Iunnrais

Is there something about farting in a bikini that’s different from farting in any other clothing?

Assuming that as an older millennial, I’m the parent you’re talking about, no. Porn almost never went on those. VHS and paper magazines mostly. Computer porn would be downloaded to a convoluted folder depth with misleading names on your hard drive, and would never be placed on removable media unless you had a CD burner, which was rare as fuck (but they did exist).

Seriously though, people used to make genuine mazes out of nested folders.

If you were in the era of dial up BBS systems, you still were far more likely to use a hard drive than a floppy. The reason floppies weren’t used is that even at low resolution with still images, not much would fit on the things, super inconvenient. Shareware, sure. Porn? Not likely.

Cassette just means a small case, compact enough that you can plug the entire case straight into your machine. A “normal” sized case would be one of those metal canisters that store 8mm movie reels, and you need to take the tape out of those to use them.

Don’t want no captain crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran…

You have Batman Beyond and Batman Caped Crusader, but no Batman: TAS? The show that redefined Batman away from goofy Adam West style comedy and into deep character drama… some of those episodes still give me the chills to this day. That show elevated camp into something deep and truly moving.

I mean, the plugins are super useful. But in general it’s really good at quickly letting you flip through a bunch of files and link them together like a wiki on your local pc. Can markdown link to other files like that? Technically yes, but not using the same window and making the navigation so smooth.

But the plugins really do a lot of work.

Or North Korea. Or China. Take your pick of fascist dictatorships.

No, the difference is that if you double a kelvin number, you have quantifiably doubled the heat. If you double a Celsius or Fahrenheit number, you have not quantifiably doubled the heat… the number does not objectively count an amount of something.

Think meters. A meter measures an exact length. Two meters is double one meter.

Celsius doesn’t do that. Celsius is a scale between two amounts of heat.

The equivalent for distance would be if we had a scale where 0 degrees distance was equal to 582.7762 meters, and 100 degrees distance was equal to 721.5323 meters. Each degree between 0 and a hundred is then a slice of that range. Maybe for the people who designed such a scale there’s useful reasons to do so, but you aren’t measuring the quantity or amount of something, you’re measuring a range.

Kelvin measures molecular movement, just as hertz measures oscillations or cycles, or grams measure weight.

Nope, Kelvins are a countable unit, like meters. Celsius and Fahrenheit are not.

I genuinely enjoyed it more when I was younger, finding all the joke articles and whatnot. Now I enjoy it less, but I’m content to let others have their fun. No use whining about it, and why should I decrease someone else’s enjoyment, when all I need to do is sit back and ignore stuff that doesn’t matter anyway. Easy.

I get that lemmy hates AI, and I’m not going to try to talk you out of that, but please stop repeating this factually incorrect myth. LLMs are not stochastic parrots, despite what you may have heard. And they do think… to a degree. Note that they’re by no means everything CEOs and tech bros want them to be, but if you’re going to criticize them, please do it accurately.

They do know the meaning of words, but only in relation to other words. It’s how they work. It’s not a statistical thing like word frequency patterns— they’re not doing the same thing autocomplete does. Instead, they’re doing math on words in a several hundred-thousand dimensional array where placement on this grid indicates the meaning of the word— one vector direction indicates plurals, another indicates rudeness or politeness, another indicates frog-like, another might indicate related to 1993 ibm pentium CPUs, etc, etc, etc. It developed this array via training on terabytes of text, but it’s not storing a copy of that text, nor looking it up, nor copying anything from it… it’s defining words based on how they are used, then doing math on it to figure out what is the most appropriate thing to say next— not the most likely thing according to statistics, the most meaningful based on the definitions of the words it understands.

They really do not copy and paste. They do use definitions. They do think about the words in a very real way.

They don’t apply logical consistency and fact checking. There are hacks to make them talk to themselves in a way that following the meaningful definitions of words will more likely lead to fact checking and logical consistency, but it’s not 100% fool proof.

