Curious_Canid

My big dog understands this principle. He often carries around a stuffed Koala with him and cuddles with it. When anyone, human or animal, is having rough time, he bring it to them and tucks it in next to them.

Orange cats are going to save us from the zombie apocalypse.

You understand your cat and you are a good person.

Chocolate is poisonous to dogs! They usually love to eat it, but enough will kill them.

Please, for the sake of your dog, check with your vet for details.

That kind of seems like a win-win to me.

This is why we could, and should, replace most CEOs with AI. If someone is going to make bad decisions, we could at least avoid paying them hundreds of millions of dollars to do it.

On the set of Black Panther, Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman were apparently referred to as the “the Tolkien white guys”.

How is she ever going to learn chemistry if you keep shutting down her experiments?

I write software for a living and I have worked directly with LLM backend code. You aren’t wrong about the exceptions, but I think they actually reinforce my main point. If you play with the parameters you can make all kinds of things happen, but all of those things are still driven by the existing information it already has or can find. It can mash things together in random new ways, but it will always work with components that already exist. There is no awareness of context or meaning that would allow it to make intelligent choices about what it mashes together. That will always be driven by the patterns it already knows, positively or negatively.

It’s like doing chemistry by picking random bottles from the shelf and dumping them into a beaker to see what happens. You could make an amazing discovery that way, but the chances of it happening are very, very low. And even if it does happen, there’s an excellent chance that you won’t recognize it.

I’m in favor of using LLMs for tasks that involve large-scale data analysis. They can be quite helpful, as long as the user understands their limitations and performs due diligence to validate the results.

Unfortunately what we are mostly seeing are cases where LLMs are used to generate boilerplate text or code that is assembled from a vast collection of material that someone who actually knew what they were doing had previously created. That kind of reuse is not inherently bad, but it should not be confused with what competent writers or coders do. And if LLMs really do take over a lot of routine daily tasks from people, the pool of approaches to those tasks will stagnate, and eventually degenerate, as LLMs become the primary sources of each others’ solutions.

LLMs may very well change the world, but not it in the ways most people expect. Companies that have invested heavily in them are pushing them as the solutions to the wrong problems.

LLMs are not capable of creating anything, including code. They are enormous word-matching search engines that try to find and piece together the closest existing examples of what is being requested. If what you’re looking for is reasonably common, that may be useful. If what you’re looking for is obscure, you may get things that don’t apply. And the LLM cannot tell the difference. They can be useful but, unlike an LLM, you need to understand the context to use them safely.

I think the most interesting thing about LLMs is actually what they tell us about the repetitive nature of most of what we do.

I stand with Alaric! Where can I buy a campaign button?

Bear in mind that it doesn’t actually say “AI” girlfriend. It says “IA” girlfriend. I grew up in Iowa and this all seems perfectly normal to me.

Bogie is awesome. And the tiny human is lucky to have someone like that in her life.

I love all these responses, but that one deserves a special shout-out for brilliance. I’m still laughing.

The character was intended to be a thoughtful conservative, and I thought they did pretty well with that. I’m somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders, but I don’t mind watching intelligently written characters who I disagree with.

Also, I will watch almost anything with Jeff Daniels. He is one of the most versatile actors of our time and he brings depth to every role. His performance is what made “Pleasantville” for me. (I hate Dumb and Dumber, but he added something to it.)

One of the best quotes from “The Newsroom”: “I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.”

I hadn’t heard of Sileo. I’ll mention it to our guest dog’s owner.

My dog Denali is a remarkable guy. He’s too bouncy to make everyone comfortable, but he really tries and he often succeeds. His intentions are always good. Another of his adorable habits is to bring a stuffed animal to anyone who’s having a rough time.

We occasionally take care of a friend’s small dog. He gets along well with ours, so we just bring him home for those stays. In most respects, he’s pretty relaxes, but he is scared of sudden loud noises. Holding him and petting him doesn’t seem to help much. He just hides in his crate and whimpers. Poor little guy!

On his last visit, during a storm, I noticed that he had stopped making noise. I went to take a look, and found him in his crate, but with our 90lb husky-mix wrapped almost all the way around it. Evidently that was a form of protection that he trusted, and he had calmed down. Our big guy is a great caretaker who just wants everyone to be happy.

I’m giving it a try. It does look like a good option. My only concern is that there don’t seem to be many source options for the US. There were several that showed up as unavailable when I first started, it that no longer show as options now that I’ve configured it. I’m puzzled.

I don’t think that is a characteristic of our species. It is not universally true across other cultures.
And studies strongly suggest that the characteristic that was most important to the early survival of humans was altruism. There are always a lot more people who are basically good than basically bad. Only around 4% of the population are sociopathic.

Unfortunately, promoting sociopaths is a built-in characteristic of capitalism. Without controls, it rewards managers who are willing to sacrifice other people for profit (or power). The people who do that the best are those without empathy. So we end up with the worst of us making the decisions about how the world should work.