Profile pic is from Jason Box, depicting a projection of Arctic warming to the year 2100 based on current trends.

  • 0 Posts
  • 197 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle







  • I think the biggest problem is when one partner believes that the other is condemned for eternity in some way (not just a hell, but also other forms like reincarnation to a lower state or anything else deemed bad)…and either they spend the relationship trying to change the other person and probably ruining it, or worse, they accept that fate for someone they claim to love.

    As an atheist, I don’t have that concern that my loved one is doomed to torment somehow, I just have the here and now to try and make their life with me as pleasant as I can. There is the issue of whether or not an atheist could live with someone whose rational is governed by beliefs that affect their judgement, either like mentioned above trying to convert them for their sake, or in other ways where religion steers them vs. having their own thoughts. But for what I think is a large majority, religious people mostly go through the motions if any just to fill some subconscious uncertainty and it’s not enough to threaten a relationship with a differing viewpoint.

    The human brain is very good at compartmentalizing things to help us get through the day.



  • Think of federation as potential redundancy for data and discussion. Individually an instance of whatever platform you’re using can be great, bad, or start off nice and get worse, but as long as there is federation of the good parts of communication among the people, there’s going to be somewhere else you can go if your first source goes downhill. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than a single location where users are at the mercy of whoever runs and controls it.


  • LLMs can be good at openings. Not because it is thinking through the rules or planning strategies, but because opening moves are likely in most general training data from various sources. It’s copying the most probable reaction to your move, based on lots of documentation. This can of course break down when you stray from a typical play style, as it has less to choose from in the options of probability, and only a few moves in there won’t be any more since there’s a huge number of possible moves.

    I.e., there’s no calculations involved. When you play a LLM at chess, you’re playing a list of common moves in history.

    An even simpler example would be to tell the LLM that its last move was illegal. Even knowing the rules you just told it, it will agree and take it back. This comes from being trained to give satisfying replies to a human prompt.






  • That’s even more why it feels like someone new in the company stepping in and questioning why there isn’t something in play officially if there’s interest in freeware/open source. Someone who talked to the lawyers first to make sure no right were signed away yet. That may be very pessimistic and conspiratorial, but if there isn’t any reason to stop someone else’s work on something, why would they send one? I don’t know a lot about copyrights and trademarks, but I do think there is a point where if you aren’t using an asset and others are interested, you shouldn’t be able to just hold it under lock and key and do nothing with it. I think patents are like that, you have like 20 years or something protected to do something, and then it’s open(?) Again, I’m not sure.


  • Any reason given? Not that they have to give one, it’s still their property to do what they want with it. I would keep an eye on them and if they somehow in the future come out with something very similar, I hope there are good records of the past years of work and discussion. Since it was going to be free and not for profit, not really a case for lost income, but there must be some laws to protect people working in good faith with a trademark knowingly who get their ideas stolen FOR profit. If that happens.




  • Free will is something where people talk about it as a binary thing, but it can be both the ability to make choices, yet very deterministic at the core. If someone asks you to think of your favorite color, in your mind you visualize what that is, and it’s your preference and choice for whatever reason you like it best. But the deterministic part begins when you wonder when you made that decision. Can you even narrow down the instant when it popped into your mind as the preferred choice, or what occurred before it was made? At some point there was a triggering of thought and memories from the question asked that resulted in you thinking of your color, but when did it go from predictable neuron firings to a choice? There is a gray area there.

    For what it’s worth, while I enjoyed some of the later Terminator movies for themselves, the saga ended with T2 in my mind. Where that future led could be just as dark, as someone else could come up with their version of Skynet eventually, like any other technology, but we are left to ponder that on our own. The actual previous future is gone thanks to the efforts made, and we’re allowed to try again.