OmnipotentEntity

joined 2 years ago
[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 2 points 9 hours ago

With Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk all leading Trump around with a $100 bill on a fishing line, you'd have to be profoundly naive or dishonest to actually take the stance that Republicans will do anything about Big Tech.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The hottest year on record so far.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

A serial web story by Wildbow named "Pact" has a pretty interesting soft magic system with a decent amount of depth.

Description of Magic SystemAll characters who can use magic in the story are not able to lie on penalty of their magic power being greatly reduced. The magic system is based around tiny spirits who listen to and judge people. There are powers in 3s, power in performance, powers in name, yet despite this the magic system still feels ad hoc, like you can make magic happen that you would not normally be capable of if you are just smart enough, poetic enough, and persuasive enough to the spirits...

Magical beings feel Eldritch, actively dangerous, and typically very clever. The ones who are clever typically have very good mental models of what makes humans tick, yet clearly do not fall under the same rules.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 13 points 1 month ago

It pisses off liberals. Literally the only thing that matters to him.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 5 points 1 month ago

It caused my brother to stop talking to me. He doesn't understand how ChatGPT works, so he's trying to woo his way to GenAI by layering some sort of fake ass natural language computation system on top of the spicy auto complete.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 0 points 1 month ago

I think you're reading more intent in my post than was actually present. I'm not denying we did genocide to 100 million natives. All I'm denying is that Jackson specifically is significantly worse than the historically reasonable alternatives to the position. Had (for instance) John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe doctrine and a big proponent of western expansion, won the presidency, I do not doubt that a similar overall trajectory would have taken place. Maybe we wouldn't have specifically had a trail of tears moment, but there's more to the genocide of native americans than just the trail of tears.

And this is absolving responsibility of all the people who maintained slavery, which one could argue is even worse than jim crow.

How so? I believe you're arguing in good faith, but I honestly don't see how you come to this conclusion from what I wrote?

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I'm not really trying to weigh and decide if 6000+ deaths and forcible removal of 100k+ people from their homes is better or worse than 100 or so years of systemic oppression followed by more, quieter oppression. Instead, I'm looking at this from the perspective of alternatives.

After the Civil War we very nearly had a moment when we could have maybe did something real for racial equality beyond anything we've seen even up to the present day. The Freeman's Bureau was fighting for wages for former slaves, and was generally a force for working class empowerment. Black congressmen were already being voted into office rapidly. If it were left to do its work, it might even have helped to innoculate the Irish- and Italian-Americans against future union busting on Black/White racial lines a few decades down the line.

Instead, after only about a year, Andrew Johnson started fighting and dismantling the Bureau, placing the former slaveowners back into a de facto master/slave relationship with their former slaves, giving the old Southern Democrats back their political power, and generally restoring the status quo as much as possible. The Bureau itself lasted only 5 or 6 years, don't remember. The KKK rose up because reconstruction wasn't there anymore to prevent it, because the Democrats wanted so bad to just put all of the states back in the union and go back to bad old days, and so on.

That was never a realistic moment that I know of in American history where people against war with the native tribes of this land had outsized power and influence. Jackson completely ignoring the Supreme Court's ruling was awful, but while the ruling was grounded in good moral and legal principles, it was, like it or not, extremely unpopular. There wasn't an entire party with a supermajority in Congress that could have kept up the pressure on this issue.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Andrew Jackson was Trail of Tears, but I actually think Andrew Johnson was arguably worse. He was Lincoln's Democrat vice president (he was brought on to help "balance the ticket" instead of sticking with his strongly abolitionist first term VP Hannibal Hamlin), who started dismantling reconstruction and giving the power back to the former slaveowners.

You can pretty much lay Jim Crow at his feet.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 3 points 2 months ago

Which is why the slang for diamonds is "ice." They feel quite cold when you touch them because they have such high thermal conductivity.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

It wouldn't solve the world's problems. It would simply make China the preeminent superpower, and cause a horrific environmental (and humanitarian) disaster.

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 23 points 2 months ago

LLMs are bad for the uses they've been recently pushed for, yes. But this is legitimately a very good use of them. This is natural language processing, within a narrow scope with a specific intention. This is exactly what it can be good at. Even if does have a high false negative rate, that's still thousands and thousands of true positive cases that were addressed quickly and cheaply, and that a human auditor no longer needs to touch.

 

Abstract:

Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs. Specifically, we define a formal world where hallucina- tion is defined as inconsistencies between a computable LLM and a computable ground truth function. By employing results from learning theory, we show that LLMs cannot learn all of the computable functions and will therefore always hal- lucinate. Since the formal world is a part of the real world which is much more complicated, hallucinations are also inevitable for real world LLMs. Furthermore, for real world LLMs constrained by provable time complexity, we describe the hallucination-prone tasks and empirically validate our claims. Finally, using the formal world framework, we discuss the possible mechanisms and efficacies of existing hallucination mitigators as well as the practical implications on the safe deployment of LLMs.

 

You might know the game under the name Star Control 2. It's a wonderful game that involves wandering around deep space, meeting aliens, and navigating a sprawling galaxy while trying to save the people of Earth, who are being kept under a planetary shield.

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