I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?
At one point I messed around with a lore generator that would chop up sections of “The Dungeon Alphabet” and “Fire on the Velvet Horizon” along with some other stuff, and feed random sections of them into the LLM for inspiration and then ask it to lay out a little map, and it pretty reliably came up with all kind of badass stuff.
This wasn’t an intentional feature; they’re actually trying to train it with fine-tuning to add this as an ability. It’s one area that highlights the difference between it imitating the text it’s been seeing, instead of actually understanding what it’s saying – since most of its training data is of the form “(ask a question) (response to question)” overwhelmingly more often than “(ask a question) (say you don’t know, the end)”, it is trying to be a good imitator and do the same, and come up with some plausible nonsense even if it doesn’t know the answer.
You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:
So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.
It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:
I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.
Fun fact! They think that because of some kind of electromagnetic issue, Kessler syndrome or its precursors could maybe destroy the ozone layer too.
I don’t think anyone is saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do it; just that they think it’s going to go poorly
Also I would add that it’s a moderately dire sign as far as the state of Russia’s manpower levels. Every country at war desperately wants more soldiers at all times but some desperates are more desperate than other desperates.
military has repeatedly said it is not deliberately targeting the media
“ There is no policy of targeting media personnel,”
These are actually two different statements, with a very small, very subtle, but profoundly important difference between them.
some within the IDF appear to have viewed journalists working in Gaza for outlets controlled by or affiliated with Hamas to be legitimate military targets
“affiliated with”
This comes right after Israel sending a delegation to the US to “talk about” the war in Lebanon and the so called war in Gaza, too. Presumably to talk about hey you’re gonna bankroll those into the fall, like always, right?
But… why? I am honestly baffled as to the business reasons behind the decision. I don’t think people are sick of propaganda. People love propaganda.
But it’s hard for me to say you are wrong, also, simply because like I say I have no idea what the thinking behind it is.
That’s what I mean. It’s like they are trying to get at an honest presentation of the facts of the story.
It’s fuckin weird from ANY corporate US news outlet but from those two it’s like bizarro world
It’s a fairly impressive propaganda double dip
DON’T explain the context, beyond “synagogue” and “antisemitism” and some vague language about how violence “evolved” into existence. Thus, anyone who isn’t pro Palestinian sees the story in a very particular way that will reinforce a particular wrong perception of the protestors.
But DO bring Biden’s name into it for literally no reason at all, so that the people who support the protestors and are able to realize that there’s probably more to the story, will have their particular wrong perception, that quite a lot of them probably have, that he’s anti protestor, reinforced.
It’s a rare and cunning story that can simultaneously communicate “look at these scumbag anti semitic protestors” and “look at Biden thinking these protestors are anti semitic scumbags” simultaneously, with each population receiving the message which is exactly appropriate to misleading them and them specifically.
CNN and fucking USA Today have been doing quite a bit of actual complete and honest reporting recently.
I have no idea where it came from, but I’ll take it
I hadn’t fully been aware of the changeover, but yeah I saw season 7 and it was definitely more coherent and solid and less wandery and desperate than some of the middle seasons, absolutely there was an uptick in quality to me yes
It has yet to pass the Senate, and Biden said he would veto it.
Of course, Biden is still swearing to everyone that he is still sending shipments except for the one that he paused because of Rafah, and that he plans to keep doing it. And, his administration conducted an investigation which somehow managed to conclude that they “may have” been committing war crimes but that it’s not clear enough that we would have to stop shipping them weapons or anything which we would be legally obligated to do if they “conclusively” were doing anything criminal.
Fuckin assholes
In general, they get grants of cash from the US which they are required to use to “purchase” from US suppliers more or less any weapons (with few export restrictions). We’re giving them weapons but they still get to pick out what they think they need. This is a pretty good overview which seems like it’s mainly missing:
It became associated with aggressive internet shutins bleating about Pickle Rick and the szechuan sauce, although it’s hard to tell where exactly the line was between “these guys are losers yelling and being obnoxious at McDonalds,” and “stop cyberbullying we’re all just internet weirdos who like a funny cartoon and that is fine.” And then, Justin Roiland had some kind of sex abuse allegations and the worm turned and the world is officially supposed to hate Rick and Morty now, I think.
I mean, allegedly. I’m with you; some of it is still some great funny shit.
Please no let’s not start this
I know it’s officially not cool to like Rick and Morty anymore, but I cannot read a description of a suspicious bad thing called “Project Nimbus” that Google is getting itself involved in, without picturing a weird creepy sexual supervillain riding a giant seashell into a meeting with their executives
I know this whole message is preaching to the choir but:
You guys managed to find like the one time in history that US military ordinance killed civilians that unequivocally wasn’t our fault, when they were attacking a clearly military target under occupation from a clearly malicious invading force
And you are, predictably, complaining like it’s our fault you put the airfield right next to a fucking public beach and then didn’t sound any kind of warning that it was under active bombardment and knocked one of the missiles off its military target and it fell on some people
Pack up
Go home
Yeah. It is fairly weird to me that it’s such a common thing to do to take the raw output of the LLM and send that to the user, and to try use fine-tuning to get that raw output to look some way that you want.
To me it is obvious that something like having the LLM emit a little JSON block which includes some field which covers “how sure are you that this is actually true” or something, is more flexible and simpler and cheaper and works better.
But what do I know