My apologies, I see that I have made a mistake. There are in fact 3 w’s in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries.”

It’s an illusion. People think that because the language model puts words into sequences like we do, there must be something there. But we know for a fact that it is just word associations. It is fundamentally just predicting the most likely next word and generating it.

If it helps, we have something akin to an LLM inside our brain, and it does the same limited task. Our brains have distinct centres that do all sorts of recognition and generative tasks, including images, sounds and languge. We’ve made neural networks that do these tasks too, but the difference is that we have a unifying structure that we call “consciousness” that is able to grasp context, and is able to loopback the different centres into one another to achieve all sorts of varied results.

So we get our internal LLM to sequence words, one word after another, then we loop back those words via the language recognition centre into the context engine, so it can check if the words match the message it intended to create, it checks them against its internal model of the world. If there’s a mismatch, it might ask for different words till it sees the message it wanted to see. This can all be done very fast, and we’re barely aware of it. Or, if it’s feeling lazy today, it might just blurt out the first sentence that sprang to mind and it won’t make sense, and we might call that a brain fart.

Back in the 80s “automatic writing” took off, which was essentially people tapping into this internal LLM and just letting the words flow out without editing. It was nonesense, but it had this uncanny resemblance to human language, and people thought they were contacting ghosts, because obviously there has to be something there, right? But it’s not, it’s just that it sounds like people.

These LLMs only produce text forwards, they have no ability to create a sentence, then examine that sentence and see if it matches some internal model of the world. They have no capacity for context. That’s why any question involving A inside B trips them up, because that is fundamentally a question about context. "How many Ws in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries” is a question about context, that’s why they screw it up.

I don’t think you solve that without creating a real intelligence, because a context engine would necessarily be able to expand its own context arbitrarily. I think allowing an LLM to read its own words back and do some sort of check for fidelity might be one way to bootstrap a context engine into existence, because that check would require it to begin to build an internal model of the world. I suspect the processing power and insights required for that are beyond us for now.

I’d be happy to help! There are 3 "w"s in the string “Howard likes strawberries”.

I don’t even know if that would be legal, but that doesn’t matter. The fee creates a little bit of disconnection so both parties can assume that questions of legality are the others’ responsibility.

This doesn’t make it legal either, it just makes it more likely to happen, and slightly harder to prosecute.

Most of these oversized trucks you wouldn’t really want to take offroad. They’re built to exploit a tax loophole, not to actually be good trucks. Because they’re generally pavement princesses anyway the makers know they can skimp on the parts that make good offroaders, like suspension and transmission. The people who know anything about offroad wouldn’t look at them twice anyway, so it’s not where their market is.

Being giant and heavy is actually pretty bad for offroad performance, which is why people will cope by talking about “towing capacity” instead, where weight is an advantage, although most of these trucks don’t get used that way. If you want good offroad performance something like a Jeep is a way better investment.

Whistlin’ Diesel is pretty good at beating on these trucks and showing how weak they are. Although one time he tried to kill an older model Hilux and it was hilarious to see the dangerous lengths he went to try and fail to break anything on that truck.

Some trucks are made to do work, and it’s not these giant hunks of overpriced garbage.

(though some might consider this an anti-feature)

To be fair, not everyone would say that, and the only reason you would call it an “anti-feature” is if you had an accurate understanding of the issues.

On lemmy I’ve been accused so many times of reverse-racism and reverse-sexism, where advocating for minorities brings out the trolls who want to muddy the waters and claim that noticing bigotry is the real bigotry actually, and they had big vote pile-ons to go with those comments.

This is largely from big instances with open sign-up. I assume lemmy attracts the right wing trolls who tend to get banned from other places, which is one downside of being a viable alternative that isn’t yet mainstream. Also I’m sure they target this place because it is generally left-leaning.

Because the decision of which politics is disallowed is a political discussion, and those people will bring their politics of bigotry to the table and argue that “no politics day” means minorities should be silenced.

Uh oh, you got politics in your no politics.

Thanks! As far as I know I’m not describing anything too unusual with the mixed-up signals, I think pins & needles is essentially that, just a bunch of nerves randomly firing, so you probably do know what it’s like in little doses.

I’ve been paying attention to it since I wrote that, and it definitely is still slightly more numb on the affected side, I think I was right that not all the nerves regrew completely.

Thanks, I hope they don’t do it. I would expect the security community to be able to find something like this, since it’s not hard to hook up some devices and do packet sniffing to detect if they’re talking to each other.

This would be an excellent use case for LTT’s faraday cage room for instance.

I’d be interested to see more information on that. I don’t doubt companies would do that, but some good information on when it happens and how to prevent it would be useful.

See, I just don’t connect it to the network. It complained when I set it up but now it just works as a screen.

I’ve got a raspberry pi steaming my desktop to it with gamestream/sunshine/moonlight, and it’s now as smart as my computer. It can even stream from different computers no matter where they are in the house, watch anything with stremio, and play games from them too. It’s way better than using the youtube or netflix button on the TV, most of the services it offers I don’t use anyway.

But actually pihole does sound like a good idea and maybe I should get that set up one of these days.

I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.

They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.

At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I’d get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn’t grow successfully and remained near that site.

It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven’t had a pins & needles experience for a few years.

The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right… yeah I don’t see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.

I found this: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens/redress/what-should-i-do-if-i-think-my-personal-data-protection-rights-havent-been-respected_en

Can you report that somewhere?

Exactly this. The point is not that there is no way to do it, the point is that the alternatives are obscure to limit adoption. It’s a dark pattern.

This winget thing is worse than just using edge to download an alternative. The problem is not that people are forced to interact with a browser they dont like, it’s all the people who don’t know enough to understand that there are alternatives, and those people will never use winget.

Federated communities that make decisions on consensus, with the fundamental rule that “those affected get to decide”.

There’s a lot more to it and there’s a lot to unpack in just the above paragraph, but if the only alternative you can imagine is a global military dictatorship then it’s hard to know where to even start explaining it to be quite honest.

With your username I’m not surprised you’re in cybersecurity lol.

And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.

Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it’s possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they’re the sort of person who can’t work in a capitalist org, or they’re paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.

You’ll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We’ve seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don’t think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.

I thought I’d have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.

All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.

They literally design our environment, and as the Well There’s Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.

I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don’t like being compared to cops.

Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they’re similar to cops. Cops aren’t the owning class, they take down a salary, but they’re also class traitors.

The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.

Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the “thin blue line” between “order and chaos”. The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.

So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it’s as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that’s existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it’s just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.