• do not rely on c/showerthoughts for medical advice

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model’s training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn’t too much of an enemy of the state.

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I’ll give you a cookie. Well, I’ll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It’s probably possible but you’d have to be pretty good.

Reminder to Burger King employees: AI is notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm.

… as opposed to English, which was carefully crafted by experts scientifically putting each word in exactly the right place and deriving the most consistently logical system of orthography.

No goats either.

Greenwich?

Yes, that’s the prime meridian, so if you’re looking for exactitude in your hemispheric definition it is the one to go with. Any system of coordinates is an arbitrary choice imposed on the universe for our convenience. It may seem attractively rebellious to reject the one we have, but you’re not going to gain anything but confusion by picking a different one.

Good luck using it to get from Jupiter to Haumea.

In reality the flash drive mostly exists to be an extra air-gapped backup.

end-to-end encryption enabled by default

“By default” doesn’t even seem good enough. Can you imagine making or using a password manager that isn’t end-to-end encrypted? Why on earth would anyone ever do that? Anyway I’ll stick with my encrypted text file on a flash drive.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

Have you thought of trying MCTS? It’s a pretty easy algorithm to understand and was good enough to get computers playing Go up to the level where they could offer beginner to intermediate human players a satisfying game.

Doubtful, even if it’s not from far enough in the future that it’s after the Butlerian Jihad.

I think the temperature of your shower might need adjusting.

Perhaps the contemporary high school student knows fewer things that are untrue, and certainly they have a few vague ideas about principles that were entirely unknown in the 19th century, but even so I’ll bet they know much less overall.

That’s one more excuse for collecting all the data about you they can get and running it through the analytics — not that they needed another excuse for such a fair and reasonable business practice.

Much more fewer people know why to think.

According to radio weather reports in Canada -5° usually “feels like” about -20 according to the elaborate calculations of the wind chill experts, so that checks out.

I sure hope this is the end of Discord. Maybe only 10% of people will rage quit rather than show their ID, but if every group has one in 10 people they invite say “nah, that’s not happening” and everyone has to admit they’re probably in the right, it might make some difference.