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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Okay so both of those ideas are incorrect.

    As I said, many are literally Markovian and the main discriminator is beam, which does not really matter for helping people understand my meaning nor should it confuse anyone that understands this topic. I will repeat: there are examples that are literally Markovian. In your example, it would be me saying there are rectangular phones but you step in to say, “but look those ones are curved! You should call it a shape, not a rectangle.” I’m not really wrong and your point is a nitpick that makes communication worse.

    In terms of stochastic processes, no, that is incredibly vague just like calling a phone a “shape” would not be more descriptive or communicate better. So many things follow stochastic processes that are nothing like a Markov chain, whereas LLMs are like Markov Chains, either literally being them or being a modified version that uses derived tree representations.



  • Tankie was originally a Trotskyist term for the people that supported tolling tanks into Hungary in the 50s.

    Of course, the term “authoritarian bootlicker” is a funny one, as its purveyors have a habit of recycling and promulgating the propaganda pushes of the US State Department and opposition to that tendency is often what gets one labelled a tankie. Like when MLK spoke positively of Castro’s revolution or a Vietnam united under Ho Chi Minh rather than targeted for bombing by the US. Though I am being generous: so many people using the term are so politically illiterate that they apply it to basically anything vaguely left that they disagree with.

    I think you’d be calling him a tankie.






  • “AI” is a parlor trick. Very impressive at first, then you realize there isn’t much to it that is actually meaningful. It regurgitates language patterns, patterns in images, etc. It can make a great Markov chain. But if you want to create an “AI” that just mines research papers, it will be unable to do useful things like synthesize information or describe the state of a research field. It is incapable of critical or analytical approaches. It will only be able to answer simple questions with dubious accuracy and to summarize texts (also with dubious accuracy).

    Let’s say you want to understand research on sugar and obesity using only a corpus from peer reviewed articles. You want to ask something like, “what is the relationship between sugar and obesity?”. What will LLMs do when you ask this question? Well, they will just attempt to do associations and to construct reasonable-sounding sentences based on their set of research articles. They might even just take an actual semtence from an article and reframe it a little, just like a high schooler trying to get away with plagiarism. But they won’t be able to actually mechanistically explain the overall mechanisms and will fall flat on their face when trying to discern nonsense funded by food lobbies from critical research. LLMs do not think or criticize. Of they do produce an answer that suggests controversy it will be because they either recognized diversity in the papers or, more likely, their corpus contains reviee articles that criticize articles funded by the food industry. But it will be unable to actually criticize the poor work or provide a summary of the relationship between sugar and obesity based on any actual understanding that questions, for example, whether this is even a valid question to ask in the first place (bodies are not simple!). It can only copy and mimic.



  • It coincides with their switch to more and more “AI” black box models. Whereas before they would use a hand-tuned heuristic model to describe whether you are turning, merging, or continuing on a road, they just use a less correct but automagic model where they still inevitably have to tune it a whole lot but it is “AI” so it has the approval of the petty lords of management.

    Incorrect entrances and closed roads are another example. They’re just using satellite and street level imagery and tossing it at some models that spit out things like “door 99% confidence” and “road 98% confidence” while neglecting the question of, “are you actually allowed/able to use this?”

    PS under basically every correct answer in this category is a team of poorly-paid “labelers” whose answers directly turn into the data in the map. Your door-that-is-not-an-entrance was marked entrance because someone making $8/hr only had 10 seconds to review before moving to the next question.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlTabasco on pizza: Yay or Nay?
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    21 days ago

    Italians are well-known for being sticklers about the right way to prepare their food, often implying it is ancient. Unless it is a low-oil focaccia or a salad (ancient Roman), it is surprisingly often the case that it is a dish that is 50-100 years old with a foreign influence.

    Naples has been making pizza for about 200 years as a basic flatbread with tomatoes, mozarella, and basil. If you eat pizza with a tomato sauce… that’s an American change. Pizza was not often eaten outside Naples [Edit:whoopsie] until around WWII. The most common variations around the world are all based on the American version.

    Carbonara was a WWII-era invention with tons of variations at first and an American origin. I’ve known Italians that get actually upset if you prepare carbonara with the “wrong” ingredients even though they were ingredients used on “original” carbonaras less than 50 years ago.

    If you go back just a bit farther, every dish that needs tomatoes or potatoes or peppers is from the Americas, not Europe. And Europeans were not big on tomatoes for a looong time. It’s only been in much use there for about 250 years.



  • Being “ready” means nothing, it is just a thought in your head. Praxis requires that you act. You aren’t ready for an uprising if you aren’t actually organizing towards one yourself. And I have yet to meet a successful revolutionary organizer that tries to sheepdog for literally genocidal Democrats.

    I haven’t advocated for “doing nothing”, I have advocated against supporting genocide from both a moralizing and electorally strategic angle. I choose these angles because it is the language most people will understand and because the propaganda that I oppose in the process teaches people to give up leverage and cheerlead, which is literally disempowering.

    If people want recommendations on something positive to do, I would recommend joining the Uncommitted Movement if you prefer electoralism. If you are interested in politics that also extends beyond electoralism, I would be happy to provide advice on any local groups and reading materials.


  • They will not exist so long as you vote for “lesser evil” genociders. Why would there be? You still vote for them! They don’t need to listen to you at all and will gladly continue the project that is in their overall material interest in supporting Israel. You show up in their databases as, “Likely Democratic voter” and so they send some volunteers to try to get you to vote and they ask you for money. That is how you are thought of, and I mean this literally. That is how they curate and use their information. The rest is PR for how to ensure you don’t take these looney anti-genociders too seriously.

    There is no “push from there” without leverage. If they don’t do what you want, what are you going to do? With what power? If you mske a threat, why is it credible? We are kept docile and ineffective through electoral illogic that serves the interests of the existing political class and cannot imagine gaining or wielding power in any practical way.




  • The constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery in the US provided one exception: anyone convicted of a crime.

    This was a tool of Jim Crow to maintain a sizeable black slave labor force via disproportionate criminalization of black people and poverty (newly-freed previous slaves were very poor, often illiterate). It was and is a tool of modern racialized hyper-exploited labor via the prison system. And it is likely a tool that US authorities are keeping in their back pocket for the mass criminalization of the homeless.