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iaccountthencom

24 karma · joined February 1, 2023

I have an opinion. many of them in fact. but I wonder why bother 'having' them?

I do like making them up, these opinions of mine. But then what?

add it to this noise? sure why not...

but then what? write it down? this is part of how I construct these opinions of mine; so it's partially done already

..but then what?

submissionscomments
iaccountthencom··on The Online Safety Bill: An attack on encryption
freedom (liberty) really goes away if we stop defending it.

it's like cleaning (like any and all maintenance work), you're never done with it.

what a lie (a mistake) to believe that liberty once fought and realized stays with us, in a state of having been won. It must be maintained, it's like being in shape.

Liberty, software, bureaucracies and their complicated interactions... why must it get worse before it gets better?

why does it seem like tyranny is easier to keep?

iaccountthencom··on ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web
most of what goes as "understanding" (where 'our culture' is the agent/actor doing the 'understanding') really is compression of information (abstraction is the form of the compressing)

I thought about this possibility years ago, but as I see more of what neural nets are doing, it makes me more certain I'm onto something (which makes no meaningful difference to me, i.e. being onto what these deep neural models are is useless to me)

in any case, yea sure. neural nets are some kind of lossy compression but nobody thinks about them this way.

and my point is that to create abstract theories which explain lots of things (e.g. physics) is also this kind of 'lossy compression'.

over these theories we say "we understand" stuff, this means we are able to recall things about what the theories are describing, it allows us to reconstruct scenarios and predict the outcomes if/when the scenarios match up.

maybe I'm gearing up to say that 'backpropagation' is a creative action?

shrugs

iaccountthencom··on Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
I fucking hate it when they talk about integer number of HUMANS as a mere percent (potentially a floating point value)
iaccountthencom··on ChatGPT's breakout moment and the race to put AI to work
their new paid plans happened, that's a change.