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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Please be careful, while the thrust of your statement is correct (not a substitute for a real professional, it can give dangerously bad advise on some occasions and there’s no way besides personal knowledge and expertise to distinguish when it messes up besides hard study and real research), the meme that LLMs are glorified autocomplete is factually incorrect. Don’t be like the D.A.R.E. program and try to scare people away from things with bad facts and lies.

    It is disingenuous to say that because the AI system that trains the AI system that becomes the LLM uses “next word prediction” as its success metric, that the LLM itself is nothing but autocomplete. Here’s an example of a next word predictor: a fully fledged intelligent human being who is asked to predict the next word of a sentence. And I’m not saying that an LLM is that, or equivalent, or even close, just that being a next word predictor doesn’t rule that out, and claiming or implying so is simply wrong.

    True, use of LLMs is not guaranteed to be correct, and in areas where correctness really matters and you lack expertise to check it, you really should not use an LLM. But let’s not lie to make it sound dumber than it is. It’s plenty dumb enough already.





  • I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.

    Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.

    To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.


  • Iunnrais@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzoriginality
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    9 months ago

    The scuttlebutt is that buffalo as a verb was only attested very briefly in upstate New York and the Midwest for a brief period of time in the early 1900s. It never spread nationally, and definitely not internationally.

    However, checking Google ngrams shows that “he buffaloed” and “was buffaloed”, (to ensure it’s being used idiomatically as a verb and not just in the famous example sentence) emerged in 1900, peaked in the 1950s, but has sustained small but constant use in published print since then. I was actually expecting the ngram to rapidly drop off and never recover… shocked to see that some people still use it as a real phrase.


  • Iunnrais@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzoriginality
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    9 months ago

    Not that I’ve heard of. Now, whether Homo sapiens idaltu is a real separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens is disputed, so there’s a question as to whether the second sapiens actually differentiates us from anything… but I haven’t seen any signs of any consensus against calling ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens to date.




  • Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.

    Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.

    Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.

    But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.








  • Iunnrais@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre infidelities really that common?
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    10 months ago

    My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.

    There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing

    Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.

    Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.

    What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!

    It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.


  • Yes! Mostly “That’s a car! That’s a truck!” And as his interest and vocabulary is growing, “that’s a hydraulic shovel!” and “a concrete boom pump!”

    I am in fact learning the names of all kinds of construction equipment I never knew before. I never knew that a tiny front loader was called a skid steer before. Apparently, they’re called that because they turn by having one pair of wheels go faster than the other, literally steering by skidding. I’ve also learned the specific names of different varieties of fire trucks thanks to him. There’s pumper trucks, ladder trucks, refraction ladder trucks… there’s a special prototype in Japan with tank treads named the Red Salamander for disaster area work too. I also now know the difference between an excavator, a hydraulic shovel, a mini-shovel, and a micro shovel, on sight. I am also learning the names of specific Japanese bullet train models… that’s the the nozomi, that’s the hayabusa and komachi (they sometimes connect to each other by the nose), that’s the tsubasa…


  • Agreed. The “it’s not really food” idea came from labeling requirements that to be labeled cheese, it needs a certain percentage of its ingredients to be cheese. Once upon a time, American cheese slices were made from the offcuts of cheddar, but the popularity of American cheese means that there literally aren’t enough offcuts to be economical… you’d have to make cheddar just to turn it into American cheese.

    But guess what cheddar is made from? Milk. Turns out, when making American cheese, it’s possible to skip the aging and culturing process and simply go straight from milk into the cheese slice we know, with less than the mandated amount of aged cheddar added. That means they had to write something like cheese product instead of calling it cheese directly.

    But it is still food! In fact, it’s still American cheese… skipping a step in the recipe to get a very similar if not identical result doesn’t change what it is! It uses the same raw ingredients, for crying out loud! It’s still the same stuff!