@proprietous@mastodon.social
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proprietous

@proprietous@mastodon.social

Engineer, Morosoph, Polymath, Magikarp.

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ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Consciousness
Full comic here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-5

#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #ai

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Shading??? Oh la la, Monsieur Weinersmith!

(Props for trying something new!)

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

AI
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-12

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith This is DELIGHTFUL

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Stupid econ question:

So it looks like a lot of remaining inflation is rent. In that case, wouldn't you want to lower rates to increase home-building and home-ownership in order to reduce rent pricing?

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Let me weep in your general vicinity about the state of zoning in areas where rents are high. :(

A lot of cities seem to be taking the "discourage people from moving here" tact rather than the "build more housing" tact and it makes me very frustrated! Unfortunately, because a lot of people's wealth is tied up in the value of their homes, they have an incentive to discourage new home construction.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith breathable air now requires a variance that must be granted by City Council after a community design review scheduled with the neighborhood Registered Community Organization (RCO), which is required for Zoning Board of Approvals (ZBA) review, which must happen after a review by the historic commission and the art commission.

Also if the parcel in question hasn't been updated in the city's land records database your review will be rejected. There's an 18 month update backlog.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

How do you think International Law would look at the following situation:

5 years from now, humanoid robots are really good and relatively cheap. Russia tries invade a non-NATO country. The US sends 10,000 robotic soldiers, which are technically operated locally.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith my cold-water take, humanoid robots will never be as effective as robots shaped like a cheetah with a gun and a claw strapped to its back. So, won't matter. They'll be treated like drones are in the air.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Look it's me!

https://youtu.be/JDh2QTYYA6o?si=tvhfdO9_0gxomCQM

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Y'all look so good!!! They did you up real pretty-like. :)

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Anyone else just... not particularly moved by travel? I don't necessarily dislike travel, but keeping a garden and a library is my preference 99% of the time. I find most travel stressful and disruptive, and I mostly do it to support books or see family.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith I've been thinking about this these last few days. It's very easy for me to mentally elide how taxing travel is, in terms of stress and cost, while thinking of it as really good and desirable. And I was trying to figure out why I held that belief.

I had seen pictures of the Pantheon, sure. I knew plenty about it. It didn't loom particularly large in my personal mythology. But standing there... I've never felt anything closer to what I'd describe as a religious experience.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So, I got some good news this week on a new project, that along with Bea Wolf is part of a long term plot to seize people's children and turn them into English majors, and in particular the kind of English major who has reservations about who's in the Canon but can also quote from Chaucer, Pope, Dickinson, and Kipling upon request.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Too obvious. Who can't recite Shakespeare these days?

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Holy shit, Nvidia is now worth more than Saudi Aramco.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Sigh I am once again reminding investors that you can't eat tulips.

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

"Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI." I can't believe they're still claiming that generative models can "understand" the world. They can't understand anything. They are just a fancy statistical model for correctness probability against previous known good outputs. You don't get AGI from that. You can't get AGI from that. Irresponsible claims.

https://openai.com/sora

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@CatherineFlick It's so frustrating to me that the whole field is behaving in such an irresponsible way. No amount of data is going to provide any kind of truth understanding guarantee. The machinery is not designed for that! But it's how it's being sold!

It would be different if folks were working on trying to ground LLMs with some kind of truth model, like a knowledge graph or something. Instead everyone is handwaving and promising AGI. It's dishearteningly unscientific.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Weird question:

So, one possible nearterm use for AI is as a concierge for purchases, e.g. "find me the best place(s) to buy the following 14 spices online; my budget is 60 dollars" How does this affect advertising? Meaning, part of why advertising works is individual people don't have the time or expertise to do a careful analysis about quality and cost, so brands try to capture attention and then to display quality/desirability.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith A lot of good answers already in the comments here.

Re: "there's objective data," LLMs don't know anything that isn't ingested into the training corpus, and have no sense of objectivity. All the problems with search exist with LLMs, except you have the additional problems of poisoned data that would be easy to spot as a human, "hallucination" (aka low confidence results being presented as high confidence) and data set biases that don't match the customer's expectations.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Stuff like this is what gets me really interested in AI: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-suggests-chatbots-can-understand-text-20240122/

Like, how cool would it be if some computer science stuff helped us understand why consciousness and language evolved, because it turns out there are meaningful scaling laws.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith I need to read the original paper, but there are several red flags to me here. I immediately was wondering how they're evaluating this on actual data. Turns out they're asking ChatGPT to evaluate itself! That seems inappropriate.