It was their self-descriptor until they learned other leftists didn’t like them much (because they’re authoritarian and supportive of fascist dictators such as Putin), and naming them using their self designated term meant they were excluded from other leftists. So they started taking offense.

To be clear, it seems you object to the concept of sequels and movie serieses (how do you pluralize “series”?) more than compilations?

AI hate on lemmy is strong. Admitting that you vibe code is enough to get an avalanche of downvotes. (I didn’t downvote you, I just happen to know things how it is around these parts)

It is, and if I recall correctly he’s an eye surgeon. He has a YouTube channel that’s pretty darn funny even to a non-doctor.

I have the number “x277853” burned into my memory… but I can’t 100% remember what it was for. I want to say it was my ICQ, but no one else seems to have an x at the beginning of theirs? Where was this x number from?

Narcissism is a spectrum, but at the far end of that spectrum, the narcissist is unable to feel anything except existential dread at the fact that they cannot feel anything, which is relieved by seeing reactions from other people, which is called “supply”. Trump is is at absolutely pathological levels of narcissism, and thus clearly cannot feel shame. The most we can make him feel is a supply withdrawal.

Don’t forget: this game was pretty good but was made before various UI and control standards were really set in stone as known best practices, so I’d love to play the game again as I remember it, not as it actually existed.

System Shock, looking at you…

I am protected.

The following wall of text is a simplification that I hope will help you understand.  The simplification of the simplification (tldr) is: for as long as it has context window available, it figures out the meaning of every word in the entire conversation based on its position relative to every other word in the conversation.

The longer explanation (but still a simplification) is as follows:

An LLM does math not just on every word you send it, but on how every word you send it relates to every other word you send it.  You can think of every “token” in an LLM’s context window as being a discrete slot that can take a word (or part of a word, or punctuation, whatever… that’s why we always say “token” not “word”), and that slot has very very complicated wiring that connects to every other slot in the context window.  And the output of each of those connections is itself connected to more wiring, and the output of that to more wiring, and so on.  Each of these layers seems to help with grammar, understanding, and linking of concepts… it also turns out that a lot of the connections aren’t even used, but having them all wired in allows the system to find the most optimal arrangement by itself.  The way it figured out how to wire all the “slots” together is based on terabytes of training data.

Part of this wiring passes through a “dictionary” of sorts (not what it’s called, but we’ll run with it for this simplification), which encodes every token as a long LONG series of numbers.  Each number in that series corresponds to a “semantic concept”.  For example, one of the numbers in the series might determine how “plural” a word might be.  Another number might determine how masculine or feminine the word is.  Another number might encode how rude the word is.  Another might be how “cat-related” a word is.  I keep saying “might” because we didn’t write the “dictionary” ourselves, we got another machine to make it for us by analyzing literal terabytes of human written texts and checking for word co-locations (what words appear in the vicinity of other words).  Academic Linguists have been having a golden age recently by studying the math of how the machines mapped words, and have slowly been piecing together what the various numbers mean-- it’s really quite fascinating.

Anyway, the context window is not an arbitrary array, and increasing a context window by even a single token basically requires rewiring the whole thing, which is why an LLM’s context window is inherently limited.  And if there isn’t a slot to put a token in, then it simply can’t think about it.

So, an LLM does “think”… in a sense.  It does “reason”… but only as to what the *words* mean, not about logical consistency or adherence to the real world or facts.  You may have heard the Symphony of Science song “A Glorious Dawn” (https://www.youtube.com/%E2%80%8Bwatch?v=zSgiXGELjbc%5C&list=%E2%80%8BRDEMft98UQ9nSZoCk8V-gaQ7zQ&%E2%80%8Bstart%5C_radio=1) where Carl Sagan says:

"But the brain does much more than just recollect It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes  it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one  Has an elaborate logical underpinning\l The brain has its own language For testing the structure and consistency of the world"

An LLM does SOME of this.  It inter-compares, but only between definitions of words in its dictionary.  It analyzes… but only between definitions of words in its dictionary.  It has its own elaborate logical underpinning, but these logical connections apply to WORDS and COMBINATIONS of words, not to ideas like our brain does.

