hsr is building from scratch.

It’ll take a long time but it will eventually get done, because there is still a will, not a strong one, to get it done. Most Californians recognize the immense value it will bring and will keep pushing for it.

Hsr isn’t dead, it’s still being actively built, employing thousands of people, still has broad public support and just got a shit ton of funding from the feds. It’s over budget and delayed yes but so was the original shinkansen because bootstrapping that kind of project and industrial knowledge is hard.

degeneration might be the ONLY way to prevent Faceboom

So we should just start posting furry porn to try and scare them off?

That study is like giving a written test to an illiterate adult, seeing them do worse than a child and saying they aren’t intelligent or innovative. Like I said earlier intelligence is multi-faceted, and chatgpt excels at rhetorical, conversational and other types of written intelligence. It does not, as that study shows, do well in spatial manipulation, that doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent. If you gave that same test to a paralyzed blind person with little to no concept of spatial reality they’d probably do just as bad. If you asked them to compose a short story or an essay they might be good at it because that’s where they’re capabilities lye. That short story could still be innovative in its composition and characters, and could be way better than anything a child wrote.

You have to measure different types of intelligence with different tests. If you asked chatgpt and a set of adults and children to write a short story about a wholey new subject chatgpt would beat most of the children and probably some of the adults.

And if that short story is about a new subject matter completey out of its training set what/who is it plagiarizing from? You could say it’s taking common tropes, themes and story elements from other stories, but that’s fundamentally what a lot of writing and culture is. If that’s plagiarism then you should be more worried about the marvel franchise as it’s a plagiarism machine that has way more cultural impact.

I am not gambling anyone’s life. I have almost no power and can’t do anything to create or delay a crisis. The best I will do with my limited power is try and make it so the organization on the ground is ready to attempt that leftward shift if/when the crisis comes.

It could end in a fascist dystopia, but I think that’s less likely. At least in the u.s. where fascism never took off in its heyday before it had any stigma. If your talking about something with no evidence then that fascist speculation would be something, at least there’s precedent for a Keynesian new deal in the U.S. I do recognize it as a possibility though and that’s why I said probably, not with “absolute certainty”.

If the crisis doesn’t happen we may all die as well as neither party seems willing to deal with the climate catastrophe. That outcome seems way more certain to me, as shown by the repeated calls for action in the last 2 decades falling in deaf ears, than fascists taking over if a crisis does happen.

The way I see it is there’s a 90% chance of severe climate catastrophe on the current course, and a 30% chance there will be a fascist takeover if there’s a crisis, but a 50% chance for a green new deal. These are all completely speculative, but so is any guess on the future and I like to believe my guess has some backing in historical reality.

Screw ball golf, disc golf though solves all it’s problems

1. Can play in almost any environment so no habitat destruction needed. Might have to clear a few trees or brush in dense forest but otherwise mostly keeps forests intact

2. No elitism or arrogance. It’s one of the cheapest sports there is, just requires a couple $15 discs and most courses are free and are part of parks. Not much maintenance is needed on the course.

3. Easier to pick up. Most people can at least throw a disc 10 yards or so after a couple tries. Also more forgiving if drunk or high in that way.

4. More interesting to watch /play. Courses usually have obstacles like trees and the flight path of discs has a lot of lateral movement so if your good/lucky you can weave it through the obstacles.

I think your overestimating how much people will tolerate deprivation before turning on the system. After a certain point people will reject the system, sometimes violently , and seek a new way of organizing society. It’s why the great depression didn’t turn into the corporate hellscape you envision even though companies were just as powerful at the end of the 1920s. Barring some sort of military coup you can’t subject a majority of the population to slavery and poverty without those people revolting.

The system relies on the at least tacit consent of the majority of the population, if you break that it becomes unstable and in that instability new ideas can come in. This is why most successful revolutions follow a crisis, one that discredits the current ruling order and allows something new to take it’s place.

It can be dangerous though, that new thing could be FDR or it could be Hitler, but it’s bound to happen eventually and our best hope now is to lay the groundwork so that when it does we get a leader ready to usher in a new green economy.

It can answer questions as well as any person. Just because you may need to check with another source doesn’t mean it didn’t answer the question it just means you can’t fully trust it. If I ask someone who’s the fourth u.s. president and they say Jefferson they still answered the question, they just answered it wrong. You also don’t have to check with another source in the same way you do with asking a person a question, if it sounds right. If that person answered Madison and I faintly recall it and think it sounds right I will probably not check their answer and take it as fact.

For example I asked chatgpt for a chocolate chip cookie recipe once. I make cookies pretty often so would know if the recipe seemed off but the one it provided seemed good, I followed it and made some pretty good cookies. It answered the question correctly as shown by the cookies. You could argue it plagiarized but while the ingredients and steps were pretty close to some I found later none were a perfect match which is about as good as you can get with recipes which tend to converge in the same thing. The only real difference between most of them is the dumb story they give at the beginning which thankfully chatgpt doesn’t do.

