Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

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  • 91 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The algorithm assigns weights to nodes in a neural network. These weights are derived by statistical association of tokens in the training data after they have been cleaned.

    That is so enormously far from how we think humans learn (you don’t teach a kid to understand theory of mind by plopping them in front of the Gutenberg project and saying good luck, and yet they learn to explain theory of mind problems all the same) that it is just comically farcial to assume something similar is happening underneath.

    It is very interesting that llms are able to appear to be conversational but claiming they have some sort of mind with an understanding of maths is as ridiculous as suggesting a chess bot understands the Pauli exclusion principle because it never moves two pieces into the same physical space.



  • You’re arguing against a position I didn’t put forward. Also

    Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can’t we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You’re both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true

    This is what excessive reduction does to a mfer. That is just such a hysterically absurd take.




  • Yeah this is the exact criticism. They recombine language pieces without really doing language. The end result looks like language, but it lacks any of the important characteristics of language such as meaning and intention.

    If I say “Two plus two is four” I am communicating my belief about mathematics.

    If an llm emits “two plus two is four” it is outputting a stochastically selected series of tokens linked by probabilities derived from training data. If the statement is true or false then that is accidental.

    Hence, stochastic parrot.


  • Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

    It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

    Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.





  • you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

    Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

    By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.


  • It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

    Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

    Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

    So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.


  • Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

    Majority of people: do horrible thing

    Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

    Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

    you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.


  • I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

    Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.