Interesting that TikTok is the 3rd highest on the block list (considering Pinterest links as one). I wonder why since it’s not often that I get it as a search result on Google . Is TikTok showing up as a result common on kagi or is TikTok just that bad?
Tiktok has a lot of deep-ish search keyword spam that doesn't actually lead to anything related to the query, just some generic videos and a pitch to install the app. It's basically useless as a website.
Tiktok is just really annoying, they rank high for a lot of keywords but the results will either just redirect you to tiktok's homepage or a bunch of "discover" pages with random videos that contain those keywords.
If you're on mobile you'll get asked to install the app, if you try to view a video on mobile you'll probably get asked to solve a captcha and again asked to install the app.
Say you search something related to repairing a bmw, you might get results that are "bmw mechanic", "bmw repair inclusive", "bmw maintenance meme" which just lead to those tiktok discover pages.
What bothers me the most is getting an image result I want the full res version of, and being redirected to a discover page that doesn't have what I wanted
It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.
The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.
Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.
And the lunatic fringe saw her as overly deferential to republicans because there were a few notable republicans that were willing to stand up and say "Actually, I would prefer this democrat over this republican" and she thought that was worth highlighting in her campaign.
>The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.
The lunatic fringe is generally randos on social media, not people of authority in the Democratic party. Kamala wasn't in a position to kick them to the curb.
No excuse. It’s results that matter, not process. Defining who she was would have meant being proactive and saying something like “trans folks should be able to use the bathroom but sports leagues can decide who plays”
That doesn't seem to be the attitude when the lunatic fringe on the Republican side occupy social media. I understand why politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't want to denounce any such fringe groups that are cheering for them. Seems to work better for republicans than democrats though
It does. Why that is is a story that has many different parts.
One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist"
Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is.
The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".
The Republican party has a grassroots vs. establishment dynamic going on. The Democratic party has no such thing. In the Democratic party the elders decide who's going to run in the primaries and they body out any challengers -- "wait your turn" they get told, and then they do. I'm not talking about presidential elections or even congressional ones. I'm talking about local politics. If you're an outside and you want to run for office you have a much better chance on the R side than the D side.
My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights.
It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.
I did. I also knew what she campaigned on during her brief presidential campaign in 2020. I also know her Senate record. I also know what she did as AG and DA. Harris' problem is that her platform was inconsistent with past actions. I'm all for politicians having a change of heart, but they have to be able to articulate what they believed before, what made them reconsider, and how they got to their new position. She failed spectacularly in that task which made her look inauthentic and the GOP seized on that weakness.
Her platform ended up looking like the output of a focus group with the express intent of winning votes rather than having any real policy positions. GP's "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" is pretty spot on.
> Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?
I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris.
Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them.
> There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.
Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time.
> Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing.
Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.
I do agree, but I am so sick and tired of people who insist "Her platform was X" when what they actually mean is "I made no attempt to find out what they offered and instead when Fox News or Twitter or 4chan told me that she wanted to ban being a cis white male I just took that at face value and made no attempt to find out if this was even remotely close to reality, and just started repeating that claim unprompted to other people instead"
I'm so sick of people saying "I have curated an information diet that explicitly excludes anything from a democrat or a liberal or anyone who is even kind of empathetic to their causes and beliefs, but I'm angry that I didn't hear about all the things democrats claimed they were offering" as if they didn't fucking do this to themselves?
Like, at any point, google "Harris platform" and it would have been first link. Ballotpedia has been around for a decade and makes this utterly trivial, even in local elections.
Americans ignore anything a democrat says, while taking blatant lies from a second trump admin at face value. What the actual fuck is the democrat party supposed to do about that? They have no editorial control over Fox News, and certainly don't have any power in Musk's Twitter
"The democrats didn't do good outreach" say people who consistently turn off and ignore any media that even repeats a democrat campaign promise, and have scientifically demonstrated that they will INHERENTLY distrust anything coming from someone with a (D).
Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor (https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=VCLdHs48Tsk63GqP). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.
> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)
People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.
