ta8645

Of course, none of us have exhaustive knowledge. I don't know the capital of Togo.

But I do have enough knowledge to know what an IDE is, and where that sits in a technological stack, i know what a string is, and all that it relies on etc. There's a huge body of knowledge that is required to even begin approaching the problem. If you posted that challenge to an intelligent person from 2000 years ago, they would just stare at you blankly. It doesn't matter how intelligent they are, they have no context to understand anything about the task.

I'd say that it takes intelligence to encode knowledge, and the more knowledge you have, the more intelligently you can encode further knowledge, in a virtuous cycle. But once you have a data set of knowledge, there's nothing to emerge, there are no side effects. It just sits there doing nothing. The intelligence is in the algorithms that access that encoded knowledge to produce something else.

Yes, but that just effectively recreates the pretraining. You're going to have to explain everything down to what an atom is, and essentially all human knowledge if you want to have any ability to consider abstract solutions that call on lessons from foreign domains.

There's a reason people with comparable intelligence operate at varying degrees of effectiveness, and it has to do with how knowledgeable they are.

The issue is that general intelligence is useless without vast knowledge. The pretraining is the knowledge, not the intelligence.

Doesn't this mean that at least one of the results is wrong?

How about have separate laws for CSAM and "hate speech". Because CSAM is most likely just a fig-leaf for the primary motivation of these laws.

Free speech already under threat and now y'all are giving up the right of private communication too? For anyone cheering this on, do you honestly think this will only affect the "bad people", and you'll never have your own neck under the government's boot? Even if you trust the government today, what happens when your neighbors elect a government you disagree with ideologically?

Ostensibly, this EO is meant to remove power from bureaucratically controlled agencies in the government. The right have been complaining that real power has been usurped from the institutions mentioned in the constitution, and centered in a professional managerial class, that works below the surface, and has no culpability or exposure to voters.

That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".

Revealed at time: https://youtu.be/7gQ9DnSYsXg?t=391

Vladimir Reshetnikov

Was Hellwig first, or Andre Hedrick, or maybe Hans Reiser?

Elon Musk already held "top secret" security clearance. Because of Space X.

> imagined realities.

Imagined realities are a real part of reality.

> so LLMs are an approximation of an approximate model of reality?

Yes, and we as humans have a mental model that is just an approximation of reality. And we read books that are just an approximation of another human's approximation of reality. Does that mean that we are bullshit because we rely on approximations of approximations?

You're being way too pedantic and dismissive. Models are models, regardless of how limited and imperfect they are.

As the technology exists today: imperfect, often prone to mistakes, and unable to relay confidence levels. These problems may be addressed in future implementations.

That's the same message, without any emotional baggage, or overly dismissive tone.

You're really missing the point and getting lost in definitions. The entire point of human language is to model reality. Just because it is limited, inexact, and imperfect does not disqualify it as a model of reality.

Since LLMs are directly based on that language, they are definitely based on and are a model of reality. Are they perfect? No. Are they limited? Yes. Are they "bullshit"? Only to someone who is judging emotionally.

> no models of reality involved.

It literally has a mathematical model that maps what would, colloquially at least, be known as reality. What exactly do you think those math pipelines represent? They're not arbitrary numbers; they are generated from actual data that is generated by reality. There's no anthropomorphizing at all.

I've never used Claude, but Perplexity often says that no definitive information about a topic could be found, and then tries to make some generalized inferences. There's a difference between a specific implementation, and the technology in general.

In any case, it's worthwhile for people to understand the limitations of the technology as it exists today. But calling it "bullshit" is a mischaracterization; I believe based on an emotional need for us to feel superior, and to dismiss the capabilities more thoroughly than they deserve.

It's a little like someone saying in the industrial revolution, "the steam shovel is too rigid, it will NEVER have the dexterity of a man with a shovel!". And while true and important to know, it really focuses on the wrong thing, it misses the advantages while amplifying the negatives.

> Being persuasive (i.e., churn out convincing prose) is how LLMs were designed to be.

No. They were designed to churn out accurate prose that accurately reflects their model of reality. They're just imperfect. You're being cynical and emotional to use the term bullshit. And again, it anthropomorphizes the LLM, it implies agency.

