Notices by scmbradley (scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz)

@christianp how long until we have custom emojis of them?

@christianp this one in particular is hurting my brain

The Addams family meet up with a Navy officer.

The daughter says "hello Commodore".

Wednesday, it's Captain.

@mcc most software documentation employs an unreliable narrator, so why not let them experiment with other literary tropes?

Folks, I'm turning 40 later this year and I need some tips about what's a good midlife crisis. I'm not keen on your classics like get divorced, buy a fast car or take up golf, so I'm looking for alternatives? I'm thinking maybe start a podcast?

I've almost certainly posted about this before but Indian metal band Bloodywood did a tour called "Raj Against The Machine" and that is some top tier punning.

@steter @Nickiquote the last two world cups have been in Russia and Qatar so... Uh... Yeah

@technomancy @mattly no that's fair. My interaction with js is pretty unusual in that at work I'm primarily using it as a scripting language within a much larger project and I literally cannot bring in any packages into the VM. So I interact with vanilla js all the time, so the inadequacies and rough edges there really stick out to me.

@dalias @Swedneck @futurebird I didn't say they weren't important, just that they weren't part of my understanding of intelligence.

But I think you're right that there's an awkward tension in the AI industry between wanting to say that they are creating genuine intelligent agents, but also not wanting to acknowledge the moral agency of their creations.

@dalias @Swedneck @futurebird I don't think having offspring, being the outcome of evolution or being embodied are necessary for intelligence. All intelligent things we have observed so far appear to also have those features, but that's accidental, in my view. Making it true by stipulation that LLMs can't be intelligent doesn't help the case of the LLM critic. "Ok fine if that's how you define intelligence then the AI isn't intelligent, but it's still got all these great helpful properties" is what they'd respond, and we're no further forward. Because the actual argument we should be having is whether LLMs do in fact have these useful desirable properties. And, for the most part, they don't. There's no value to arguing over the abstract question of "intelligence" or "consciousness".

@Swedneck @futurebird but isn't the same true of humans? We know it's just electrical signals and action potentials in the brain and nervous system. But somehow, mysteriously, that collection of bits and pieces we understand gives rise to consciousness and agency.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that LLMs are conscious, I'm arguing that consciousness is hard and the critique that LLMs aren't conscious or "don't understand" things is the wrong way to criticise them.

@futurebird @apophis @wmd @jandi @bri_seven ok kids, today were going to learn how to quit vim

@baconandcoconut isn't this just a book?

Tired: marketplace of ideas
Wired: repair cafe of ideas

Normally I'm a pretty relaxed "let a thousand flowers bloom" kind of cooking guy, but this just seems too much.

@cwebber additional fifth poll options: I've not played it but I've bookmarked this toot so I can play it once I'm on my laptop.

@julesh Ive lived in both and I think this is true.

@julesh fiiive gooold sets equipped with two binary operations such that (etc etc)

Lazyweb: if I want to play around with generative art, is processing.org a good option, or are there better choices? Searching for generative art brings up a lot of AI bullshit, and even the pages that do seem to be about creative coding mostly talk about nft bullshit.

Is Nannou any good? What other options are there?

If I had 200 billion dollars, I could give away 50 million dollars a week every week until I die and not run out of money. That seems like, uh too much money?

And I know people with massive networth have most of their assets tied up in stock they own or whatever, but it still feels like if you own more than a hundred billion and you're not giving away life changing amounts of money every week, that's a moral failing.