Cethin

most models I’ve seen now cite sources you can check when they’re reporting factual stuff

Maybe online models can, but local has no access to the internet so it can’t. However, it’s likely generating a response that is predictable that can cite a source, but it could totally make that up. Hopefully people would double check it to make sure it actually is and says what it’s claiming, but we both know most won’t. Citing a source is just a way to make it look intelligent while it still generates bullshit.

Yeah LLMs might be more likely to give bad info, but people are unreliable too, they’re biased and flawed and often have an agenda, and they are frequently, confidently wrong.

You’re saying this like they’re equal. People put thought into it. LLMs do not. Yes, con men exist. However, not everyone is a con man. You can follow authors who are known to be accurate. You can do the same with LLMs. The problem is consistency. A con man will always be a con man. With an LLM you have no way to know if it’s bullshitting this time or not, so you should always assume it’s bullshit. In which case, what’s the point? However, most people assume it’s always honest, because that’s what the marketing leads you to believe

I run local models. The other day I was writing some code and needed to implement simplex noise, and LLMs are great for writing all the boilerplate stuff. I asked it to do it, and it did alright although I had to modify it to make it actually work because it hallucinated some stuff. I decided to look it up online, and it was practically an exact copy of this, down to identical comments and everything.

It is not too diluted to matter. You just don’t have the knowledge to recognize what it copies.

You can look up the author and figure out if they’re a reliable source of information. Most authors either write bullshit or don’t, at least on a particular subject. LLMs are unreliable. Sometimes they return bullshit and sometimes they don’t. You never know, but it’ll sound just as confident either way. Also, people are lead to believe they’re actually thinking about their response, and they aren’t. They aren’t considering if it’s real or not, only if it is a statistically probable output.

Not remotely the same thing. Books almost always have context on what they are, like having an author listed, and hopefully citations if it’s about real things. You can figure out more about it. LLMs create confident sounding outputs that are just predictions of what an output should look like based on the input. It didn’t reason and doesn’t tell you how it generated its response.

The problem is LLMs are sold to people as Artifical Intelligence, so it sounds like it’s smart. In actuality, it doesn’t think at all. It just generates confident sounding results. It’s literally companies selling con(fidence) men as a product, and people fully trust these con men.

Like the other comments say, LLMs (the thing you’re calling AI) don’t think. They aren’t intelligent. If I steal other people’s work and copy pieces of it and distribute it as if I made it, that’s wrong. That’s all LLMs are doing. They aren’t “being inspired” or anything like that. That requires thought. They are copying data and creating outputs based on weights that tell it how and where to put copied material.

I think the largest issue is people hearing the term “AI” and taking it at face value. There’s no intelligence, only an algorithm. It’s a convoluted algorithm that is hard to tell what going on just by looking at it, but it is an algorithm. There are no thoughts, only weights that are trained on data to generate predictable outputs based on given inputs. If I write an algorithm that steals art and reorganizes into unique pieces, that’s still stealing their art.

For a current example, the stuff going on with Marathon is pretty universally agreed upon to be bad and wrong. However, you’re arguing if it was an LLM that copied the artist’s work into their product it would be fine. That doesn’t seem reasonable, does it?

Only if there’s one path, no dead ends. A maze branches, a labyrinth doesn’t and only winds around as one long path.

Yep, and anding with a bit ask is incredibly fast to process, so it’s not a big issue for performance.

They also have a podcast called It Could Happen Here. Originally it talked about what to expect if a civil war breaks out basically, but it’s now a news show about stuff going on and also with some leftist political discussion thrown in.

(Robert Evans created these, Behind the Bastards, and wrote the book It Could Happen Here.)

Yeah, I watched it again not too long ago and it really hurts the movie in my opinion. It’s still fairly funny, but I can’t really recommend it.

It’s not that long of a book either, and it’s an important part of our culture; for the wrong reasons I’d argue, as surveillance is what “1984” has come to stand for but is a more minor part of the book compared to controlling thought.

That’s actually a large point that Andor makes, interestingly enough. When Andor is being asked to fight against The Empire he says something along the lines of “it’s better to live and eat, isn’t it?” He is stuck in a mindset of just getting by, like most people are, until he can’t just do that anymore. He has a hatred for The Empire, but he’s too scared at first.

Andor is, by far, the best Star Wars thing that’s been made (at least season 1, I haven’t seen 2 yet) because it takes its world seriously, unlike the rest of Star Wars. There aren’t these perfect heroes and perfect villains. There are flawed people doing what they need to do, and bureacracies doing their jobs without considering what that actually means. It’s in the Star Wars universe, but it’s taking a realistic look at how The Rebellion could have actually started with regular people making it happen because they couldn’t stand by any longer.

I’m willing to bet I could teach someone how to count in binary on their fingers who doesn’t know binary in five minutes or less. They don’t need to know it’s binary. It’s just a simple rule that you add one and if that finger is up it instead goes down and the next goes up. They don’t need to know more than that. Then they just work backwards to get the final count. Knowing this is binary can be helpful, but it isn’t a prerequisite.

I wouldn’t. It’s easy, people just haven’t learned it. It takes probably all of a minute to teach someone to count in binary with their fingers.

I don’t know if there’s a better term, but a subset is what it is.

It’s not an excuse. Where did I excuse anything? I just said having someone who will reduce the harm done by the church is better than someone who will increase it. Do you disagree?

Just FYI, I’m an atheist who’s against organized religion. This pope was still much better than most, in that he tried to help poor people at least, and he was accepting of most other people, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with them.

A leader like him mitigates harm that would be done under someone else. It doesn’t mean I like him. I just prefer him (or someone like him) to other options. It isn’t an excuse. It’s just the best option, not that any of us get a choice. Not even Catholic followers do.

For sure, but as long as the mafia exists (which looks like it’s going to be for a good long while still) I want it to have the leader who will do the most good possible, even if it’s still a net negative. There are those out there who would use the resources to do a lot of harm.

Yes and no. Part of the issue is that more people wanted more stuff cheaper. These items were expensive, and paying for a few more hours of work didn’t substantially effect the price, so they did it. Now, that amount of added work would probably cost the same as the enitre item before it’s done, so they don’t do it.

When price becomes the primary component of shopping, items become cheaper and craft work becomes (as a ratio to the total cost) more expensive. It’s not worth the effort unless you’re paying thousands of dollars for it, which those items are still being made but we aren’t the customers for them.

Y/m/d sucks honestly. It’s the opposite order of what you want. Day is most critical, then month, then year. That’s the order it should be in. Everything else is different levels of bad.

I agree with you, but you just invented Socialism again. You get your needs provided and the means of production are available for you to produce with. That’s socialism.