merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on YouTube "search results" 2 days ago:
It’s like it just gives up after about 8 results. “These 8 results don’t contain what you want? I give up. Here, just watch one of these videos instead.”
Screw you, just show me the rest of the results, I swear it’s in the top 30 results.
- Comment on YouTube "search results" 2 days ago:
You search for “blah”, Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again “blah but not foo” and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you’d only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.
If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor’s search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 4 days ago:
So could tulip bulbs, for a while.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
Can you explain the difference between understanding the question and generating the words that might logically follow?
I mean, it’s pretty obvious. Take someone like Rowan Atkinson whose death has been misreported multiple times. If you ask a computer system “Is Rowan Atkinson Dead?” you want it to understand the question and give you a yes/no response based on actual facts in its database. A well designed program would know to prioritize recent reports as being more authoritative than older ones. It would know which sources to trust, and which not to trust.
An LLM will just generate text that is statistically likely to follow the question. Because there have been many hoaxes about his death, it might use that as a basis and generate a response indicating he’s dead. But, because those hoaxes have also been debunked many times, it might use that as a basis instead and generate a response indicating that he’s alive.
So, if he really did just die and it was reported in reliable fact-checked news sources, the LLM might say “No, Rowan Atkinson is alive, his death was reported via a viral video, but that video was a hoax.”
but why should we assume that shows some lack of understanding
Because we know what “understanding” is, and that it isn’t simply finding words that are likely to appear following the chain of words up to that point.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
But no “r” sound.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
Oh yeah, I forgot about how they add a “v” sound to it.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
You can even drop the “a” and “g”. There isn’t even “intelligence” here. It’s not thinking, it’s just spicy autocomplete.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
How do you pronounce “Mrs” so that there’s an “r” sound in it?
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
And people are trusting these things to do jobs / parts of jobs that humans used to do.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
Imagine asking a librarian “What was happening in Los Angeles in the Summer of 1989?” and that person fetching you … That’s modern LLMs in a nutshell.
I agree, but I think you’re still being too generous to LLMs. A librarian who fetched all those things would at least understand the question. An LLM is just trying to generate words that might logically follow the words you used.
IMO, one of the key ideas with the Chinese Room is that there’s an assumption that the computer / book in the Chinese Room experiment has infinite capacity in some way. So, no matter what symbols are passed to it, it can come up with an appropriate response. But, obviously, while LLMs are incredibly huge, they can never be infinite. As a result, they can often be “fooled” when they’re given input that semantically similar to a meme, joke or logic puzzle. The vast majority of the training data that matches the input is the meme, or joke, or logic puzzle. LLMs can’t reason so they can’t distinguish between “this is just a rephrasing of that meme” and “this is similar to that meme but distinct in an important way”.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
then continue to shill it for use cases it wasn’t made for either
The only thing it was made for is “spicy autocomplete”.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
If you’ve ever heard Germans try to pronounce “squirrel”, it’s hilarious. I’ve known many extremely bilingual Germans who couldn’t pronounce it at all. It came out sounding roughly like “squall”, or they’d over-pronounce the “r” and it would be “squi-rall”
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
No, I was on vacation on Earth, not Proxima Centari 6.
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
So do I.
So, what I think happened was that I knew roughly where my stuff was. When I went to play in the waves I basically went straight out from my towel. Because of the rip currents I was being pushed sideways while in the waves, but I mostly kept trying to correct for that so that I didn’t wander too far from my stuff. I am pretty sure about that, because that’s what I always do at the beach. I always hate being pushed around by rip currents and am really worried about getting caught in the undertow so I try to stick to the same part of the beach.
When I got tossed by the huge wave(s) I did end up getting moved sideways. I remember that because I remember how out of control I was. But, I suspect it wasn’t too far. So, when I went to search for my stuff I wasn’t searching the entire beach, just a small section of it.
I think I remembered what colours my beach towel was, so I think I just wandered that section of beach, squinting so I could see a bit better, looking for a towel with roughly the right colours and with nobody on it. Then when I thought I had the right one I crouched down to see if I could recognize the bag I brought.
I don’t think I asked for help, which would have been the smart option. But, I was a shy kid in a foreign country so I am pretty sure I didn’t do that.
But really, I don’t remember. I just have a clear memory of how helpless I felt, and a vague memory of wandering up and down the beach. The rest is just reconstructing how I think it probably happened based on vague memories and what I know about myself.
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
To each where own?
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
Yep, a good idea, but if you use them when playing in the ocean and are hit by a big wave, they can be knocked off.
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
If I was at home, I always knew where I had some backup glasses. But yeah, wake up at a friend’s house or something and you’re screwed.
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
- I can wake up and glance at the time instead of having to lift something up and put it centimetres from my face to tell the time.
- I can do sports without the glasses falling off, getting mashed into my face, etc.
- I look a lot better, with a -13 prescription, my glasses were heavy and thick
- My nose and ears aren’t in pain from carrying the weight of my glasses all the time.
- I’m not having to constantly adjust my glasses whenever my nose sweats a bit.
- I’m not completely blind any time I have to take off the glasses, like when I take a shower or go in a pool, or especially swim in the ocean where there are big waves.
- I’m not utterly helpless because I’m blind if I lose my glasses. If you’re blind without your glasses, and your glasses aren’t where you expect, you can’t really use your eyesight to find them.
- I don’t have to deal with all the problems of using and potentially losing contacts.
