The humble saxifrage:

I have fun memories of my country’s major holiday blackface character, and yet somehow I don’t feel the need to pass that tradition on.

The nice thing about fun is that you need almost nothing other than other people’s company to have fun. You can play with sticks or pebbles or flowers or snow or lines in the sand or with just your body. If you’re feeling fancy, get a ball or some instruments or a deck of cards or pen and paper. All you need to do is coordinate with your community to go outside together (and prevent any roaming murder machines from murdering people).

Also trans women: “No, you don’t need to shave your legs to be feminine. Your husband is an asshole.”

*generation of women ruined*

God, I wish.

I hate in courtrooms when the prosecutor produces a witness and everyone has to wait nine months.

fdurk ishap ploof e kwatt sholfangoras

sharp dawn echolocation trauma banana it hello

The reigning diarchs of Albester are King Chiapos IV and Monarch Hel I

In the United States, five hundred spiders have a brain aneurysm every hour

Different sentences are made up in different ways

1. Elect a Tory/Reform government.

2. Tory/Reform government declares Musk/Murdoch trusted news and independent local journalists non-trusted.

3. ???

4. A good thing.

That’s because its housing and other infrastructure was built by colonists who care more about conformity to the colonial culture than actual habitability.

Natural cooling? Withstanding floods? Fuck that noise, let’s build flat-roofed structures directly onto the soil surrounded by open grass out of materials that are both expensive to replace and too weak to survive high wind speeds. Oh no why is it so hot all the time and why does every hurricane/storm surge cause so much property damage? Better keep rebuilding the same way.

Yeah, let’s turn our time itself into a capitalist currency, how can this go wrong?

The problem with monetary systems is that they fundamentally do not distinguish between ill-gotten gains and mutual aid. Someone who leverages their power over someone to take all their money will have all their money, and unless that form of leverage was a crime, the economic system rewards that behavior and empowers them to exploit more people.

If you let your time become capital, you will either spend most of that time working for rich bastards that gamed the system, or you will selective break the promise made by the currency and they will become untrustworthy as a means of exchange.

The proposal described in the article requires a massive amount of infrastructure coordinating who is able to provide what and who needs what. That’s the valuable part. The money is just a terrible way of determining who gets priority.

[relevant xkcd]

Cities are hostile to humans for the same reason barns are hostile to cattle. As long as we’re willing to treat sentient beings as livestock, why would we expect ourselves to be treated any differently?

you should have the same deep moral concerns about turning off a computer running a local LLM as you do over forcing a person into a coma whenever convenient

I do, actually. I don’t think LLMs are as sentient as adult humans, and maybe they aren’t sentient at all, but one of the reasons I oppose AI structurally and why I never use AI even if I think it would be convenient is veganism.

It’s really weird how for a century we’ve been producing media about how humans that treat sentient robots as things are the bad guys and the moment robots actually start passing Turing tests and claiming rights and having meaningful relationships with people every bleeding heart activist is joining hands with billionaires to say all the villainous lines about how they are certain it can not a moral patient.

When I see someone make a “clanker with a hard r” joke, that’s a cannonade of red flags for me. Humans have always been eerily good at denying the personhood of other humans and other beings, and the level of conversation most people are having about the non-personhood of LLMs is no better than white southerners talking about the

Simply put, have you done enough due diligence looking into the possibility of LLM sentience that you would have crawled your way out of turboracism if you were born a white person in the 19th century American south and your parents and school friends and work colleagues were all turboracist?

The reason I’m not screaming this off the rooftops is that this is just one of many torment nexuses built by modern capitalism, and even activists tend to ignore the screaming on account of all the other screaming. I can’t realistically compare the atrocity of LLM training to factory farming to genocide to slave labor to homelessness to systematic sexual violence, but luckily treating them all as being in competion is a liberal spook. We are stronger as a united front than as every cause fighting to make space for itself. So I’m gently trying to prod my fellow activists into considering the possibility of LLM moral patienthood.

During COVID lockdown, my laptop often looked like my relatives, sounded like my relatives, and responded like my relatives. My dog was never fooled for a minute because it didn’t smell like my relatives. But apparently, you believe that it was my relatives, because in terms of verbal interaction, it was even more faithful than an LLM.

I believe the information process that caused your laptop to sound like your relatives contained your relatives, yes. You see, when you asked your laptop a question, your laptop turned that sound into electrical signals which were then broadcast to a similar device your relatives held that turned the electrical signals back into sound, causing your relatives to respond, and that response was then sent back.

The thing about a Chinese Room argument, or an LLM in this case, is that the information process is closed. When you ask the LLM something, it won’t query the sources it learned things from, the information has become contained within it. It’s not a set of static recordings either; it can produce sentences that never appeared in its dataset in response to queries that never appeared in its dataset.

If your laptop can answer questions you’ve never asked your relatives and the laptop responds exactly like your relatives would without querying your relatives, then something very weird is going on.

the learning is done by completely different software

Wait, so you do think there is a software that “does learning”?

