goldfish crackers ©

@sqc.bsky.social

207 Followers 1736 Following

Mostly lurking, in accordance with the robustness principle. In this house we believe distortionary and redistributive issues should be separated, the notion of a "fiduciary" is essential to the future of democracy, and fascism must be destroyed.

"When a chatbot isn’t actively responding to your prompt, it sits around waiting, doing absolutely nothing. Not thinking, feeling, experiencing self-awareness or consciousness or anything else. Until your prompt comes in, the chatbot is just a big fancy recipe, vacantly waiting for someone to do something with it. When your prompt does arrive, the chatbot merely translates it to a number, pipes this number through a giant formula, then translates the resulting number back to text. That’s all."

“It’s got to ask uss a quesstion, my preciouss, yes, yess,
yesss. Jusst one more question to guess, yes, yess,” said
Gollum.
But Bilbo simply could not think of any question with
that nasty wet cold thing sitting next to him, and pawing
and poking him. He scratched himself, he pinched
himself; still he could not think of anything.
“Ask us! ask us!” said Gollum.
Bilbo pinched himself and slapped himself; he gripped
on his little sword; he even felt in his pocket with his
other hand. There he found the ring he had picked up in
the passage and forgotten about.
“What have I got in my pocket?” he said aloud. He was
talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and
he was frightfully upset.
“Not fair! not fair!” he hissed. “It isn’t fair, my
precious, is it, to ask us what it’s got in its nassty little
pocketses?”

From Turing's Computing Machinery and Intellligence paper: "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to
which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption
that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the
mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances,
but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one
then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data
and general principles."

A passage from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy:

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur, "It's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er [...] I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

A graph showing AI capability as a function of time, with human performance also shown.

screenshot of the famous tweet:

"biggie was fat
tupac was a rapist
xxx beat women

accept it, at the end of the day I only care about the music"

a screenshot of a holocaust denial meme I found on facebook

A screenshot of a post I wrote:

"These guys remind me a lot of doomsday preppers. The dude with guns and canned food reserves who has been fantasizing about being king of the wasteland - his paranoia redeemed as prudence, the normies forced to recognize his foresight - is unlikely to be of much use in some actual apocalypse."

A talk slide depicting frames from Lord of the Rings and The Wizard of Oz.

a photo of Jim Downey from the famous "Jeffrey Epstein? The financier?" meme.

An excerpt from Justin Clarke Doane's "Morality and Mathematics" (2012):

"It is true that the above account of the contents of our arithmetic beliefs will not suffice to explain all apparent arithmetic convergence.24 Consider, for example, the theorem that Pell’s Equation, x^2 – 2y^2 = 1, has infinitely many solutions. Different historical figures appear to have independently arrived this result again and again, despite their mutual isolation. Whatever
the precise content of the theorems they proved, it cannot easily be identified with a logical truth. Unlike “2 + 2 = 4,” there are no surrogate logical truths in this case. And, unlike contemporary mathematicians, premodern mathematicians rarely proceeded from explicit axioms."

An exerpt from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:

"Moore famously claimed that naturalists were guilty of what he called the “naturalistic fallacy.” In particular, Moore accused anyone who infers that X is good from any proposition about X’s natural properties of having committed the naturalistic fallacy. Assuming that being pleasant is a natural property, for example, someone who infers that drinking beer is good from the premise that drinking beer is pleasant is supposed to have committed the naturalistic fallacy. The intuitive idea is that evaluative conclusions require at least one evaluative premise—purely factual premises about the naturalistic features of things do not entail or even support evaluative conclusions. Moore himself focused on goodness, but if the argument works for goodness then it seems likely to generalize to other moral properties."

Text from a Joseph Heath article called "What Libertarians and Pedophiles Have in Common" by Joseph Heath. Text:

When it comes to the economy, libertarian arguments always have the same flavour. For example, some people don’t like public health insurance, they want the freedom to choose their own private insurance. And yet the kind of people who make this argument are always the kind of people who would actually go out and buy health insurance. And so on.

Another joke to wrap things up: I’m not sure where I heard this one, probably a New Yorker cartoon. It involves a rich society woman in Manhattan complaining about the poor. “I don’t see why they are always complaining about having no money,” she says, “I often go days at a time without spending any money at all.” At this point her husband interjects and says “My dear, that’s because your driver pays for everything.”

The moral of the story is that once you have a sufficient amount of money, it start to become invisible. You have so much of it that you lose the ability to see the world through the eyes of someone who lacks it. The same is true with respect to self-control. Members of the self-control aristocracy have so much of it that they take it for granted. As a result, they have great difficulty seeing the world through the eyes of someone who lacks it. And so they spend their days advocating political ideas that would, in many cases, only benefit members of their narrow social class, and yet this never even occurs to them.

A screeshot of me replying to someone else.

Someone else:

FWIW I think this isn't quite it: they're superior *if you know what you're looking for*. The jump that embeddings/LLMs provide is that you don't necessarily need to quite know what you're looking for to find something, so long as you can describe it closely. Which is valuable, and not illiterate.

Me:

* if you know what you're looking for, and your knowledge is explicitly representable in formal language, and the system you're querying supports logic-based queries.

This is why I don't like the "LLMs are for people who can't grep" idea. Most of our knowledge is tacit! Most info isn't organized!

The wikipedia page for Hans Reichenbach, notable German philosopher who ended up living in the U.S.

a picture of the abstract of the paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10120732/

paper abstract

A screenshot of a tweet by Elon Musk falsely accusing Jhoan Boada of assaulting a police officer.