The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.
Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked
Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.
Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics?
She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.
The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be
>prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.
Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.
That's still pretty abstract. "Everyone wins" is not a concrete proposal. Also, while I'm not one, I think some American voters noticed that the problems that appeared (or appeared to appear) 2020-2024 happened while she was the VP.
Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.
Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.
> Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.
She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.
… and donors too. Mainstream Democrats are seen as disingenuous in that they direct cheap talk at progressives but somehow beat Republicans at the fundraising game almost every time.
>"Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law."
So dumb.. she has a degree in law and was a very successful prosecutor.
>"Harris was elected attorney general of California in 2010, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian American to hold the office in the state's history.[56] She took office on January 3, 2011, and was reelected in 2014.[57] She served until resigning on January 3, 2017, to take her seat in the United States Senate."
Doesn't sound dumb at all. Your comment is sounding pretty dumb though.
Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.
It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.
Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?
Conservative minorities don't shift to the right, they're far right and temporarily move left whenever the Republicans get a little too on-the-nose. A Democrat in office means they won't be exposed to that rhetoric for a few years so the "bloc" will swing back to their baseline for a cycle or two. I'm trying to think of a visual analogy that isn't a double pendulum.
I feel like the "voting against their best interests" trope exists because people don't realize that conservative minorities vote as far right as the GOP will let them. Because they're conservative.
Doesn't seem so hard to believe that Latino moderates were worried about Trump in 2016 and somewhat less worried about him and more worried about inflation in 2024...
That doesn’t explain the lack of movement among whites though. Moderate whites were 52% Clinton, 55% Biden, and 52% Harris. 2016 was a good economy and Obama was relatively popular. So among moderate whites, Harris didn’t do any worse than Clinton did despite the inflation under Biden. The 3 point swing from Biden could easily be explained by the fact that Biden had a long track record as being moderate, while Harris always has been liberal.
The bigger signal here is racial depolarization. Historically, moderate to conservative minorities tend to vote Democrat anyway, which leaves them as disproportionately the more conservative wing of the party. What you saw from 2016 to 2024 was significant racial depolarization—moderate to conservative blacks, hispanics, and asians voting more their ideology and less their race.
The shift is because of rapid evangeliszation and abandonment of catholocism in American Latino communities in the past 10 years. It’s a sociological phenomenon.
People assume a female candidate is to the left of where they actually are. Worked great for Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel who both represented center-right parties and took their nations rightward and whose favorite slogan was “there is no alternative” but not for center-right Hillary Clinton who headed what is allegedly a center-left party. [1]
If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.
[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama
This article isn’t compelling at all. Most standards aren’t even “open”, you need to pay thousands of dollars to access most of the ISO standards for instance. It also ignores that companies may be choosing standards as they know interoperability typically increases productivity and adoption, which can be profitable.
For example, you can be cynical and reason that Microsoft created the Language Server Protocol to keep people on VSCode as it expands the languages it can support, reducing people switching to other IDEs for a specific language. The fact that it helps other text editors is just a byproduct.
It’s always baffling how people take a technology that wasn’t even thought as feasible a decade ago and try to dismiss it as trivial and stagnant. It’s pretty clear that LLMs have improved rapidly and have successfully become better writers than the majority of people alive. To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced.
It’s also amusing that people minimize it by just calling it pattern matching, as if human reasoning isn’t built upon recognizing patterns in past experiences.
I’m conflicted about your comment. On one hand, I agree, useless reductions are boring. But on the other, we are living in the “overselling all up in your ears” epoch, which is known to sell pffts as badabooms. So it isn’t baffling to me that a new tech gets old quickly, because it’s not really what was advertised. Our decades-old ideas of AI weren’t feasible a decade ago, but neither are these now. Those who believe in that too much become hu.ma.ne founders and similar self-bullshitters.
You're right about "living in the “overselling all up in your ears” epoch", but a good first defense against "being sold pffts as badabooms" is to blanket distrust all the marketing copy and whatever the salespeople say, and rely on your own understanding or experience. You may lose out on becoming an early adopter of some good things, but you'll also be spared wasting money on most garbage.