That is an emotionally manipulative definition and anthropomorphizes the LLMs. They don't "intend" anything, they're not trying to trick you, or sound persuasive.

> You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.

No. It's a legitimate possibility. Maybe it wont happen. But maybe it will. There's a reason that military training is meant to be hard though, and not filled with comfort and affordances for personal feelings.

> To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?

No human has been back to the moon since that male dominated field sent them there. And when they added women, they couldn't produce a shuttle that could work without huge budget overruns, or reliably. And the only example of a real surge in a return to space, is run by an asshole dictator at Space X.

> It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.

No, that definitely worked out great. It was created by a gruff guy who was an asshole to everyone, and wrote the basics of Git by himself in a week.

This should be expected blowback. The billionaires are taking advantage of a large group of people who feel alienated. All the billionaires have to do is not call them racist, transphobic, nazis, and they'll get their votes. Regardless of misaligned economic interests.

Whatever you think about all those issues, and how stupid you think the hoi polloi are, there has been a massive strategic miscalculation about which issues to focus on, and how to address them over the last number of years.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

All my arguments hold even if Musk and Trump are the devil incarnate. In fact, they may be the devil that convinces people to take their eye off the ball of climate change. They are exploiting people's emotions and hatred to do damage to the fight against climate change.

It doesn't matter what Musk Tweets, It doesn't matter how shitty Trump is. If you use that as an excuse to do anything less that 100% of what you can to help in the fight against climate change, then you are a climate change denier who doesn't really believe we're in a fight for our lives.

> There's a tremendous leap between "Not supporting Tesla because of Musk" and climate denialism.

Not really. Because it doesn't matter if you choose to support an alternative EV maker. If you actively campaign against Tesla you are hurting EV sales. There are Tesla's built today that should be purchased instead of ICE vehicle. Anything you do that stops someone else (even if you're not going to buy them yourself) is actively hurting the fight against global warming.

The only reason you would hurt the fight against global warming, is that you don't think it's as important as your reason for hating Musk. And that's a form of denialism. You're denying (if only to yourself) that climate change is going to cause death and destruction.

It's not that easy... there is inertia, investment, mindshare and messaging. What some fraction of the public will hear, no matter how clear your messaging, is not Fuck Tesla, they will hear, Global Warming isn't that big a deal.

You are literally saying that hurting Musk is more important than the fight against global warming. That sends the wrong message. And you would only be willing to send that message if you don't truly believe that climate change is an existential threat.

Nobody complains about how shitty the landlord is when their apartment is on fire, they just get busy putting out the fire and protecting their family and property.

Exactly. We're surrounded by closeted climate change deniers who don't actually believe the results of climate change will be catastrophic.

What does it cost anyone to support Tesla, or at least stay quiet about any opposition you feel toward them? Nothing. But people are so emotional that they'd rather speak out against Tesla than swallow their anger. And the only explanation for that, is they do not really believe in climate change.

That's really not the point. Not everyone is paying attention, ANY messaging at all that dissuades the public from going EV instead of ICE is actively harmful. Anyone advocating against Tesla is letting their emotions hurt the fight against global warming. And the only explanation I can come up with, is that they don't actually believe in global warming. Because if they did, they would swallow their anger, and favor every measure that advances the fight against global warming.

This article claims exactly that:

https://electrek.co/2025/02/06/trump-just-canceled-the-feder...

Wrong. What we do TODAY determines what happens in a decade. Global warming is determined by what we do today, even if the final destruction doesn't show up until later.

You are literally a climate change denier.

What does it matter what one man thinks? What does it matter what coup happens if the world ends because of global warming? The only way to think that party politics matters more than doing every single thing we can to fight global warming, with no distractions, is to not truly believe in global warming.

Because if you actually believed it, you'd be too terrified to be distracted by party politics.

All grievances are petty compared to the destruction of our world.

There are some people who can make that choice, and that's preferable. But not everyone can do that. And to leave a single EV unused, just because we hate a single man, is unconscionable for anyone who believes the world actually hangs in the balance.