In some ways this can be mitigated by encoding more and more information into the “dictionary”, which is how you can get an LLM to pass various exams it’s never seen before. But it’s all based on the meanings of the words as it understands them, not logic.

How DOES it think?  Well, at the LOWEST level, it thinks one word at a time, considering what it should say next based on what has already been said.  If it reads “Two plus two equals what?” it looks up the meaning of those numbers, checks the relation to the plus and equal words, does math on the WORDS (not the number 2!) and sees that, hey, there’s a dimension of words that relates to its position on the number line!  I can adjust along this dimension of meaning, and come up with the answer four!  And as long as two, plus, equals, and four are all SUFFICIENTLY well defined in the dictionary, then it can manipulate those ideas just as well as a human, or better.

What happens when it lacks words for concepts that it can map mathematically (what does cat + dog + not kingly + casual + bridgelike + sounds melancholy + french origin + purple + etc etc etc = ?)?  This happens all the time.  It looks for the closest word.  Even if it has an exact concept mapped (very rare), it’ll still look around its concept space a little bit, according to a metric called “heat”, jiggling around the tokens in its dictionary like molecules jiggle when heated.  This gets pretty good results, but not consistent ones… the result isn’t fully random, we don’t get chaos, but we do get different results for the same input.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

However… true contradictions can also arise in its definitions.  The most famous example of this was when ChatGPT was asked about a “seahorse emoji”.  Turns out, in the training data, it was able to find connections between seahorse and emoji pretty easily.  It’s very confident that there is one.  Unfortunately, there isn’t… so it has mathematical connections between the concept of seahorse and the concept of emoji, but when it adds them together, NO actual token of a seahorse emoji emerges (because there isn’t one in unicode).  Using the “find the nearest mathematical token that DOES exist” principle, it’ll spit out another emoji.  Then it will look at the emoji, and see that it clearly doesn’t match… that’s *not* a seahorse.  But it “knows” that a seahorse emoji exists according to its dictionary; it has a link there!  So it tries again, and again can’t find it.  So it gets stuck in an endless loop.

Anyway, how do agents fit into all this?  Well, people started thinking-- if we can’t get an LLM to think in terms of ideas and logic outside of the definitions of words, what if we handed off the logic to another program that can do that?  We can train the LLM to associate and link certain words to computer commands to run a program that can do arithmetic, or calculus, or formal logic, or drawing a picture, or arranging text into a table, or things like that.  These external programs can then return text to the LLM, which can process it as words with definitions, and give you a good answer.

We can also use the “definitions of words” approach to approximate thinking about abstractions and ideas.  Just have the LLM start generating associations, but don’t show them to the user, keep them in the backend as “chain of thoughts”.  When the abstraction has gotten to a useful enough point, we can then use it as part of our context window to analyze it as words and get a good result.

Sometimes there’s a problem with using only one dictionary… sometimes words mean VASTLY different things in different contexts.  That’s where the “Mixture of Experts” approach comes in.  You build different dictionaries for different contexts.  You have one LLM figure out which domain is most likely appropriate, then hand the text off to a different LLM who was trained on that other domain with a different dictionary.

It all comes together, and it works.  Mostly.  Usually.  There are problems sometimes.  And it used to be that we could fix problems just by giving it more training data… make the dictionary better.  And it’s probably true that with an infinitely precise dictionary, there’d be no problems at all, just like it has no problems adding two plus two because it has sufficient definition of all those words; except we’ve literally run out of additional training data to give it.  So workarounds and hacks and specialized training and things have been utilized to patch over the bits of the dictionary we don’t have and possibly can’t ever make.

And that’s a simplified version of how LLMs do what they do.