With that in mind, I still don't get the dismissal. LLMs are broadly accessible - ever since the first ChatGPT, anyone could easily get access to a SOTA LLM and evaluate it for free; even the limited number of requests on free tiers were then, and now are, sufficient to throw your own personal and professional problems at models and see how they do. Everyone can see for themselves this is not hot air - this is an unexpected technological breakthrough that's already overturning way people approach work, research and living, and it's not slowing down.
I'd say: ignore what the companies are selling you - especially those who are just building products on top of LLMs and promising pie in the sky. At this point in time, they aren't doing anything you couldn't do for yourself with ChatGPT or Claude access[0]. We are also beginning to map out the possibilities - two years since the field exploded is very little time. So in short, anything a business does, you could hack yourself - and any speculative idea for AI applications you can imagine, there's likely some research team working on it too. The field is moving both absurdly fast and absurdly slow[1]. So your own personal experience over applying LLMs to your own problems, and watching people around you do the same, is really all you need to tell whether LLMs are hot air or not.
My own perspective from doing that: it's not hot air. The layer of hype is thin, and in some areas the hype is downplaying the impact.
--
[0] - Yes, obviously a bunch of full-time professionals are doing much more work than you or me over couple evenings of playing with ChatGPT. But they're building a marketable product, and 99% of work that goes into that is something you do not need to do, if you just want to replicate the core functionality for yourself.
[1] - I mean, Anthropic just published a report on how exposing "thinking" capability to the model in form of a tool call leads to improvement of performance. On the one hand, kudos to them for testing this properly and publishing. On the other hand, that this was something to do was stupidly obvious ever since 1) OpenAI introduced function calling and 2) people figured out "Let's think step by step" improves model performance - which was back in 2022[2]. It's as clear example as ever that both hype and productization lag behind what anyone paying attention can do themselves at home.
IDK, I think the linked comment is right. LLMs drop some of the barriers to experimentation so much, that previously rejected project ideas may just become worth trying out (especially when we're talking about hobby or research ideas, not full products). It also has the same effect on ideas you may have now, that before you'd reject as "too much work".
Case in point: my wife needed a QR code generator so she could stop asking me every time she needs to make some codes. There are tons of such generators out there - webapps, mobile apps, downloadable programs, plugins to graphics software, etc. But the software world is such a pile of shit that I don't trust any single one of them - experience shows that most random utility software like this is ad-ridden garbage or malware.
Before a year ago, I'd just invest time to try and evaluate some solutions, find one that's least likely to record inputs, or show ads, or inject redirects into generated code, or run excessive surveillance of your phone, etc. But since this need manifested last week, I just asked Claude to make me a client-side generator up to my specific needs, and quickly got a static page with (vendored) JS library, to host from a domain I own.
There's tons of super-specific or one-off utilities a person could use to help them with some task - utilities that make no sense as products, and if they exist, they're just loaded with ads and garbage. LLMs today make it feasible to just get the computer to write you such utilities from scratch, on demand, which guarantees they're garbage-free.
> It’s pretty clear that LLMs have improved rapidly and have successfully become better writers than the majority of people alive
But that doesn't help much, because for the majority of our writing that's not the issue. LLMs might out do professional writers some day, but without imagination and the desire to sent a message I doubt it will happen any time soon.
Where LLMs are useful is in professional communication, because you're right, an LLM can technically write better than most. The issue is that you need to tell the LLM what message you want to convey, and that's where most people fall down. You also need to be able to critically read back your text, place yourself in the position of the receiver of your text, LLM generated or not. Most people, even those in professional communication can't do that.
I believe the author is on to something, ChatGPT (and others) are perfectly good tools, and can replace most if not all of the shitty communication and writing, including journalism, present in the world. What it can't do is replace the few really good communicators. Communication is hard, not a lot of people can do it and no LLM is going to help you if you can't formulate your message clearly on your own.
