if someone comes up with an alternative way to use a bunch of that infrastructure to make money, I bet they could get a lot of business when the AI bubble pops and suddenly these datacenters are desperate to find a use for themselves
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Which most of us neuroscientists hated because a neural network is a biological network. [...] Conflating the term with research on actual neural networks.
Yeah that's fair, co-opting the term in computing was bound to overtake its original definition, but it doesn't feel fair to blame that on the computer scientists that were trying to strengthen the nodes of the model to mimic how neural connections can be strengthened and weakened. (I'm a software engineer, not a neuroscientist, so I am not trying to explain neuroscience to a neuroscientist.)
mostly because they called it “neural networks” which sounded super cool.
To be fair... it does sound super cool.
It boogled the mind how anyone could believe a prediction model could have consciousness.
I promise you the computer scientists studying it never thought it could have consciousness. Lay-people, and a capitalist society trying to turn every technology into profit thought it could have consciousness. That doesn't take AI, though. See, for example, the Chinese Room. From Wikipedia, emphasis mine, "[...] The machine does this so perfectly that no one can tell that they are communicating with a machine and not a hidden Chinese speaker." Also, though it is from a science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." applies here as well. Outside of proper science perception is everything.
To a lay-person an AI Chatbot feels as though it has consciousness, the very difficulty with which online forums have in telling AI slop comments from real people is evidence to how well an LLM has modeled language such that it can be so easily mistaken for intelligence.
There is no understanding. No thinking. No ability to understand context.
We start to diverge into the philosophical here, but these can be argued. I won't try to have the argument here, because god knows the Internet has seen enough of that philosophical banter already. I would just like to point out that the problem of context specifically was one that artificial neural networks with convolutional filters sought to address. Image recognition originally lacked the ability to process images in a way that took the whole image into account. Convolutions broke up windows of pixels into discreet parameters, and multiple layers in "deep" (absurdly-numbered layer-count) neural networks could do heuristics on the windows, then repeat the process to get heuristics on larger and larger convolutions until the whole network accurately predicted an image of a particular size. It's not hard to see how this could be called "understanding context" in the case of pixels. If, then, it can be done with pixels why not other concepts?
We use heuristics
Heuristics are about a "close enough" approximation for a solution. Artificial neural networks are exactly this. It is a long-running problem with artificial neural networks that overfitting the model leads to bad predictions because being more loose about training the network results in better heuristics.
Which further feed emotional salience (attention). A cycling. That does not occur in computers.
The loop you're talking about sounds awfully similar to the way artificial neural networks are trained in a loop. Not exactly the same because it is artificial, but I can't in good conscious not draw that parallel.
You use the word "emotion" a lot. I would think that a neuroscientist would be first in line to point out how poorly understood emotions are in the human brain.
A lot of the tail end there is about the complexity of human emotion, but a great deal was about the feedback loop of emotion.
I think something you might be missing about the core difference between artificial and biological neural networks is that one is analogue and the other is digital. Digital systems must by their nature be discreet things. CPUs process instructions one at a time. Modern computers are so fast we of course feel like they multitask but they don't. Not in the way an analogue system does like in biology. You can't both make predictions off of an artificial neural network, and simultaneously calculate the backpropogation of that same network. One of them has to happen first, and the other has to happen second, at the very least. You're right that it'll never be exactly like a biological system because of this. An analogue computer with bi-directional impulses that more closely matched biology might, though. Analogue computers aren't really a thing anymore, they have a whole ecosystem of issues themselves.
The human nervous system is fast. Blindingly fast. However computers are faster. For example videos can be displayed faster than neurons can even process a video frame. We've literally hit the limit of human frames-per-second fidelity.
So if you will, computers don't need to be analogue. They can just be so overwhelmingly fast at their own imitation loop of input and output that biological analogue systems can't notice a difference.
Like I said though the subject in any direction quickly devolves into philosophy, which I'm not going to touch.
from a purely mathematical standpoint, yes
from a practical engineering standpoint, no, it's impossible
I'm pedantic as they come, but pedantry has little use in an engineering discipline, software engineering included
like, if I take a cup of water and pour it into the Pacific Ocean strictly speaking I can say I "single-handed raised the water level of the ocean" and you'd be correct in the most unhelpful way
for the code in question if the PRNG is working as expected then for all meaningful purposes it can be considered impossible
edit oh also to fight pedantry with pedantry, technically even a check that would prevent duplicates might not prevent duplicates because you could argue there's a non-zero chance a random cosmic ray flips just the right bit at just the right moment rendering even that pure chance. anything engineered (and not pure mathematical theory) has to draw the line of plausibility somewhere because we're engineering inside of a chaotic reality. drawing the line to say that the image above is functionally impossible is just fine.
