ClaytonB
Member

Man versus Bear...

I see that in the online dictionary. I really am a nerd so when I was a kid, I looked this issue up, specifically, because I thought that "spat" made more sense than "spate" for exactly this reason. "Spit" has something to do with fighting; "a flood of something" (what "spate" literally means) does not seem to. But when I looked it up, it was "spate", and NOT "spat", which I found puzzling. "Spate of words" is the idiom that makes it make sense. But I see that the Clown World timeline now agrees with my original intuition. So be it. There is residue of the original, as I linked, note "spate of angry words". I've screenshotted and archived this in case the censors scrub it. I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it: they are lying more than you can possibly imagine.

Am I allowed to mention the Mandela Effect in this thread, or will that take this spat-spate too far afield? :tears:

:facepalming: This is what AI and the death of (honest) elitism has done to us. "Spat" is just a mis-spelling of spate. But glad to see it made it into the dictionary so all the mis-spellers don't have to feel they made a mistake... :rolleyes: PS: I think I caught my first serious AI-hallucination in the wild: "intransitive verb: to strike with a sound like that of rain falling in large drops". Now that's oddly-specific and just downright silly. Nice job, ChatGPT...

"To have a spate" is an idiom, and it means "to have a lot of words", "to have a spate of words" or just, "to have a spate". "Spat" is just the past-tense of spit. One might characterize an argument as "He spat at him" but spat is here a verb, not a noun, thus they cannot have a "spat", but they can have a "spate". See here.

Forum Grammar-Nazi PSA:

History, probably:

Whoa... The more that the world is destroyed by the God-haters, the more sense that all of God's prophecies of the world's coming destruction make to me...

The White Knight is strong with these ones...

-deleted-

@12:20, Altman signals that OpenAI's current internal model is very significantly advanced beyond GPT-4. "GPT-4 is the dumbest model that any of you will ever have to use again, by a lot." So far, OpenAI has consistently understated its products so, if the trend continues, we can reasonably expect that GPT-5 is going to be a significant advance over GPT-4. While I'm pleased that OpenAI is making progress, I parse this mainly in terms of the question of how the open-source community will catch up. Open-source LLMs are trailing OpenAI by about 6 months (that's my preferred measuring-stick, some people give OpenAI more lead than I do.) Technology is made of "ingredients", so to speak, so the question as I see it is, what are their ingredients? @19:47 "I wonder... how long it will take us to figure out the new social contract..." This quote perfectly exhibits why I consider OpenAI the worst-case AI safety scenario. People keep wringing their hands, "How do we keep ChatGPT a safe AI?!?" but ChatGPT/OpenAI just is the unsafe scenario, it is the worst-case AI-safety trajectory. OpenAI is precisely what an AGI nightmare-scenario looks like in its nascent stage. Musk knew this (and has as much as said it) and I believe this is the real reason he left OpenAI. While his lawsuit has some pretty wild stuff in it, it's not all silly, there are some serious components in it. @26:22 " ... a human right to get access to a certain amount of compute ..." Smoking-gun. Straight-up Marxism. So, there's a new social contract coming, a core part of this social contract is supposed to be that "we all" get "access" to "a certain amount of compute", that is, access to this digital-mind-of-god which OpenAI is building. Note that this is almost precisely conformal to the ancient concept of temple sacrifice to receive the attention of an idol. "I need rain for my crops. I need the attention of the rain-god. I shall travel to the temple of the rain-god and offer this goat in sacrifice to him in the hopes that he will solve my rain problem." OpenAI is on a trajectory to that, but this will be the omni-idol, since its "intelligence" is being sold as being able to "solve all other problems." Recall that Demis Hassabis explicitly stated that his goal in founding DeepMind was to "Solve intelligence. Then use that to solve everything else." While I don't oppose that concept, as stated, the fact is that these people are spiritually shallow (carnally-minded in Christian terminology) and they simply have not thought through the real implications of what they're trying to do. They've obviously thought through the material implications in great depth -- the effect on infrastructure, logistics, employment, production, lifestyles, and so on. They've thought about all of that to great depth. But they haven't thought about the spiritual implications, on the specious theory that our material lives and spiritual lives are clinically separate. The current AGI agenda might work if life was living in a Virtual Reality Ikea catalog. Life is not a Virtual Reality Ikea catalog. Maybe a few nerds in Silicon Valley would even consider that Paradise. The vast majority of us do not. @37:50 "... the balance of power in the world, it feels like it does change a lot..." -- In other words, the Marxist New Social Contract is going to be implemented by the power of the pen, which is mightier than the status quo sword.

