• 20 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • That was actually my biggest disappointment with my degree - the course didn’t teach anywhere near enough for my tastes. However I would hope that I was an outlier in that respect!

    From my own experiences, and those of my own social circles, you’re in the majority and its not even close. I think a lot of schools are both bad at teaching, and failing to account for the changes in the world since the internet. A lot of schools seem to want to stick to the bare minimum without changing methods or content, which unfortunately makes sense (financially), given capitalism and our current culture around schooling.


  • You seem to be missing what I’m saying. Maybe a biological comparison would help:

    An octopus is extrmely smart, moreso than even most mammels. It can solve basic logic puzzles, learn and navigate complex spaces, and plan and execute different and adaptive stratgies to humt prey. In spite of this, it can’t talk or write. No matter what you do, training it, trying to teach it, or even trying to develop an octopus specific language, it will not be able to understand language. This isn’t because the octopus isn’t smart, its because its evolved for the purpose of hunting food and hiding from predators. Its brain has developed to understand how physics works and how to recognize patterns, but it just doesn’t have the ability to understand how to socialize, and nothing can change that short of rewiring its brain. Hand it a letter and it’ll try and catch fish with it rather than even considering trying to read it.

    AI is almost the reverse of this. An LLM has “evolved” (been trained) to write stuff that sounds good, but has little emphasis on understanding what it writes. The “understanding” is more about patterns in writting rather than underlying logic. This means that if the LLM encounters something that isn’t standard language, it will “flail” and start trying to apply what it knows, regardless of how well it applies. In the chess example, this might be, for example, just trying to respond with the most common move, regardless of if it can be played. Ultimately, no matter what you input into it, an LLM is trying to find and replicate patterns in language, not underlying logic.


  • The LLM doesn’t have to imagine a board, if you feed it the rules of chess and the dimensions of the board it should be able to “play in its head”.

    That assumes it knows how to play chess. It doesn’t. It know how to have a passable conversation. Asking it to play chess is like putting bread into a blender and being confused when it doesn’t toast.

    But human working memory is shit compared to virtually every other animal. This and processing speed is supposed to be AI’s main draw.

    Processing speed and memory in the context of writing. Give it a bunch of chess boards or chess notation and it has no idea which it needs to remember, nonetheless where/how to move. If you want an AI to play chess, you train it on chess gameplay, not books and Reddit comments. AI isn’t a general use tool.






  • Lemmy was originally founded by political extremists who wantted a space for their politics (tankies.) Its since grown past that, but that inflence is still present in many ways, most prominently in the influences of .ml. On top of this, politics is something inflammatory (and thus engaging) that affects everyone. Because its both engaging and broad-appeal, its going to be something everyone talks about. On the other hand, many niches, aside from being niche are often less inherently engaging (IE talking about a finished TV show). This makes it very hard to get the critical mass needed for a community to snowball into relevance. This means that (effectively) all you’re left with is the political communities and a couple niches that are broad appeal enough and have active enough users to be stable.











  • Bears are predators evolved to hunt large game, primarily with brute force (unlike something like a big cat, which relies much more on ambushes).

    Gorrilas, as tough as they are, survive through intelligence. This means avoiding tough fights, and when absolutely needed, fighting as a troop rather than individualy.

    So bear. But…

    Does the Gorilla get time to prepare?

    The one advantage gorillas have is their intelligence. If both animals are given training, or tools, then I could see the gorilla potentially winning - mostly because a bear will struggle to get any use out of either, whereas a gorilla could be trained to fight much more effectively and possibly even make/use weapons.