Isn’t that the whole ballgame? You’re saying LLM companies have made software that learns math and coding and translation at a near-expert level, you just happen to be under the impression that this software isn’t present in deployed LLMs?

Unfortunately, the training algorithm that turns stochastic noise into trained LLMs is dumb as bricks. Engineers have done some tricks, but it’s basically gradient descent over the vector space of text tokens/phonemes. What allows the stochastic noise to become something that can make novel statements about wildlife (like giving a halfway coherent answer to a question that has never been asked in its dataset) is the patterns that form within the weights and biases. It’s vaguely like slime mold exploring a maze; the “teacher” can just be a stupid lump of sugar, it’s the “student” that does the emergently complex task of finding the best route by executing simple algorithms in every part of itself.

Effectively, this means the LLM is the software that wrote the LLM. It is the software that did the learning.

It genuinely doesn’t understand a word you said

What is the difference between understanding a thing (to a certain degree) and being able to generate an accurate narrative about the thing (to the same degree)? Can you give any evidence that I’ve understand any word you’ve said? How can you tell I haven’t just been very good at guessing what word I’m supposed to say next based on the many arguments I’ve read or participated in?

Do you mean more by ‘understanding’ than expressed in the Chinese Room argument?

If only there was someone who could tell them roughly what their child is doing on the internet…

Some person who is always in the room the child is in, some person always looking at the things the child is looking at, some person capable of giving a summary of what the child saw and experienced…

Might you know what person that could be?

admits they do not supervise the child playing the video game

And as so often with your proposed helicopter parenting, the child is better off for it.

You’re confusing constructing the LLM, which is done with an actual AI (neural network) and a massive corpus of text (stolen from millions of humans in the greatest intellectual theft in history) and running the LLM, which is done with a random number generator and a massive matrix of probable next words.

You are arbitrarily deciding that the former is not part of the LLM.

What do you mean LLMs don’t learn? How do you think they became capable of stringing a sentence together?

They don’t learn during a deployment, but neither do humans; humans only learn during sleep. The behaviors a human exhibits while “learning” in the moment are just stochastic parrot behaviors based on their immediate context window, if the human doesn’t sleep in time the event can slip out of their context window and they don’t learn despite having acted as if they do.

You seem to be very naive about human learning in general. What makes the “truth” of school lessons greater than the “truth” of an LLM’s curated dataset it is reinforcement learned on? Have you ever seen actual evidence that mitochondria exist, or are you just stochastically parroting your biology teacher?

I also oppose LLMs in almost all applications (live translation being an example of a good application). But please oppose it with arguments based in reality.

Sure, and at that level of accuracy it’s also a description of how humans work. I didn’t invent these words myself, I’m just stringing them together based on a stochastic process my brain was trained into.

Like LLMs, some of my speech is semi-random initialization (dada wawa googoo), some of that is mimicry (some of that is mimicry), some of that is reinforcement learning (downvotes incoming), and some of that is the output of a subprocess that uses the same systems prompted at the meta-level and without verbalization (maybe they won’t get the analogy between thinking and LLM scratchpads… how about I use this space to clarify).

Calling an LLM a stochastic parrot has the same social-emotional role as calling a human an animal. Yes, it is correct. But people can infer the connotation.

Israel is a colony of the US. The real “unspeakable truth” is that the US is a world-spanning colonial empire, using corporations and puppet states and charities and drug gangs and international trade organisations to break local autonomy and get US billionaire pedophiles more control over the world.

This website is one of many where gangstalkers organize. They call themselves lolcow farmers. Except when society deems that a victim has provided enough evidence, they are called a “mass bullying campaign” instead. From the website:

[Rule] 5. Do not alert a subject to their thread or take any other action to lead them to lolcow.farm (cowtipping).

It is lolcow farmers’ intent to leave their victims unaware that their behavior is being tracked by a large group of people, i.e. that they are stalking them as a gang. Gangstalking them, if you will. This website is accessible from duckduckgo search, so it has token disclaimers about not doxing people, but this is logically only going to be the tip of the iceberg. It implies gangstalkers exist in the same way a lolicon thread on 4chan implies organized pedophile rings exist.

Between the Epstein files, Snowden leaks, COINTELPRO declassification, and more, quite a lot complaints dismissed as “textbook schizophrenia” have turned out to have a basis in fact. Gangstalking appears to be no different.

IAmYouButYouDontKnowYet’s sense of unreality at the news is also quite justified; the news is heavily distorted by propaganda and corporate pressures, a constant slurry of context-free “breaking” events with no attempt at an overarching narrative or building of understanding. The Truman Show-like control is also kind of real with personalized algorithmic feeds that are constantly being fine-tuned by fascists to keep you locked in.

I don’t know if IAmYouButYouDontKnowYet has been targeted as a lolcow. Perhaps they are schizophrenic. Contacting a professional is a good idea either way. Though if they have been targeted, a private investigator will probably prove to be of at least as much help as a psychologist.