The 7th grader and plagiarism comment make me think you haven’t played with them much or really tested them. I have had it write contracts, one of which I had reviewed by a lawyer who only had some small comments, as well as other letters and documents I needed for my mortgage and buying a home. All of these were looked over by proffesionals and none of them realized it was a bot. None of them were plagiarized too because the parameters I gave it and the output it created were way too unique to be in its training set.

I agree that initially people respond to crisis with conservatism and leaning on the current system, but that conservatism runs out though. If the system is able to solve the crisis, or at least show progress in solving it then it can be re-entrenched. If it can’t and proves utterly incapable of solving it, or even perpetuating it then people start to get radical. In 1929 and 1930 many people still believed laissez-faire could fix the depression but as conditions stayed the same or worsened people started to realize it’s flaws. By 1932 they were ready to give up on it and try anything to end it. 2007 was different as the neo liberal system was able to muster a response to the problem of speculative financial collapse in the form of financial bail outs which did bottom out the recession and start an upward trend.

The crisis I’d “root for”, as much as I can root for something that’d cause immediate suffering to many people, is one that neo liberalism can’t handle and therefore discredits it as a governing system. That crisis will come eventually, just as the depression ended laissez-faire and stagflation ended keynesianism and if that pattern holds up we’ll probably see a swing to the left this time on this metronome of economic consensus.

I’m not saying it doesn’t encode some of its training data, I’m saying it’s not just encoding its training data. It probably does “memorize” a bunch of trivial facts from its training data and regurgitate them when asked. I’m saying that’s not all they are and that’s not what makes the intelligent, their ability to also answer questions outside their training data is.

Are you saying the green new deal will be a bad idea and unpopular or triggering a depression to get it would be unpopular and a bad idea? Because the former I’d say is necessary to stop and help heal both climate change and income inequality, and if it’s anything like the first new deal would bring the party into power for a generation and set a new economic consensus. I think the latter is a bit extreme to accomplish it but idk any other way to get people to completely turn away from the current system and it’ll just be boiling the frog as the planet gets hotter, the rich get richer and the parties lose popularity but retain power.

If that’s what it’s gonna take to get a green new deal then maybe we should. Without a crisis like that, at the current trajectory both parties seem set on selling out the planet for there corporate donors.

Auto complete is not a lossy encoding of a database either, it’s a product of a dataset, just like you are a product of your experiences, but it is not wholly representative of that dataset.

A wind tunnel is not intelligent because it doesn’t answer questions or process knowledge/data it just creates data. A wind tunnel will not answer the question “is this aerodynamic” but you can observe a wind tunnel and use your intelligence to process that and answer the question.

Temperature and randomness don’t explain hallucinations, they are a product of inference. If you turned the temperature down to 0 and asked it the question " what happened in the great Christmas fire of 1934" it will give it’s best guess of what happened then even though that question is not in it’s dataset and it can’t look up the answer. The temperature would just mean that between runs it would consistently give the same story, the one that is most statistically probable, as opposed to another one that may be less probable but was pushed up due to randomness. Hallucinations are a product of inference, of taking something at face value then trying to explain it. People will do this too, if you tell someone a lie confidently then ask them about it they will use there intelligence to rationalize a story about what happened.

If LLMs were just lossy encodings of their database they wouldn’t be able to answer any questions outside of there training set. They can though, and quite well as shown by the fact you can give it completely made up information that it can’t possibly have “seen” and it will go along with it and give plausible answers. That is where it’s intelligence lyes and what separates it from older chatbots like Siri that cannot infer and are bound by the database they pull from.

How do you explain the hallucinations if the llm is just a complex lookup engine? You can’t lookup something you’ve never seen.

All inference is just statistical probability. Every answer you give outside of your direct experience is just you infering what might be the answer. Even things we hold as verifiable truth that we haven’t experienced is just a guess that the person who told it to us isn’t lying or has some sort of proof to there statement.

Take some piece of knowledge like “Biden won the 2020 election” me and you would probably agree this is the truth, but we can’t possibly “know” it’s the truth or connect it to some verifiable experience, we never counted every ballot or were at every polling station. We “know” it’s the truth because more people, and more respectable people, told us it was and our brain makes a statistical guess that their answer is right based on their weight. Just like an LLM other people will hallucinate or bullshit and come on the other side of that guess and assert the opposite and even make up stuff to go along with that story.

This in essence is what reasoning is, you weigh the possibilities of either side being correct, and pick the one that has more weight. That’s why science, an epistemological application of reason, is so heavily reliant on statistics…