

If the username doesn’t have to be unique, couldn’t you impersonate people?


If the username doesn’t have to be unique, couldn’t you impersonate people?


I don’t feel like LLMs are conscious and I act accordingly as though they aren’t, but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion. Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is, it seems difficult to rigorously decide upon what does and doesn’t get to be in the category. The usual means by which LLMs are explained not to be conscious, and indeed what I usually say myself, is something like your “they just output probability based on current context” or some variation of “they’re just guessing the next word”, but… is that definitely nothing like what we ourselves do and then call consciousness? Or if indeed that is definitively quite unlike anything we do, does that dissimilarity alone suffice to declare LLMs not conscious? Is ours the only possible example of consciousness, or is the process that drives the behaviour with LLMs possibly just another form or another way of arriving at consciousness? There’s evidently something that triggers an instinctual categorising, most wouldn’t classify a rock as conscious and would find my suggestion that ‘maybe it’s just consciousness in another form than ours’ a pretty weak way to assert that it is, but then again there’s quite a long way between a literal rock and these models running on specific rocks arranged in a particular way and which produce text in a way that’s really similar to the human beings that we all collectively tend to agree are conscious. Is being able to summarise the mechanisms that underpin the behaviour who’s output or manifestation looks like consciousness, enough on it’s own to explain why it definitely isn’t consciousness? Because, what if our endeavours to understand consciousness and understand a biological basis for it in ourselves bear fruit and we can explain deterministically how brains and human consciousness work? In that case, we could, if not totally predict human behaviours deterministically, then at least still give a pretty good and similar summarisation of how we produce those behaviours that look like consciousness. Would we at that point declare that human beings are not conscious either, or would we need a new basis upon which to exclude these current machine approximations of it?
I always felt that things such as the Chinese Room thought experiment didn’t adequately deal with what I was driving at in the previous paragraph and it seems to me that dismissals of machine consciousness on the grounds that LLMs are just statistical models that don’t know what they are doing are missing a similar point. Are we sure that we ourselves are not mechanistically following complicated rules just as neural networks and LLMs are and that’s simply what the experience of consciousness actually is - an unconscious execution of rulesets? Before the current crop of technology that has renewed interest in these questions, when it all seemed a lot more theoretical and perennially decades off, I was comfortable with this uncomfortable thought. Now that we actually have these impressive models that have people wondering about the topic, I seem to be skewing more skeptical and less generous about ascribing consciousness. Suddenly now the Chinese Room thought experiment as a counter to whether these conscious-looking LLMs are really conscious looks more convincing, but that’s not because of any new or better understanding on my part. I seem to be just goal post shifting when faced with something that does a better job of looking conscious than any technology I’d seen previously.


MSN Messenger for the win!


Do you think they can be trusted not to take some sort of action that might take the whole situation and process out of OP’s control have a lot of unintended consequences? I feel like one’s plea that they not act upon it has a lot of risk of being overruled, or ‘act’ having some multitude of interpretations. Your suggestion makes some sense in terms of trying to get ahead of thing in case they spiral out of control for some other reason but it could result in these 3rd parties making things so much worse for everyone even if he has no ill will from the outset.


It’s also clever that they called that shift “blue watch” lol


Thanks mate haha glad my veteran underage drinking shenanigans were good for something other than misspent youth. Hope OP saw it before they decided that another drink will probably be fine. 🥳🥴🤢🤮😪


It’s really easy to feel like so far, everything has been feeling great and you’re not even really that drunk yet so why not have another drink? It’s also easy, each time you have a drink to be less good at deciding if having another one is a good idea until you’re quite suddenly really quite drunk and now you can’t do anything about it and also the effect continues so my best advice is, if it’s feeling ‘pretty great, I could take more’, that’s the perfect time to stop because you’ve probably got away with the buzz you wanted but not all the consequences of getting way drunker than you meant to.


