boot: "you are in emergency mode"
merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works Posts 10Comments 2,985Joined 2 yr. ago

No, I'm sure you're wrong. There's a certain cheerful confidence that you get from every LLM response. It's this upbeat "can do attitude" brimming with confidence mixed with subservience that is definitely not the standard way people communicate on the Internet, let alone Stack Overflow. Sure, sometimes people answering questions are overconfident, but it's often an arrogant kind of confidence, not a subservient kind of confidence you get from LLMs.
I don't think an LLM can sound like it lacks in confidence for the right reasons, but it can definitely pull off lack of confidence if it's prompted correctly. To actually lack confidence it would have to have an understanding of the situation. But, to imitate lack of confidence all it would need to do is draw on all the training data it has where the response to a question is one where someone lacks confidence.
Similarly, it's not like it actually has confidence normally. It's just been trained / meta-prompted to emit an answer in a style that mimics confidence.
It confidently gave me one
IMO, that's one of the biggest "sins" of the current LLMs, they're trained to generate words that make them sound confident.
On one hand
C'mon, with a bit of effort you could have made this one into 5 paragraphs each one sentence long too!
It sounds like you're saying "reaction" is something that happens in the head, while I'm saying "reaction" is something that happens in the body.
Would your reaction time change? Maybe the neurons in your brain would be going at super speed, but maybe your peripheral nerves would still be slow. So, the time between hearing something and the signal getting to your brain would still take ages. Or, the light would hit your eyes, but it would be a long time before that was processed into a signal your ultra-fast brain could use.
I once read a news article about a woman who had Eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory). It made her life shitty. She was never "in the moment", because everything triggered a memory. She could never forgive anybody for their past slights, because they were always fresh in her memory. It wasn't the ability to recall anything you wanted whenever you wanted to. Instead it was the condition where you constantly had detailed memories flooding in when something you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, felt, etc. triggered a memory, or a dozen memories.
I like to imagine that this is what it's actually like for The Flash, or Quicksilver or another speedster:
Sure, you can move super fast, but to do that, your thinking also has to speed up to handle that fast movement. So, it's more like everything else in the universe slows down except you. Now, it's still an amazing power, but think about those times when The Flash uses his super speed to build a brick wall nearly instantly, or to read every book in the library in the blink of an eye.
To you, building that brick wall takes what feels like a week. You're running at what feels like 30 km/h to get a handful of bricks. It feels like it takes you about 20 minutes to get to the place with the bricks. You run them back to the place you're building the wall, you put them into the wall. Then you run another 20 minutes to get the next load of bricks. While you're doing this boring wall building, you can't chat with anybody, you can't listen to a podcast, you're just stuck doing manual labour for what feels like a week without any distractions or entertainment.
If you speed-read every book in a library, that feels like it takes a month. Hopefully you like reading dry reference books, or whatever it is you're reading, because that's all you get to do for however long it takes. Someone watching you might see you flipping through the pages in fractions of a second. But, to you, it still feels like it takes 2 minutes or so per page, and that's if the material isn't difficult to understand.
Maybe super speed needs to come with super autism so that you get really engaged in these tasks and don't mind sinking what feels like days, weeks or months into one monotonous thing.
You can't actually change time, just your perception of time. Your muscles don't move any faster. If someone is throwing a punch at you and you slow down time, you can appreciate the fist moving at your face for an hour of your slowed-down time, but you still can't dodge the punch. If you speed up time, you still need to eat, sleep, and perform other bodily functions. So, instead of getting hungry every few hours, you get hungry in what feels like seconds. And, since you don't have super-speed, you need to slow time back down again so you can eat.
It might still be a power worth having, but it's not as awesome as it might seem at first.
You can only make small changes, and it doesn't always work. So, you don't actually know if you have the power or if something slightly improbable happened.
IRS audits, people kidnapping you and/or your family to get at your money, an inability to know who likes you for yourself and who just wants your money...
Like misspelling "undo"?
Flying has its own built-in side effects.
Every time you take off, there's a pretty good chance that people nearby will notice. The government will want to study someone who has the ability to fly, so they'll start surveiling the area. Within a short time they'll figure out who you are, and you'll be captured and eventually dissected.
And, that's assuming your flight superpower comes with the ability to breathe at high altitudes, the ability to resist the cold you'd be exposed to by flying, the ability to see while flying without having your eyes dry out, etc.
Whenever you do it, the fact you're reading someone's mind is announced loudly in their mind and in the minds of anyone nearby.
Ugh. That sucks. Just because it is a sign of cheap, paper-thin world building, which is typical of Star Wars.
I watched The Hidden Fortress years ago, and the connection between C3PO and R2D2 with Tahei and Matashichi is obvious. But, they're not really slaves are they? The movie certainly doesn't make it seem like they're slaves, from what I remember. The Wikipedia plot summary says they're peasants who sell their homes and leave to enlist with the Yamana clan. A slave can't really sell their home and decide to take a new job. They may be of the lowest social class, but they weren't property.
As for the droids though, if they're slaves, has there ever been a hint that they wanted to change that status? In the dozens of movies, TV shows, books, comic books, etc. they seem content to be bought, sold and owned. Sure, R2D2 objects to being owned by Luke Skywalker in the first movie, but only because it interferes with his mission. He doesn't seem to object to the concept of ownership.
And, if they are slaves, there are certain droids who seem to have normal jobs and a lot of autonomy, like the IG-11 who is a member of the Bounty Hunter's Guild.
OTOH, we've also seen that slavery of humans is pretty common in the Star Wars universe. Maybe it's possible that some droids are slaves and others are free, just like humans?
What we really need is a Star Wars series with courtroom drama to explain some of this stuff. The Andor series has shown that people actually really like a series that gets into deep political intrigue, and isn't just stories of people's action figures fighting each-other. Maybe Law And Order: Coruscant would be a hit.
So, in Star Wars, do robots have free will and consciousness or is it just an illusion?
Are droids slaves, or just tools?
As an aside, that's just the lowest of low effort costumes I've ever seen. It's almost literally a rectangular trash can, with "robot legs" made from metallic flexible ductwork you can buy at a hardware store. It would make for a bad home-made halloween costume, let alone a character in a Hollywood movie.
I do that, but the more complicated the meal, the less down time there is, and the more stuff there is you can't clean up until the end.
Also, if you use serving dishes, rather than just serve out of the pot / pan, that's another thing to clean. It's true that cleaning a pot or pan is normally a bit harder than a serving dish. But, IMO the extra bit to clean means it's not worth it.
It is a bit of a triumph when the only thing to clean after dinner is a single pot or pan though. And, pro-tip, you can make the pans easier to clean after dinner if you dump a bit of water in them as you're sitting down to eat. Even 30 minutes is enough to turn the remains of a delicious sauce into sludge at the bottom of the pan. But, soaking while you eat makes it super quick to scrape it out afterwards.
On a related note:
United States Department of Damage Control is a fictional construction company appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The company specializes in repairing the property damage caused by conflicts between superheroes and supervillains.[1] Three Damage Control limited series have been published.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage_Control_(comics)
Also note that the initials of "Damage Control" are "D.C."
This goes part of the way to explain why people are willing to continue to live in NYC despite it being regularly attacked by supervillains, aliens, demons, etc. Though, I still think Philadelphia, Newark, Allentown and New Haven would probably be experiencing a lot of growth, seeing as they appear to be close to NYC and yet safe from the NYC chaos and danger.
That's how some democracy sometimes works. Sometimes supermajorities are required in democracies. Who cares about what the majority wants? Why should that be the only thing that counts?
I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.