The pithy version of that is that we know more things than our ancestors, but we’re not smarter than them.

Even the question of “who” is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the “who” doing the thinking in the first place :))

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

That’s a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That’s what they are.

I’m happy with the Oxford definition: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.

LLMs don’t have knowledge as they don’t actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

If asked to answer 10*5, they can’t reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren’t in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.

No, I’m not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.

I’m no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.

Are the concepts of freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?

Not necessarily, and I also disagree with the commenter above that without the USA suddenly the world would be singing kumbaya.

The problem was dictators seizing power in turbulent times. In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker’s councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union. I think that says a lot.

In Romania (I’m a bit better equipped to talk about this one), things were a bit different.

The original communist government (1945) was essentially a Russian puppet state that drained the wealth of Romania via war reparations. Stalinist purges happened often during this period.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Romania got a degree of independence and things were actually looking up. Society in general (infant mortality, gender equality, literacy, standard of living, etc) were all improving rapidly without Russia draining us and making decisions for us, and we didn’t have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later. This was a period marked by political battles between the liberal communists and the Stalinist communists for control, with Stalinists commiting some pretty horrible atrocities (if you want nightmare fuel for some reason, look up the Pitesti experiment).

Then, 1965, Ceacescu took power. During his early years, he actually looked like a liberal (EDIT: Just to be clear: I mean a liberal communist. This means more individual freedom for citizens in a communist economy). He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. Unfortunately, Inspired by the “amazing” society of North Korea in 1971, he started to make changes in the structure of society to be more like it, which included an expanded Securitate. 2 years later, harsh austerity policies to repay foreign loans led to a massive drop in living conditions, which led to riots, which led to crackdowns. Things rapidly spiralled, and the Securitate were given more and more power to keep control.

This then became the police state that everybody thinks of when they think of communism. A combination of too much power in 1 person’s hands, an authoritarian imperialist overlord (Russia), and rising backlash against dropping living conditions.

Honest question: isn’t OSx considered the OS of choice for video and music editing?

Linux from Scratch and Gentoo are also pathways to abilities some would call… unnatural

Considering Ronald McDonald was a character primarily aimed at young children, I don’t think they were mentally capable of having personal responsibility at that age.

As for the parents who were pestered to buy happy meals by their children, there’s like 50 ways to answer this question. I personally think that in a mentally healthy adult, personal responsibility is a factor, but it’s not the only one and is balanced by social conditioning, genetic predispositions, mood in the moment, and a ton more factors.

The children who for one reason or another were brought up eating fast food are conditioned both socially and biologically to eat fast food, and breaking out of that addiction (as with any other addiction) can be very difficult, and is more complex than doing the equivalent of saying “git gud scrub”.

Wow, that turned into a wall of text, sorry.

Tl;dr: it’s way more complex than just “personal responsibility”.

It’s a well known fact that advertising never works and is a waste of money. That’s why the entire industry died 80 years ago, and nobody ever published an ad ever again.

It was near impossible to have an opinion contrary to the popular one

You’re wrong, and you should feel dumb and embarrassed for having a wrong opinion! Come on everyone, dogpile him! /s

Here you go. knowyourmeme.com is an excellent site for questions like this!

Ah, I misunderstood then, sorry. But still, even with all the investment in the world, LLM is a bubble waiting to burst. I have a hunch we will see truly world-altering technology in the next ~20 years (the kind that’d put huge swathes of people out of work, as you describe), but this ain’t it.

There’s an upper ceiling on capability though, and we’re pretty close to it with LLMs. True artificial intelligence would change the world drastically, but LLMs aren’t the path to it.

Yugoslavian communism: there’s dinos and toys on the shelves, and people keep buying them to smuggle over the border

Having one line about sleeping with the captain’s daughter might have been even more amusing (and thus more catchy) because of the double meaning.

Very likely, probably why the whole captain’s daughter = captain’s whip thing took off as sailor slang to begin with.

your average deck hand singing sea shanties isn’t thinking metaphorically when he’s singing about getting drunk and laid.

I never claimed it was a metaphor, it’s slang. Similarly, the “gunner’s daughters” were the gun barrels midships on gunships.

And insisting that the one line in the song isn’t about fucking is feels like wishful thinking

I mean, no skin off my nose if you believe that, but it seems pretty clear judging from the fact that the captain’s daughter is a well known slang term for a whip in a song about punishing a drunk that that is extremely likely the correct original intent. Of course anybody can interpret anything any way they want.

Think about it inside the context of the song. Every other line is a type of punishment:

• Shave his belly with a rusty razor (painfully pull chest hair out with a dull blade)

• Put him in a long boat till he’s sober (put him somewhere uncomfortably cramped on his own)

• Give him a dose of salt and water (probably the nicest variation of the song, make him vomit)

• Stick him in a scupper with a hosepipe on him (scupper= hole in the side of the ship, so stick his head in a hole and hit him with a hosepipe)

There’s also loads of other variations on the song with tons of different punishments for the drunken sailor.

Why would this line suddenly be different?

The “captain’s daughter” was a euphemism for the cat o’ nine tails. So in other words, that line meant give the drunken sailor a lashing as punishment.