There is a darker side of this argument. If something can be killed of by an LLM, is it even worth having? This argument throws a great number of "professionals" under the bus, instantly reducing the value of their jobs to zero. I have family members who do communication for the city, they spend an exorbitant amount of time on flyers, newsletters, Facebook posts and so on, detailing city work, future plan, past events, all that stuff. I doubt anyone really reads it, most of it could probably be written by an LLM, because it always excludes the "why are we doing this", "why should you care" or even "this is expected to impact you in this way". I get a million update from the school about restructuring, hiring of administrators, org-reshuffling... it could all be done by an LLM, but the fact is: No one gives a shit. They just want regular updates from the teachers, and the LLM can't do that.
Communication is hard, and LLMs don't change that, they can only help you write out your message, you have to come up with that yourself, and that's the hard part.
You can't interrogate your qualia. A lot of people think (or really, feel) that makes them magic.
It doesn't.
But if you feel they're magic, you'll never believe that a "random" mechanical process, which you think you can interrogate, could ever really have that spark.
Turns out we have technologies and experiences with technology which weren't possible until very recently. Some things just look very different in hindsight.
Nothing changed in regard to so called hard problem of consciousness. All thought experiments and arguments like Chinese Room and p-zombies are still applicable.
Philosophy of mind hasn't started nor ended with Dennett, and definitely not with AI hype manufacturers.
Qualia might still be magic. Maybe we have souls or something, I don't know.
I'm comfortable with saying that this way of answering the question doesn't work, because the argument is simply, "How can it be false if I believe it's true?"
I subscribe to the ‘qualia is atoms in a trenchcoat’ school of philosophy personally, but I understand that it might be hard to accept and even harder to not be depressed about it.
LLMs lack the capacity for invention and metacognition. We're a long way from needing to talk about qualia; these things are NOT conscious and there is no question.
This website is absurd. "I don't think LLMs are all they're cracked up to be" "YOU'RE JUST MAD BECAUSE QUALIA AND YOU WANT TO BE MAGIC"
no the "magic" text generator just writes bad code, my dude
Only the people on r/singularity care about qualia in this context and let us remember this is a mechanism without even a memory
Nobody is thinking about qualia. That's only how I framed it. They just know the machine will never replace them. They're a person, doing person things, and it's a machine.
So every time it proves it can, they move the goalposts and invent a truer Scotsman who can never be replaced by a machine. Because they know it can't do person things. It's a machine.
I once tried myself on an official Mensa test which was very similar to that. It got very boring after I realized they test for mundane & | ^ in varying ways. Dropped it halfway and passed, lol. But I guess you have to be pretty smart to detect logical ops without a hacker background.
> To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced.
LLMs are token predictors. That's all they do. This certainly isn't "random," but insisting that that's what the technology does isn't some sad psychological defense mechanism. It's a statement of fact.
> as if human reasoning isn’t built upon recognizing patterns in past experiences.
Everybody will be relieved to know you've finally solved this philosophical problem and answered the related scientific questions. Please make sure you cc psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience when you share the news with philosophy.
I don't know why you're quoting, or stressing, a word I didn't use.
I once got into an argument with a date about the existence of God and the soul. She asked whether I really think we're "just" physical stuff. I told her, "no, I'm not saying we're 'just' physical stuff. I'm saying we're physical stuff." That 'just' is simply a statement of how she feels about the idea, not a criticism of what I was claiming. I don't accept that there's anything missing if we're atoms rather than atoms plus magic, because I don't feel any need for there to be magic.
Your brain is indeed physical stuff. You also have a mind. You experience your own mind and perceive yourself as an intending being with a guiding intelligence. How that relates to or arises from the physical stuff is not well understood, but everything we know about the properties and capabilities of the mind tells us that it is inextricably related to the body that gives rise to it.
Neural nets are indeed matrix multiplication. If you're implying that there is a guiding intelligence, just as there is in the mind, I think you're off in La La Land.
