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knowing how things work allows you to criticize and fight things way better than ignoring them because you dislike them does

insisting that guns are bad and their users are immoral, so you don't need to know anything about them, doesn't change what happens when someone aims one at you, and keeps you from knowing how to make one safe if it's necessary for you to do so

i think LLMs suck and it doesn't change the fact that someone can ask Claude Fable who I am (with its ability to search the web turned off) and it will tell them. knowing their capabilities allows me to intentionally shape my online presence to not stand out to something inhuman analyzing my posts

you can believe that LLMs are just as incapable as they were in 2023 all you want. that just means the FBI, which uses modern ones that work pretty well for whatever the hell they're doing with them, knows more about them than you do

also insisting they have or don't have characteristics or abilities that any coworker with a chatgpt account can go and disprove you about instantly just makes you look stupid, and reflects badly on everyone else. would you prefer ammo that can trivially be rendered inert, or do you want to win?

yeah bsky.app/profile/reas...

cool, this thread got me put on a list by someone who can't read

what's wrong with wanking each other, anyway

nothing. which is why it's rude to insinuate it's associated with AI

My understanding of "AI" LLMs is that it's just a fancy giant look up table. It can give you an answer because the answer was the most common thing people wanted when searching that series of words, but doesn't have the nuance to understand said words. So if a LOT of people are wrong,

if it were just a big look-up table, it wouldn't be able to solve novel problems, and they can absolutely do that. it's not storing things directly, it's compressing them by finding incomprehensibly high-dimensional patterns.

this leads to things like LLMs being able to do arithmetic without calculation tools because there's a high-dimensional helix inside their activations, upon which they do arithmetic by using trigonometry (not "consciously", this process is not accessible to the LLM other than by its results)i

or the only answer immediately in it's data set is wrong, or the question isn't asked enough meaning there are fewer points of reference, it means it will just give a blatantly incorrect answer even if a real human with said context could figure out the right one.

It's the same with art, which is why AI generated images are so full of unnecessary shit. It was trained on photos and art with a bunch of stuff in the background and it's just taking the average of everything without understanding visual interest or how to lead the eye.

not necessarily, which is the weird part of LLMs. there’s a huge latent space of like… semantically related concepts developed through training; what counts as “related” isn’t really programmed into the model. it’s less that it gives something made up, more that it…