Some people are easily impressed, but God is who he is. God is both atemporal (Father, Holy Spirit and the Son in his divine nature) and temporal (the Son in his human nature).

Wondering what is the benefits-package for playing a WS? I bet they have good dental. I might need to switch careers...

I'm waiting for the day that some tech smart-ass converts an entire language model into an enormous tree of If-Else statements. That's exactly what's happening under the hood anyway but it would be quite hilarious to have it all converted into literal assembly code that can be browsed in a text-editor. It really is just "transistors all the way down". As for the net impression of intelligence that current AI creates, I'm reminded of the first time I saw the game Quake, which would have been around 1997. Today, the graphics look absurd. But in 1997, that game was more realistic than the titles you could play in an arcade. And you could run it on your own home PC. I remember many late nights with headphones on playing that with my light switched off (so I wouldn't get yelled at by my parents). The feeling of immersion was really powerful, not only because of the excellent graphics, but also the 3D sound effects which were absolutely cutting-edge for that time. You could hear when monsters were behind you, which was something that no other title out there even came close to achieving. Anyway, the point is that Quake felt like magic. It seemed that a crappy PC that could barely manage to render the X button on Windows shouldn't be able to do what Quake did. But when you dig into how they did it, there was no magic, they just applied the best principles of engineering to turn your average beige-box into a freakin' super-computer by really, really efficient use of the available resources. That's basically what large-language models, especially the open-source ones like Mixtral 8x7B, and so on, are doing, but it's the 21st-century version of that. Same for Stable-Diffusion 3 and open-source image AI. Exciting times.

No, that's exactly it: thou shalt not speak well of the devil. To speak well of Satan is treachery to God, because Satan is God's avowed enemy and he is already damned, John 16:11. There's no coming back from murdering God's own Son. The only fate after that is to burn in hell, forever. Had. See Ezekiel 28:11ff. You are just contradicting John 10:10 -- the only reason the devil comes, is to steal, kill and destroy. Sadly, some who have fallen under the devil's spell in their youth are only awakened to the true horror of the meaning of John 10:10 much later in life. If you think there is any other reason, whatsoever, for which the devil comes, you are deluded. Jesus made no mistake here... the thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. And for nothing else besides.

It can be instructive to peruse a biology fieldbook and scan the mammalian species for human-like features. It is particularly instructive to note that, on an evolutionary theory of human origins, only one "genetic line" could be in our ancestry. The actual structure of life is much, much bigger and more profound than that. God is not just the Creator, he's the greatest artist. I wouldn't mind having an AI "thinking assistant". Once properly trained, there are a lot of mundane tasks that I could have paid a secretary or personal-assistant to perform, which such an AI could perform for me. That would make my life more like that of a much wealthier man than I am. Which is fine. But people are looking to AI for answers. As in, the kind of answers you should be seeking from a priest or pastor, or through prayer and reading the word of God. AI is the absolute wrong place to look. The robots that are coming are going to look increasingly human-like, and this is going to happen much faster than most people probably think is possible, except for the loony, Spock-eared singularitarians. But for all their impressive electro-hydraulic gymnastic abilities, and their flashy, data-center-fueled chatbot "intelligence", these AI humanoids will actually be nothing more than limping refrigerators with the overall intelligence of a slightly retarded dog. The reason I keep sounding the alarm on this is that everyone is going to discover what I'm explaining here, sooner or later. The only question is how horrific that final, awakening encounter will be. A malfunctioning robot in kill-mode coming for your child with a kitchen-knife is the kind of encounter that I want to see people spared from. Better to read about this on a web forum or hear about it from your cranky, Luddite uncle, than in an AI-horror-movie scenario playing out in your kitchen. I see a rapidly-approaching, robotic future with a lot less Sonny (I, Robot) in it, and a lot more M3GAN...