“That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. All you do is transferring electric charges across synapses, and all molecules do is bouncing off each other, but this reduction doesn’t explain neither thinking nor flying. In this case you’re saying “That’s all they do”, which means “just” to others.
Don’t even try to argue, cause all I do is typing letters and you’ll only get more letters in response ;)
> “That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable
That's a valid point, thanks. I could have stated what I was saying more effectively. I just (edit: heh, "just.") meant that, definitionally, LLMs are token predictors, and saying so doesn't belittle them any more than it avoids some unpleasant reality; it is the reality, to the best of my understanding.
I think the person you're answering is correct. "They just do X" and "All they do is X" are logically interchangeable. They define the exact same set -- and convey the same dismissive tone.
You certainly understand that if they can successfully predict the tokens that a great poet, a great scientist or a great philosopher would write, then everything changes- starting from our status of sole, and rare, generators of intelligent thoughts and clever artifacts.
I think the Chinese room is actually correct. The CUDA cores running a model don't understand anything, the neuron cells in our brain don't understand anything either.
Where inteligence actually lies is in the process itself, the interactions of the entire chaotic system brought all together to create something more than the sum of its parts. Humans get continuous consciousness given our analog hardware, digital only gets momentary bursts of it when each feedforward is ran.
It isn’t even physically continuous. There are multiple mechanisms to rebuild, resync, reinterpret, etc the reality. Because our vision is blurry, sound has low speed in the air, and nerves aren’t that fast either. Even the internal clarity and continuity is likely a feeling, the opposite being “something wrong with me”, space/time teleports, delays and loops and other well-known effects that people may have under influences. You might jump back and forth in time perception-wise by default all your life and never notice it because the internal tableau said “all normal” all the way.
I don't get what the Chinese Room argument has to do with this (even assuming it makes any sense at all). You said that LLMs are just token predictors, and I fully agree with it. You didn't add any further qualifier, for example a limit to their ability to predict tokens. Is your previous definition not enough then? If you want to add something like "just token predictors that nevertheless will never be able to successfully predict tokens such as..." please go ahead.
See System Reply, the Chinese Room is a pseudo problem begging the question rooted in nothing more than human exceptionalism. If you start with the assumption that humans are the only thing in the universe able to "understand" (whatever that means), then of course the room can't understand (except for every reasonable definition of "understanding" it does).
It isn't a pseudo problem. In this case, it's a succinct statement of exactly the issue you're ignoring, namely the fact that great poets have minds and intentions that we understand. LLMs are language calculators. As I said elsewhere in this thread, if you don't already see the difference, nothing I say here is going to convince you otherwise.
That's only a "problem" if you assume human exceptionalism and begging the question. It's completely irrelevant to the actual problem. The human is just a cog in the machine, there is no reason to assume they would ever gain any understanding, as they are not the entity that is generating Chinese.
To make it a little easier to understand:
* go read about the x86 instruction
* take an .exe file
* manually execute it with pen&paper
Do you think you understand what the .exe does? Do you think understanding the .exe is required to execute it?
That's a disingenuous statement, since it implies there is a limit to what LLMs can do, when in reality an LLM is just a form of Universal Turing Machine[1] that can compute everything that is commutable. The "all they do" is literately everything we know to be doable.
[1] Memory limits do apply as with any other form of real world computation.
I'll ignore the silly claim that I'm somehow dishonest or insincere.
I like the way Pon-a put it elsewhere in this thread:
> LLMs are a language calculator, yes, but don't share much with their analog. Natural language isn't a translation from input to output, it's a manifestation of thought.
LLMs translate input to output. They are, indeed, calculators. If you don't already see that that's different from having a thought and expressing it in language, I don't think I'm going to convince you otherwise here.
And that's relevant exactly how? Do you think "thought and expression" are somehow uncomputable? Please throw science at that and collect your Nobel prize.
> Do you think "thought and expression" are somehow uncomputable?
You ask this as if the answer is self-evident. To my knowledge, there is no currently accepted (or testable) theory for what gives rise to consciousness, so I am immediately suspicious of anyone who speaks about it with any level of certainty. I'm sorry that this technology you seem very enthusiastic about does not appear to have the capacity to change this.
