Psh, I only use the Flushvalve Pro Vowel Pack. You can’t beat them in terms of value for your money.

The bill mandates safety testing of advanced AI models and the imposition of “guardrails” to ensure they can’t slip out of the control of their developers or users and can’t be employed to create “biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.” It’s been endorsed by some AI developers but condemned by others who assert that its constraints will drive AI developers out of California.

Man, if I can’t even build homemade nuclear weapons, what CAN I do? That’s it, I’m moving to Nevada!

It’s so wild how ChatGPT and this “style” of AI literally didn’t exist two years ago yet we’re all expected to believe it’s this essential, indispensable, irreplaceable tool that people can’t live without, and actually you’re the meanie for suggesting people do something the exact same way they would have in 2022 instead of using the environmental-disaster spam machine

I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.

Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.

Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well.

This is why I love Perl. Larry Wall has a linguistics background and created the only programming language where you can conjugate variables.

(I know it sounds like I’m making fun of perl here, and I am, but I also legitimately do love perl)

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Not even – it’s a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)

My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”

Clicking through to one of the source articles

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?”

Okay, I’m not a big-brain edtech integration admin, but I seem to recall that like fifteen years ago we had a website that my parents could check to see my grade in math. I feel like this was already a solved problem honestly.

Oh my god, I can’t stop laughing out loud at “women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks,” based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What’s his explanation for why men didn’t do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much

Before the big AI boom, I actually did a project where I used inferkit to generate text for the comedy factor because the unhinged nightmare garbage it spit out was extremely entertaining. I just can’t imagine using chat gpt in the same way, it’s so boring

posts you can hear

ngl his stuff always felt a bit cynical to me, in that it seemed to exist more to say “look, video games can have a deep message!” than it did to just have such a message in the first place. Like it existed more to gesture at the concept of meaningfulness rather than to be meaningful itself.

Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

Ew… stay away from my content, you creep!

Happy birthday! 🍰

If you think of LLMs as being akin to lossy text compression of a set of text, where the compression artifacts happen to also result in grammatical-looking sentences, the question you eventually end up asking is “why is the compression lossy? What if we had the same thing but it returned text from its database without chewing it up first?” and then you realize that you’ve come full circle and reinvented search engines

unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical

Well, if this guy’s quite confident, then I’m sure it’ll all pan out in the end. How hard could symbolic reasoning be, really? Incidentally, I’ve been in a coma since 1970

The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to “promote the progress of … useful arts”. Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law

I’m sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn’t totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I’ll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.

iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved “we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original,” which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I’m not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs

also again I’m not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don’t think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I’m not a libertarian. sorry ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