Chas Emerick

@cemerick.bsky.social

115 Followers 55 Following

Making PDFs reliable data sources, talking about PDFs @pdfminute, former Papers We Love / PWLConf co-organizer. Topics: PLT, distsys, future-computing, politics, policy, "tech ethics", and annoying shitposts. Signal: @cemerick.30 https://www.snowtide.com

setting the default language on das Handy to Deutsch

a parallella board

A "buff chad" meme, with orange OCaml logos overlaying each head of the Chad's abdominal heads. Top memetext: "When you start using a language with a strong type discipline, you won't need to tell anyone…" Bottom memetext: "…there will be signs"

screaming tennis ball with meme text "LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOO"

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

"Strange Loop’s rationale is cowardly and irresponsible, but what gets me more is the disingenuousness of people who say that Yarvin’s speech should be censored. Angel investor Alex Payne wrote last Thursday that Yarvin’s political opinions weren’t the problem but that Yarvin’s “support of racism and slavery” crossed the line into unprotected “hate” speech. Payne gave no examples of such hate speech, but others pointed to Yarvin’s 2009 celebration of Carlyle’s abstract celebration of slavery. This and other Yarvin pieces certainly reveal him to be a bigot at the very least, but it’s a major reach to call them hate speech, since they’re about as intimidating as skim milk. Calling it such insults those who suffer under the very real and violent hate speech of actual hate groups."

from @BaptisteDupuch on twitter: Finally listened the 1st episode: overall really good, you are really great at selling PDFs 😄 (the stability argument got me), I hope you’ll also talk about the technical aspects in future episodes (I have as much trauma as admiration). Maybe nitpicking about the audio quality.