I think this is the entire point, you're supposed to subconsciously believe that you're talking to a human, not a matrix multiplication algorithm
262 karma · joined August 25, 2024
I think of `pl.col` as delayed evaluation: I want to do math on the vector of values of this column. But wait, let me just refer to the name of that column and build the expression that I want to compute. Then I hand this expression to Polars and it retrieves the actual values of the columns my expression refers to and executes the operations.
IMO, it would've been great to just do math on strings, like `"Amount" * "Price" - "Losses"`, but programming languages either don't allow math on strings or that math is actually string concatenation, which is not what we want. So we have to wrap the name of the column into some object. This is just an API thing.
As a side note, it's such a pity that there's basically no Polars for the Julia language! There is some wrapper package, but it seems old and unmaintained. I can't seem to properly learn DataFrames.jl for some reason, I always miss Polars when I use Julia.
Basic usage is a no-brainer: write your string, put variables or short expressions in curly braces, add `printf`-style format specifiers after the colon. This is also great because it's a natural extension of `printf`-style format strings.
Of course you can write complicated and confusing f-strings. But then you can write complicated and confusing... anything, really. Many programming languages have extremely weird quirks and cases where basic syntax can be transformed into an unreadable monstrosity, like C syntax for pointers to functions and arrays.
Sure, this increases the language's complexity, but you don't have to use all of it to reap the benefits.
So when it's not active, not responding to a prompt, it's of course not thinking. I'm pretty sure nobody actually questions this. Is your computer "thinking" when it's powered off? Can a piece of metal think? Probably not. So there are no thoughts between prompts, this seems obvious.
Thus, this is a question of "discrete time vs continuous time". LLMs "live" from prompt to prompt. Humans are alive continuously. In some sense, we're prompted by a lot of things all the time. As I'm writing this, I'm seeing stuff, I'm hearing stuff, I can feel various parts of my body, I'm thinking about my problems, my goals, other people's problems and goals, etc. When I'm in a sensory deprivation tank, my brain keeps "entertaining" me by "self-prompting", like a recurrent neural network (I guess it literally is a massive RNN).
So it seems like your definition of "thinking" hinges upon the LLMs being discrete-time and single-threaded (can't think about multiple things in parallel).
IMO a more interesting question is whether an LLM is thinking WHILE IT'S GENERATING A RESPONSE, while it's "alive".
Yet here we are, warning each other about the dangers of LLM hallucinations. Humans "hallucinate" (provide random authoritative-looking information without anything to back it up) pretty often too.
If "agency" is making decisions and performing corresponding actions in the real world, then LLMs most definitely LOOK LIKE they're making decisions (what's the next token? which tool to use? what's to say, in general? what idea to convey?) and performing actions (tool use). Can we tell whether they are ACTUALLY making decisions? Well, are the people around me "actually" making decisions? Or are they simply pushed around by circumstances and external forces?
Am I actually making decisions? Did I like DECIDE to write this comment? Maybe? I have no clue...
- If you can't provide any sources, it's safe to assume you don't actually know what you're talking about. - If you can, but choose not to, why? This simply weakens your argument. - When you say "you need to read about XYZ", you probably WANT people to read about this, right? So why not point them at least to Wikipedia?
Right, so "they" can (and do) take away your purchased content basically at any time. You don't even purchase the actual content anymore. Is anyone actually doing anything about it? How successful are they? The only well-known way of actually owning your content seems to be piracy.
> Desrochers' film, called Des arbes et des arts convinced citizens that trees are living entities that breathe and communicate with each other through their root systems.
Did the citizens... not know that trees are alive? Have they never seen a tree? What do you mean a film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
I personally don't use FaceID because I'm not thrilled about having my face scanned with utmost precision. BTW, I'm looking at my phone typing this and I know my phone has its face-scanning device pointed right at me. Is it sending "them" my face data all the time? Or sometimes? I can't tell. What if I'm showing something on my phone to another person? Is it going to scan their face too? Maybe, maybe not.
I thought "thinking" is literally the model generating additional text in a human language that shows its "thought process". It's added to the model's context, which helps it reason better because it now has this self-generated context.
The "their own language" idea seems to come from some recent science fiction where LLMs develop their alien language and take over the world by 2037 or something.
The model (its parameters, its architecture and the inference algorithm) is doing the thinking. That's what we call "ChatGPT" or "Claude": it's the same model residing God knows where, somewhere in "the cloud" on some random GPUs. But when you're talking to a model, you can feel that you're talking to the same entity — the same model.
It's a bit like the SciFi notion of "uploading your consciousness". Normally, consciousness is tied to hardware: "consciousness is confined to the body" indeed. Hypothetically, clone the consciousness into a computer algorithm and run it on any machine. Now consciousness is detached from its original body, like the LLMs and MMAcevedo (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo).
So the difference between meat and "weights" is that we can easily clone and run "weights" (LLMs), but we can't clone (copy exactly, bit-by-bit) and execute "meat".
The "AI slop" here says that just like the aliens in the original, we humans don't believe that LLMs can be conscious because, in essence, WEIGHTS CAN'T BE CONSCIOUS. Original: "meat can't be conscious" (but we humans know it can). This version: "weights can't be conscious" (and we humans INSIST that this is true).
So the message here is: what if we're as mistaken about the consciousness of "weights" as the aliens are mistaken about the consciousness of "meat"?
> The name Jupyter comes from the three programming languages the project originally supported: Julia (ju), Python (pyt) and R (r).
What's wrong with "configs store parameters"? I guess "parameters are stored in configs" could be more correct, but IMO it means exactly the same thing and sounds just as natural. "Six bytes match ten" is shorthand for "the performance of the algorithm that uses six bytes of storage matches the performance of the algorithm that uses ten bytes of storage". But here we have "performance matches", which is an inanimate concept doing something, so is this an LLM smell too?