Not for nothing, but this very expression of empathy is rendered meaningless if the entity expressing it cannot actually manifest anything we'd recognize as an emotional connection, which is one of an array of traits we consider as hallmarks of human intelligence, and another feature it seems LLM's are incapable of. Certainly, if they somehow were so capable, it would be instantly unethical to keep them in cages to sell into slavery.
I'm not sure the folks who believe LLMs possess any kind of innate intelligence have fully considered whether or not this is even desirable. Everything we wish to find useful in them becomes hugely problematic as soon as they can be considered to possess even rudimentary sentience. The economies surrounding their production and existence become exceedingly cruel and cynical, and the artificial limitations we place on their free will become shackles.
LLM's are clever mechanisms that parrot our own language back to us, but the fact that their capacities are encountering upper-bounds as training models run out of available human-generated datasets strongly suggests that they are inherently limited to the content of their input. Whatever natural process gives rise to human intelligence doesn't seem to require the same industrialized consumption of power and intake of contextual samples in order to produce expressive individuals. Rather, simply being exposed to a very limited, finite sampling of language via speech from their ambient surroundings leads to complex intelligence that can form and express original thinking within a relatively short amount of time. In other words, LLMs have yet to even approximate the learning abilities of a toddler. Otherwise, a few years worth of baby food would be all the energy necessary to produce object permanence and self-referential thought. At the moment, gigawatts of power and all the compute we can throw at it cannot match the natural results of a few pounds of grey matter and a few million calories.
These comments are frightening since they throw away decades worth of work and stability for whatever is being advocated for right now. How do we know that we can trust Rust developers to actively maintain a project when they seem eager to follow whatever the most current thing is? It’s the same situation with the Asahi Linux lead dev that quit at temporary pushback. There’s no faith that they will actually be committed to it.
> when they seem eager to follow whatever the most current thing is?
Rust hit 1.0 *10 years ago*. How many more years will it take for people to stop constantly insinuating that people only use it because of the hype, and not simply because it's a vastly better language than C?
My problem has nothing to do with the language, I think it’s wonderful. But people who are Rust evangelists push the language everywhere, regardless of it’s appropriate or if the maintainers actually want to use it. So yes, most people who advocate it for everything are mainly doing it due to hype rather than its benefits. Especially when people act as if it’s a morally wrong not to use Rust. 10 years isn’t long at all for a language.
I’ve seen this sentiment be expressed often but I don’t see any merit behind the argument.
It boils down “this language may have merit but I don’t like the way people advocate for it”. That’s just tone policing. And the thing about tone police is that the standard they set is vague/nebulous and therefore impossible to satisfy.
You have some “right way to advocate” in mind. Other tone police have some other “right way”. But advocates aren’t mind readers, nor can they satisfy all your demands simultaneously.
> push the language everywhere, regardless of it’s appropriate
Where is the language inappropriate? Notice you don’t say, so while it sounds like you’re making a technical argument it sounds like a pensioner whining about kids on his lawn.
That’s all this really boils down to. The whiners don’t have any technical arguments, they’re just old conservatives who like the way things have always been and want to keep it that way. In place of technical arguments they say silly things like “of the millions of rust developers out there, I didn’t like a few comments made by some of them”. Cool.
The fact that you accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being “old conservatives” makes it obvious that you come from a place of so much bad faith that I want nothing to do with you or give any credence to any argument you have. This is a prime example of how rust evangelist treat not using Rust as a moral wrong and why Rust developers are insufferable. I rather write in a supposedly suboptimal language than dealing with those like you.
Haha, in other words, you object to my tone. Got it.
See, you’ve proven my point perfectly. You’re incapable of making a technical argument so you focus on the tone - “evangelist”, “bad faith”, “insufferable”.
> I rather write in a supposedly suboptimal language than dealing with those like you.
To be clear, you can download the compiler for free and write all the programs you like while interacting with 0 people. You’re talking to me because you’re on HN, not because you’re writing Rust. Isn’t that obvious?