AMEN

Responding to the @... :up: I agree with the spirit of where you want to go with this, but I disagree with the theology-as-such. One of the reasons that God has revealed himself to us in human form, is because, in himself, God is unrelatable to us. "My ways are not your ways", Isaiah 55:8,9. Etc. In addition, God must be, as Anselm famously defined him, "that being than which none greater can be conceived." A being which can be surprised, in the ordinary sense, cannot possibly be the greatest being.

Great opening discussion. I think the "synthesis" between the two views is found by examining the role played by randomness during training. During training, the procedure of backpropagation (BP) is performed by an algorithm called "stochastic gradient-descent", or SGD. The name SGD might seem quite intimidating, but the concept is not. Basically, imagine the error-rate of the neural-net as a 2D landscape. Initially, when you begin training, you are at a very high peak, because the error-rate is very high. You want to find the lowest point in the landscape (or a point that is nearly the same altitude), how do you do that? Well, you find the direction where the gradient has the steepest descent, and you follow that. This is called gradient descent and this is how classical BP is done. But there's a problem. Because GD is deterministic, if you had started at a very slightly different point on the mountain peak, you could have ended up at a completely different "low point" which may actually be nowhere near the lowest altitude (lowest error-rate). This is called a "local minimum", think of a bowl-shaped valley which is at the top of an old mountain; the valley is the lowest point near itself, but the whole valley is still at a high altitude. If you had just happened to go down towards that valley, instead of down the outer sides of the mountain, you would have gotten stuck in a local minimum. SGD adds stochasticity to gradient descent, which acts a little bit like having a big pogo-stick which you occasionally pull out and use to take a random leap in some direction. By doing this, you have greatly improved chances of finding a global minimum (or a minimum close to the global minimum), and significantly reduced chances of ending trapped up in a local minimum. In the case of the bowl-shaped mountain-top valley, if you got your pogo-stick out while you were part way down the descent into the valley, you could end up back on the outside slope of the mountain and escape the local-minimum. OK, so far so good, this is just an algorithm like any other algorithm. However, let's examine very closely the source of randomness in this procedure. There is a concept in computational complexity theory called derandomization. Basically, it is provable that any algorithm that uses randomness can be derandomized without altering any of the provable properties of that algorithm, in particular, without altering the running time, precision, etc. What this means is that, for every random algorithm A which you give me (a "random algorithm" is any algorithm that uses randomness), I can give you back a non-random algorithm A' that satisfies all the provable properties of A. Thus, there exists a non-randomized version of SGD that performs just as well as SGD does. Now, let's move to the domain of password cracking. In cracking, we would love to fool a user into believing he has used a truly random seed when, in fact, it is a pseudo-random (non-random) seed which we ourselves control. In this way, we have fooled the user into choosing a password/key that was random when, in fact, it was non-random and we can quickly reconstruct the key without having to do a brute-force search. You can think of this kind of password-generation attack as an instance of derandomization. Password-generation is a random algorithm that just consists of saying, "Give me X random bits". Derandomizing that algorithm allows me to satisfy whatever constraints you have on your password-generator ("use lower-case, upper-case, numerals, special-characters", etc.) but in a way where the result that is generated is actually not random.

Trump has always been a narcissist. He refused to participate in any of the Primary GOP debates, refusing to have his ideas challenged by the other candidates, and he definitely won't debate RFK Jr.., because Trump knows he will lose supporters afterwards.

Not sure, but you can do it with black-and-gold.... is the Universe winking at ancaps???