blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts

51

Comments

1,260

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

whomst among us has'nt err'd?

Carl T. Bergstrom, 13 February 2023:

Meta. OpenAI. Google.

Your AI chatbot is not hallucinating.

It's bullshitting.

It's bullshitting, because that's what you designed it to do. You designed it to generate seemingly authoritative text "with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence," i.e., to bullshit.

Me, 2 February 2023:

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be right, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is not to swim in it.

If your "app" cannot show basic information about the forum to which you are posting, your "app" is bad.

"Sediment precipitated from"?

ANTA BAKA?!*

*translator's note: baka means "plan"

Congratulations on missing the entire point of everything explained to you at considerable length and on coming back with a vintage not-pology.

The egress is that-a-way.

It's a whackaloon claim that had been circulating for a while.

From what I recall from the halcyon days of science-blogging, it was more bad Gödel than bad Bayes, but a dose of the latter would be unsurprising.

Scott Aaronson says that Aschenbrenner displays "unusual clarity, concreteness, and seriousness".

That's it, that's the joke

According to a Meta help page, Meta AI will respond to a post in a group if someone explicitly tags it or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.”

God forbid it ever take longer than an hour for an actual human with actual knowledge to type a reply.

OOM-pa lOOM-pa dOOM-pa dee doo / I've got a waste of carbon for you

That was a Calvin and Hobbes comic long before it was a meme.

Electromagnetism is a standard subject covered in a bajillion books, so the training set is probably full of repeated explanations of the basic examples. That sounds like an excellent recipe for "AI" bilge-water that is just coherent enough for a student to miss where it goes wrong.

From the Philosophy Tube comment section:

Video is way too long. But I did go to chatGPT to ask extensively about this Judith Butler character.

Spoken like a man who jerks it to tradwife Midjourney pics. Can't get it up unless the fingers look wrong, can you?

Also Yud: I can't be a cult leader, because I dress funny.

Vitalik Buterin:

A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate "charge" (as in, "my laptop is charging") and the best I could come up with is "pinxe lo dikca" ("drink electricity")

So... if you think LLMs don't drink, that's your imagination, not mine.

My parents said that the car was "thirsty" if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists

That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:

Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people won't accept anything that doesn't eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.

Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in "The Bicentennial Man", not I, Robot. It's also presented textually as correct....

In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.

Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.

I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying "Hi! I'm Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!"

Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.

When half his college students gasped, he said "THAT'S where all this AI hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're GREAT at imagining non-conscious things are people."

"Computational complexity does not work that way!" is one of those TESCREAL-zone topics that I wish I had better reading recommendations for.

Check out the big brain on Yud!

I think the pre-election prosecutions of Hillary and Trump were both bullshit. Is there anyone on Earth who holds that Hillary's email server and Trump's lawyer's payment's accounting were both Terribly Serious Crimes, and can document having held the former position earlier?