Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

  • 24 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Yeah, as a kid I was kinda the archetypal nerd. Short, fat, airheaded, besserwisser, straight A’s,* into manga and video games. My best friend for most of primary school was the guy with even better grades, but tall, handsome and a national championship level athlete.

    Then puberty hit me pretty early and suddenly I was about median height for my age, I could do pull-ups while most of my classmates couldn’t, and even though I wasn’t that fond of gym class, I was mostly motivated enough to get a decent grade just for trying a little.

    The nerd/jock thing always felt like an American thing from an older generation that wasn’t taken seriously. Maybe it was acknowledged by an overthinker like me, but to even bring up the distinction was kinda nerdy itself. It definitely wasn’t the defining social divisor in my adolescent life.

    *Or rather, nines and tens on the weird 4 to 10 scale Finnish primary education uses.











  • LLMs are quite impressive as chatbots all things considered. The conversations with them are way more realistic and almost as funny as the ones with the IRC markov chain my friend made as a freshman CS student.

    Of course, out bot’s training data only included the IRC channel’s logs of a few years and the Finnish Bible we later threw in for shits and giggles. A training set of approximately zero terabytes in total.

    LLMs are less a marvel of machine learning algorithms (though I admit they might play a part) and more one of data scraping. Based on their claims, they have already dug through the vast majority of publicly accessible world wide web, so where do you go from there? Sure, there are a lot of books that are not on the web, but feeding them in the machine is about as hard as getting them on the web to begin with.






  • I just met with a great-aunt who has been a bit distant until now. A rare time for me meeting with relatives of her generation since I ran out of living grandparents about a decade ago (though thankfully I at least hear from most of them from mom occasionally).

    We talked about some of our common relatives of her generation and some have dementia-related anterograde amnesia not quite unlike the OP’s mother. At least some of them can at least remember “new” things like the very fact that their memory doesn’t work right, but a lot of it is down to luck and conditioning, and even then it’s really hard to always consider that something might have happened hours or minutes ago, but you just forgot about it.

    Memory is hella complex is what I’m saying.