I think the problem op had with this situation and boss’ approach was that it definitely had shades of admonishment, or at least potentially so, hence wanting to know op’s the thought process. I don’t manage people professionally and never have so I’m not speaking from knowledge of best practice, but I do know that in general this isn’t going to be conducive to good outcomes. Necessary or otherwise, if admonishment or at least finding of fault with the behaviour of the person is on the cards doing so publicly is embarrassing and unlikely to foster the goodwill required for that person to think or behave differently since it moves the whole situation out of the framing of learning a lesson about how to do your job in future and in to something adversarial, with the boss now a malign influence to be resented or feared or both and the humiliation in front of peers now also means that person is more likely to feel isolated from them too with their peers are now to be viewed with apprehension as well as the boss. It’s hard to work well and to avoid making mistakes with such factors at play. One such occasion alone, probably not, but if it’s something boss wants to do a lot as a general management strategy, it’s hard to see that going well for anyone involved.
I’ve always felt KFC is just rated. Obviously the ads by KFC for KFC will claim it to be the best food ever invented but in terms of how people seem to perceive it and how I perceive it, the experience tastes and feels like what it is. It’s mostly enjoyable, fatty salty meat and it’s deep fried which is kinda the fast food signature taste and texture. It’s got a lot going for it, in the way that fried chicken generally as a food does, but it’s also extremely poor quality fried chicken and rarely very fresh but that all balances out to something that pretty much works for what you want out of it and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone expects much more of it.


Are people calling desktop backgrounds screensavers now?


In modern NLEs, you don’t need to use a broadcast safe filter before mastering unless it’s some really bizarre circumstance, for basically any normal broadcast master, the very process of encoding the file, essentially IS the broadcast safe filter and adding one on in the NLE just mucks up the grade.


It sounds a lot like they took something their psychologist said, in context, misremembered the exact wording and intended meaning, selectively reconstructed it, disregarded the original context and then applied it universally to all people in all situations instead of specifically for her in her particular circumstances as part of a sentence deeply embedded in a lot of conversation that took place before and after to try and help her understand why people act certain ways.


Flubber 1997 Not because it was such a memorably great trailer, but just because it was so misleading. I don’t want to watch that shitty movie all over again just to verify my claims but what I recall was, there were entire scenes or shots in the trailer that weren’t in the movie at all, and they were kind of the best bits. I definitely expected a lot more crazy hijinks and time spent in the flying car with sentient mischievous green goo then what I remember ending up with. The whole flubber material having some will of its own too I seem to recall was a much less prominent aspect of the movie than was implied, it seemed to be just goo most of the time. So much screen time was spent worrying about the Professor’s marriage and conflict with the University faculty, which was so boring for a kid especially when they marketed it so heavily and I was given to expect so different. Don’t know if I’d have liked the 60’s version better, from what I read and see in the trailer it does look like pretty much the same movie so likely suffered the same issues.
If one really dug through my history before this comment and probably in to the future when I’ve long forgotten about it you’d probably find examples of me not practicing what I’m about to preach but, to an extent no one really is a loser because the term is subjective and meaningless in any practical sense. People might do “loser” things sometimes or even constantly, but still have capacity for change or posess redeeming factors that make them worth time and energy to at least someone. The question is whether they’re worth your time and energy, and whether you have reason to want them to redeem themselves in your eyes.
If your father had been a much nicer spoken man, and also stayed with your mother, but still had the terrible money management and bad financial situation would you still feel inclined to call him a loser? Someone with no attachment to him and whose personal criteria for casting someone in to that bucket centres around material wealth might, but his own children maybe less so. As it happens he has been bad with money, has made a lot of decisions you disapprove of and persists in interacting with you in a reprehensible manner so it’s entirely understandable why you might not like him very much or feel much reason to indulge him or invest in a relationship with him. To me that’s enough, his “loserdom” status is immaterial, in fact it’s a distraction, because if you ever DID change your mind and wanted to attempt to repair the relationship, such value judgements might be hard to cast aside once they’re allowed to calcify and such a change of mind won’t be about his worth based on some extrinsic, arbitrary label but instead about what he is and continues to be to you.


It’s an interesting question though because I guess if the files being zipped are already nearly or maximally compressed then I’d assume that the zip of all those files actually was in some extremely tiny negligible way, actually slightly larger than those files on their own.
123 Fake St


No no, the chairs or tables will be absolved of duty, so like they’ll still be around, taking up space, we just won’t be allowed to ask anything useful of them anymore because they’re retired.
It’s more likely a collection of more mundane unconscious observations using all of your more normal senses that get very quickly consolidated in to one intuitive sense of dubious reliability but which in the absence of better information keeps you a bit safer.