Second was that I don't actually understand how they're able to prove that a bipartite graph that explains an LLM's behavior actually exists, and it seems like they authors don't either.

CatherineFlick, to pokemon
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Now this will be interesting to watch. https://corporate.pokemon.co.jp/media/news/detail/335.html

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@CatherineFlick I'm not usually a fan of copyright law being used to put people through the wringer, but in this particular case...

I'm ready for some squeezing.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Peter S Beagle makes everyone else in fantasy look like chumps. I love how he purposefully uses an utterly generic fantasy setting so he can just leap right into these beautifully drawn strange characters.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith You gotta read Evan Dahm's stuff at some point!

Also, have you read/watched Mapp and Lucia? Did we already recommend that? I think we did but can't remember. I'm reading it now, it's a hoot. The 2014 series is great too.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

worst joke idea

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith That's maybe a variant of a praise kink, which is definitely a thing.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Been listening to Karl Popper while listening to sentimental podcasts, and this comic idea that only I find funny is the inevitable result

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith I'm half Cuban and the beach and the jungle suck, imho. No thanks!!!

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

La cuisine française : Ah oui, le beurre et la farine avec des œufs sont géniaux, mais... as-tu essayé des œufs et de la farine avec du beurre?

proprietous, (edited )
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Mmm, je pense que tu peux ajouter plus du beurre... no no, ce n'est pas suffisant, continue. Et si tu separes les blancs des jeunes, oh la la, tu peux faire encore plus!

ZachWeinersmith, (edited ) to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

The inside of a pancake should be:

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith all the people saying "so thin it has no inside" are absurd and are forgetting that crepes exist.

I like raw dough but I will admit that is not the proper pancake consistency. It should be fluffy but not wet on the inside, like a cake with a very open consistency.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So for Hanukah I made latke tacos (in the sense of latkes as a filling in flour tortillas). Kelly put apple sauce and sour cream, along with beans, cheese, and latkes. I am pro fusion cuisine, but this may be too far.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith swap the applesauce for eggs and you've got a breakfast taco, so I don't feel like this is too big a pioneering step.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

HI! I'm stuck in a hotel lobby for a while! AMA

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith if you were to receive a box of homemade Christmas cookies, is there a variety you'd absolutely want included?

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Scenario:

You've been on two great dates with a guy. He is kind, smart, good listener, great sense of humor, interesting life.

On the third date, it's dinner. He orders a coffee. Out of his wallet he takes a single slice of bologna, which he uses as a straw.

Do you go for a fourth date or break up?

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Bologna? Too pedestrian, big red flag. I'd expect nothing less than culatello.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So, if you know computer science history, this is kind of amazing. Augustus de Morgan (he of "de Morgan's Laws" in logic) wrote this in the middle of the 19th century. I would say he was quite right about the future fame of his good friend Boole, who had recently passed away when this was written.

(This is from "A Budget of Paradoxes" volume 2, 1915 edition. Odd thing - I didn't supply the underlining. It was a used book and this was the only underlined passage in either volume.)

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Delighted that Boole was honored by having a primitive type in Comp Sci named after him. Booleans are everything!

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

At least in terms of formal recognition, a glowing review in the NYT is about as good as you can get. Thanks everyone-- it all starts with a few of you reading weird comics 20 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/books/review/kelly-zach-weinersmith-city-on-mars.html

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith What a great review, for a great book! I'm glad it's getting the recognition it deserves. :D

ZachWeinersmith, (edited ) to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Reading Michael Lewis' book on Sam Bankman-Fried and... it's amazing people fell for this guy? He just seems like a generic nerd who thinks he knows everything because he doesn't care about how he dresses and didn't think Shakespeare was any good as a high school student, and can explain away being a dick with an expected value calculation. Like, he's not even a compelling fraud?

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith There are a number of compelling articles from about how B-F's outfit was very much a "uniform," as much as Holmes' getup was. The silicon valley boy genius tech bro, with schlubby free swag tshirts, unkempt hair, and shorts is very a "style" which, when combined with a modicum of riches, reels in a surprising number of marks.

proprietous,
@proprietous@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Oh I mean I think generally very few to none of the people involved in major investments these days have any idea about the stuff they're investing in. It's a lot of high level promises, good ol' boys, and gut instinct.

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