On Authority is a pointed response to the thought-terminating pejorative of “authoritarian.” If you haven’t read it, you should! It’s short and important =)
You want a change in society? You don’t care that fascists don’t want that change? Then you’re an authoritarian. Everything after that is a matter of degree.
You know, you think that the first time, but if you go for it (and have the storage) you’ll be surprised at how glad you are to have them!
Or we can be part of making that a condition of the democrats doing well. Not supporting a genocide isn’t something we can or should “strip out” of our expectations of politicians. If you’re right, then burning the system down is the only feasible thing. Nothing else is feasible.
It’s infeasible to expect decent people to rally around genocidiers.
Don’t let the people with power tell you what is or isn’t feasible. Not supporting a genocide is easy for them. They may lie to themselves about it, but it’s obvious.
Literally, my brain is flooded with Dr. Evil upon seeing lasers and sharks in the same sentence. I can’t think about anything else until i look away.
This is lovely :)
I love the patient fella at the end.
Incorrect, see above. The role of a king in a civilized society is to be guillotined! Anything less is barbarism.
Dead kings are themselves a good outcome! I’m interested to hear the results of your experiments though!
well here’s my theory: if the reason it didn’t work is because you have a new king…well…what’s the new king’s role in civilized society?
Kings have one appropriate role in civilized society and it is to be guillotined.
It’s to stop all the SEESEEPEE spies from slacking off at work…that’s gotta be it!
Sweet, this makes me immediately want to go buy a kobo! I love ifixit.
Cute comic but…what’s it doing here?
He doesn’t let his PR hacks tell him what to do!
They are, for sure. I mean in some sense, the explain-ability is why it’s correct…you might need to explain why it’s correct to a judge one day!
Ah, well in that case I won’t take your word for it that it’s good. I’ll take your word for it that it’s working for you for now… Again in a legal context, that’s like “I got chat GPT to write this contract, and it’s working great,” but of course…it won’t be when things go wrong haha!
These guys are such incredible losers. This guy in particular.
I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what good code looks like lol. Again, to compare to what I’m familiar with, you can also ask an LLM to draft you a purchase agreement for shares of a private company, and if you’re not a lawyer it’ll look good…and it’ll be able to sound like it’s explaining to you why it’s good…but it will not be good haha
I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.
I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.
I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”
I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!
So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.
If you’re willing to do something about that wish, then you’re an authoritarian too.
And FWIW, casting it in personal terms makes that wish tautological. No one wishes for a system where they have to cater to the whims of someone else. I’m sure you meant to say “no one has to cater to anyone else’s whims,” and that’s all well and good. Still authoritarian if you’re willing to see anything at all done to overcome the desires of the powerful to maintain the status quo (and in case it’s not obvious, that’s a good thing to be authoritarian about).