bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Adding an m before the b

Walter Bright soon reading his second ever newspaper: "Wow, this is a lot like Washington Post!"

Your success as a greenhorn Silicon Valley intellectual will rest on your ability to shoehorn Girard’s name and the “mimetic theory” with which he’s associated into as many blog posts, podcast interviews, and tweets as possible.

Instructions unclear, accidentally started reading Gerard instead.

Why would I even want to learn anything from the French? As the article points out, they can't even outcompete China, a place well known for its free speech and low taxation. French language doesn't even have a word for entrepreneur.

I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones' embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google "chatgpt strawberry" and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you're still streered to marketing material.

Either way, I'm looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.

They have successfully convinced me they are HIPPA compliant, yet simultaneously they've convinced me they are not HIPAA compliant.

The stretching is just so blatant. People who train neural networks do not write a bunch of tokens and weights. They take a corpus of training data and run a training program to generate the weights. That's why it is the training program and the corpus that should be considered the source form of the program. If either of these can't be made available in a way that allows redistribution of verbatim and modified versions, it can't be open source. Even if I have a powerful server farm and a list of data sources for Llama 3, I can't replicate the model myself without committing copyright infringement (neither could Facebook for that matter, and that's not an entirely separate issue).

There are large collections of freely licensed and public domain media that could theoretically be used to train a model, but that model surely wouldn't be as big as the proprietary ones. In some sense truly open source AI does exist and has for a long time, but that's not the exciting thing OSI is lusting after, is it?

I get the gist, but also it's kinda hard to come up with a better alternative. A simple "being wrong" doesn't exactly communicate it either. I don't think "hallucination" is a perfect word for the phenomenon of "a statistically probable sequence of language tokens forming a factually incorrect claim" by any means, but in terms of the available options I find it pretty good.

I don't think the issue here is the word, it's just that a lot of people think the machines are smart when they're not. Not anthropomorphizing the machines is a battle that was lost no later than the time computer data representation devices were named "memory", so I don't think that's really the issue here either.

As a side note, I've seen cases of people (admittedly, mostly critics of AI in the first place) call anything produced by an LLM a hallucination regardless of truthfulness.

Condolences to the nations of Mali and Anguilla to have your TLD associated with this crap.

Movie villain: "Society bad. Solution: murder everyone."
Most media literate viewer: "He's right, society does suck, therefore we should murder everyone."

Not much, what's autoplag with you!

It's short for automatic plagiarism machine.

It's the least of this thing's problems, but I've had it with the fucking teasers and "coming soon" announcements. You woke me up for this? Shut the fuck up, finish your product and release it and we'll talk (assuming your product isn't inherently a pile of shit like AI to begin with). Teaser more like harasser. Do not waste my time and energy telling me about stuff that doesn't exist and for the love of all that is holy do not try and make it a cute little ARG puzzle.

I think it's weird that "hallucination" would be considered a cute euphemism. Would you trust something that's perpetually tripping balls and confidently announcing whatever comes to them in a dream? To me that sounds worse than merely being wrong.

I don't play TCGs much* but I'm fascinated by them and have friends who play, so I hear some of the big controversies.

In my view the Magic player base is looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. Power creep is real, but certainly not new. A median MtG card from 20 or 15 years ago will beat the shit out of the median card from 25 or 30 years ago**. Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

Knowing the kind of shit that goes on in YGO, Magic's trajectory seems downright conservative. Then again, a comment Iheard about that game recently that resonated with me was "the only thing more intricate than the OTK combos in this game is the fucking banlist".

Again comparing MtG and YGO, at least I see a healthy ecosystem of alternate formats in Magic. For the latter, the serious contenders for actually played formats are "standard" and "standard but 20 years ago". Maybe commander is the main way to play Magic nowadays, but at least it's not just a choice between two games with the same mechanics (modulo a couple of extra deck summon types) but different banlists.

I might be an outsider, but I quite like the special format cards. The crossovers are mostly meh, but the Secret Lair series includes some really cool cards like these snow lands, the social media goblins, this magnificent goat, and my favourite MtG card art ever.

I don't doubt that the game has enshittified, but for this one I might hazard a "it took you until now to realize"? At least usual competitive Magic isn't an eternal format so power creep is not quite so guaranteed.

I don't meant to defend WotC with any of this. Fuck them and their interpretation of the "open" game license they wrote, but seem to suddenly not like. Just to me it's a bit funny how fans of the OG trading card game seem to be really late to noticing the problems inherent to the medium.

I have played Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! casually, but mostly in the form of ancient video game adaptations. Also Pokémon TCG, but with a "one booster pack every two weeks" kind of kid's allowance with no internet access in those days.

** Specifically median because of early broken ass bs like power nine

I expected the same, except the names being Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and/or Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.

Wait, he's over fifty?

I knew he's older than he pretends to be but I still expected him to be closer to my age than my dad's.

Can't even "OK boomer" him properly anymore. A millennial might at least take offence but the only bit of generational emotion a mid (phrasing intended) GenXer like him has likely neglected to suppress is euphoria from someone recognizing gen x was ever a thing.

You're underselling it. I see the Ukranian poster very politely telling the Russian missile and drone supplier company employee to shut up and handle his grievances through their legal department and see how that works out for them. All while he continues to listen to the daily barrage of missile and drone strikes in his neighborhood and wonder how many of those weapons are running Linux.

Honestly I'm so used to deconstructions of the basic good races vs. evil races dichotomy that when I joined my first long form DnD campaign about a year ago, I ended up having a chat about it with our DM where he had to explain to me that the orcs were intended to be an obviously "we are evil, we are the enemy, you are supposed to fight and kill us" type of enemy. There's been some more nuance since then, but even since we've moved to the next campaign with new characters, mine is once again the "wait, maybe we should listen hear out the chaotic evil demonic minions and find out why they suddenly decided to try and invade our lands" type of character.

Best of luck!

"I want to speak to the manager" energy.

I don't want nazis there either. At least on fedi you can defederate from them.