console.time()jots down the current time, if you do that twice and put stuff in the middle you get two times and the difference between them is how long that stuff took to doconsole.timeEnd()uses the last execution ofconsole.time()as the starting point to work out how long the stuff took to doconst originalUUID = crypto.randomUUID()generates a Universally Unique IDentifier, which can be thought of as a very large very random number, by use of a pseudorandom number generatorwhile(stuff)evaluates the stuff for truthiness (1 + 2 = 5 would be false, 50 < 200 would be true, 'my username starts with the letter k' would be true) it's typically followed by a 'block' of code, that is lines beginning with{and ending with}, but we don't see that here, which means we can readwhile(stuff)as "keep checking ifstuffis true in an endless loop, and only continue to the next line if one of the checks ends up beingfalse"the
stuffhere is creating another random UUID, and checking to see if it's the same random number as the first one generated.functions like this are so incredibly random that chancing upon two executions creating the same number should be practically impossible. staggeringly impossible. If so this code should never complete, as that
whilecheck would be endless, never finding a matchthe image suggests that one such match was found in about 19 million milliseconds (a bit over 5 hours). this is probably faked, because the absurd unlikelihood of the same number being generated in so much as a single human lifetime, let alone a day, is laughable
the imagine is faked or something is terribly wrong with their pseudorandom number generator
hold on now, let's not conflate "ignorance" with "willful ignorance"
having access to information and refusing to use it is clearly terrible and a clear sign of some unhealthy mindset, but being ignorant about something doesn't automatically mean that ignorance was sought out or valued
for example, I would say I am ignorant about more things than not by sheer quantity of information in the world, but I would be glad to learn if presented the opportunity, that doesn't make me any less ignorant
there's nothing wrong with being ignorant, only with trying to stay ignorant
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TIL braille is not one-letter-per-group all the time. In looking this up I learned that there are a lot of braille shortcuts, abbreviations, and contractions in English Braille.
neat!
A... Mourbioros? Morboros? Mouroboros?
Ah yes, like The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. A classic.
ah fuck you're absolutely right, it's ambiguous 🤦
The title of this post was, "What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype?"
14 years is hardly 'recent'
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is it ajar?
depends on the story you want to tell
regardless, don't forget about the new Into the Spiderverse animated films which, though feature a teenage protagonist, do liberally include an adult Peter Parker and we see some glimpses into their life and struggles
I had success running unit tests for software deployments in pairs, one with pinned versions (error on a failed build) and one unpinned (warning on a failed build)
so at least you get forewarning when an upstream dependency messes everything up, and if the software changes are somewhat regular than each log of pipeline runs should show incremental changes making it easier to spot the package that started breaking everything
almost 20 years ago I downloaded off limewire a cover of Toxicity by System of a Down, purely instrumental and listened to it through highschool
the artist listed in the file's metadata was Trans Siberian Orchestra. back around 2005 finding out that they never covered Toxicity was somewhere between challenging and impossible so I accepted it and forgot about it
recently I wanted to re-find that song, maybe on Spotify or YouTube or wherever. only this year did I realize that that artist was never correct, and googling held nothing for me
in one of the vanishingly rare successful uses of a large language model I got ChatGPT to suggest artists from that time that might have covered that song and after a few tries dismissing the most popular artists it spat out Vitamin String Quartet and I get to listen to a higher quality version of the song I first heard around 2005
my lay person understanding of the law is that in situations like these you don't need to prove what should be so overwhelmingly self-evident
there's probably some Latin phrase for it a lawyer would just know but when a thing is so far away from a gray area of reasonableness you're fine
you shouldn't need hard evidence, people as a rule don't like to set themselves on fire
tristate as in three states or tristate as in five states?
I didn't read books 2 or 3 either, and just limped to the end of book 1, but they do make it quite clear that the things depicted in the game are meant to be strange but not totally alien to the players. that's why the leader was some ancient well know Chinese figure from folklore, despite that not being the actual name of the alien
figuring out binary logic wasn't with flags, it explained in the book that in reality they reflected light with their bodies, but that's super alien to humans so they used flags as an equivalent in the game
I agree though that the science and logic don't follow with their decision making regarding earth. you could argue that with this godlike AI why didn't they just go to the nearest uninhabited livable world instead of earth, and they kinda addressed it by explaining that the trisolarians (which is a way better name than the san-ti, Netflix) were scared of humanity so want to squash us before we can become another interstellar superpower
but I don't buy it. I'm watching through the netflix adaptation now and I'm already disappointed in it. better in some ways for sure, but also presents its own brand new problems.
it's a real shame, honestly, because the history of an alien civilization evolving on a planet in an unstable orbit of a three-body star system sounds really interesting, but the book cares less about world building than it does about political allegory 🤷