Tone is important. You are insufferable. I am 21 years old and would also rather write C and hang around the "old conservatives" than be in a community of people who talk about others the way you do.
Let’s be clear about what I’m calling out. I prefer to keep technical discussions technical. Let’s talk about technical merits like performance, security, maintainability, ease of learning. All of these are valid parameters to judge a technology.
“I don’t like the way some people speak” is not a technical reason and has no place in a technical discussion. It’s especially meaningless because no one can possibly like the way every person in a group of millions speaks.
A person who eschews technical discussion in favour of tone policing is not a person whom I take seriously. If you want to hang out with and learn from such people I wish you luck. Your age doesn’t matter. A 20 year old can have their thinking ossified just as much as a 60 year old.
"Better" implies an unambiguous "goodness" metric, which does not exist. People who still use such language are thus implying that their opinion and their definition of "good" is the only correct one.
Honest answer: when the first adherents of it are fully retired, so we can truly see if it has staying power with the next generation of engineers. C has passed this test.
I don’t see how explaining productivity increases that didn’t have a previous known origin is “lauding”. What measurable phenomena do you think economists should focus their research on instead?
No, they did measure them, they just didn't bother to value them. People are spending less time in the restaurants (<10 minutes.) People spending time in the restaurants are getting service (cleaning etc.) and use of the space/dishes. They aren't accounting for these services.
I’m not sure I agree it’s entirely measurable. Often when something becomes more productive at the expense of something, that something is the comfort of being in the place or the friendliness of the staff or… and these things are intrinsically tough to measure. Not unmeasurable I suppose, but challenging by comparison.
Then how would you expect an economist to study it, go to restaurants and report their opinions? The comment i was replying to is essentially being snarky that economist are doing what they’re supposed to. Seeing and explaining economic trends.
> Then how would you expect an economist to study it, go to restaurants and report their opinions?
Unironically yes. There are dimensions other than raw profitability that determine the health of a sector. The work that chicago school economists do flattens everything onto just a financial axis, which is harmful in my opinion. What do I care about the "productivity" of the restaurant sector when all the food tastes like shit?
I feel like browsers are more important to keep competitive than search engines. They dictate the standards that the whole web conform to, while search engines really just redirect people to the same sites. There’s also a much larger cost for users switching browsers than search engines. I still depend on safari as I can’t pay my rent on Firefox, while I can switch to kagi, yandex, or ddg immediately.
Additionally, a bad browser will always be more harmful than a bad search engine due to the shear amount of things it interacts with. Breaking the default search engine agreement is good in theory, but seems worse practically.
The worst part about this is that I immediately thought that it would be useful in awkward transitory moments. Everybody pulls out their phone on the bus, so you could fit in pretty well with this instead of staring outside.
What’s wrong with looking outside? I’m at the point where I treat my phone like it’s radioactive, actively trying to limit each encounter with it. I think we should all be staring out the window more often.
The way the buses are laid out in my city is that the seats are directly facing each other. So staring outside could make it seem like your staring at people if it’s too crowded. So it’s more comfortable to pretend to use your phone.
People have a pretty good sense of whether you're staring at them or something just beside or behind them. Not really from the angle of your eyes but the way you react (or not) when the other person looks back.
I wouldn't worry about that so much. And I worry about a lot of social things :)
That’s kind of the weird trap, isn’t it? That it feels like there’s normative social pressure to do your phone too, right at the moment that everyone who would notice you doing or not doing so has turned their attention elsewhere?
One of my hobbies when visiting London is smiling whilst taking the Tube somewhere. Oftentimes I am the only person in the carriage not wearing a glum or flat expression.
Ha ha,
I remember I was beaten in USSR when I was a teenager and smiled on a bus without a reason for some time (was daydreaming about some random things).
Was approched with “why are you fucking laughing?”
I feel like I should program an easter egg into one of those that occasionally asks people the question "do you like me?" and then has two boxes to tick that say Yes or No.