- …
For me, before I got laser surgery, I was once swimming in the ocean at a very big and popular beach. I was wearing contacts because obviously wearing glasses in the water is next to impossible. I got hit by a big wave, tossed around, and lost my contacts. Now I was almost completely blind, in a foreign country where I knew almost nobody, and trying to find my beach towel and bag among thousands of others. I actually can’t remember how I resolved that problem, but I do remember the massive stress and panic being blind like that caused. When I got back from the trip, I got my eyes fixed within a year.
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
their
- Comment on Anon considers LASIK 1 week ago:
Not just that, but you’re absolutely blind without your glasses. Someone sexily takes them off to look at you sexily, you’re now squinting and can barely see their face. You wake up in the morning and either put on your glasses or pick up your phone and put it right next to your face otherwise you can’t see it.
There’s a reason why any scene where an actor wears glasses they have essentially zero prescription, unless the goal is to make someone look nerdy. (Aside: Stephen Root is an incredible actor!) In fact, it gets even more ridiculous. There are pictures of Brad Pitt wearing glasses going all the way back to the 1990s. But, when he’s in a movie role he’s wearing contacts and then has zero-prescription glasses on.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, and it sometimes makes sense just from an acting PoV, so you can forgive it. It’s hard to fit all the characters and cameras in a scene if someone lives in a typical cramped apartment. So, like in the Friends TV show, none of them has jobs that should indicate they’re rich. But, the sets they use for the apartments suggest they have huge apartments. In that show, Joey’s apartment isn’t beautifully furnished, it looks fairly cheap. But, it’s really spacious for NYC. But, it seems like it’s all about giving the director the freedom to frame shots to get everybody involved, and to allow characters to move around.
OTOH, A recent movie, “Black Bag” was terrible for this. I hated the movie because it was just impossible to believe. This guy, who’s supposed to be a British intelligence officer (i.e. living on government wages). His wife is also an intelligence officer. Yet, somehow, they live in this condo that looks like it would be about £5m to buy, or about £5000/month. Since the plot revolves around whether one of them is a traitor and is selling state secrets, it seems pretty obvious it’s this guy or his wife because no civil servant is living in a place like that on just a government salary.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 2 weeks ago:
I remember that from S1, but it doesn’t show up in S2, does it? Maybe they took it down?
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 2 weeks ago:
If you’re a Baron, maybe.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 2 weeks ago:
It’s not just Home Alone for me. Almost every show I watch, I look at the places where the characters live with immense envy.
Lord of the Rings: Man, I’d love to live in that hobbit house. That looks incredibly cozy.
Daredevil: That is such a nice loft, and it has such great light. It’s unfair that a guy who’s blind doesn’t truly appreciate his great apartment because he can’t see.
Futurama: Fry’s a delivery boy and he lives in a robot’s closet, and it’s still better than where I live.
Only Murders in the Building: NYC and these guys have those kinds of amazing places? (To be fair, this is a major plot element of the 4th season)
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 2 weeks ago:
If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.
Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn’t get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.
- Comment on To join Facebook these days, one must record a video selfie 3 weeks ago:
On one hand
C’mon, with a bit of effort you could have made this one into 5 paragraphs each one sentence long too!
- Comment on Let's play this game again 3 weeks ago:
It sounds like you’re saying “reaction” is something that happens in the head, while I’m saying “reaction” is something that happens in the body.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 3 weeks ago:
Would your reaction time change? Maybe the neurons in your brain would be going at super speed, but maybe your peripheral nerves would still be slow. So, the time between hearing something and the signal getting to your brain would still take ages. Or, the light would hit your eyes, but it would be a long time before that was processed into a signal your ultra-fast brain could use.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 3 weeks ago:
I once read a news article about a woman who had Eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory). It made her life shitty. She was never “in the moment”, because everything triggered a memory. She could never forgive anybody for their past slights, because they were always fresh in her memory. It wasn’t the ability to recall anything you wanted whenever you wanted to. Instead it was the condition where you constantly had detailed memories flooding in when something you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, felt, etc. triggered a memory, or a dozen memories.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 3 weeks ago:
I like to imagine that this is what it’s actually like for The Flash, or Quicksilver or another speedster:
Sure, you can move super fast, but to do that, your thinking also has to speed up to handle that fast movement. So, it’s more like everything else in the universe slows down except you. Now, it’s still an amazing power, but think about those times when The Flash uses his super speed to build a brick wall nearly instantly, or to read every book in the library in the blink of an eye.
To you, building that brick wall takes what feels like a week. You’re running at what feels like 30 km/h to get a handful of bricks. It feels like it takes you about 20 minutes to get to the place with the bricks. You run them back to the place you’re building the wall, you put them into the wall. Then you run another 20 minutes to get the next load of bricks. While you’re doing this boring wall building, you can’t chat with anybody, you can’t listen to a podcast, you’re just stuck doing manual labour for what feels like a week without any distractions or entertainment.
If you speed-read every book in a library, that feels like it takes a month. Hopefully you like reading dry reference books, or whatever it is you’re reading, because that’s all you get to do for however long it takes. Someone watching you might see you flipping through the pages in fractions of a second. But, to you, it still feels like it takes 2 minutes or so per page, and that’s if the material isn’t difficult to understand.
Maybe super speed needs to come with super autism so that you get really engaged in these tasks and don’t mind sinking what feels like days, weeks or months into one monotonous thing.
