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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • The dude is my wife’s gay best friend for life.

    In our early days of me dating my now wife, dude was my wife’s roommate. The two of them moved to a larger apartment to better accommodate two people and pets. Guy almost immediately quit his job and stopped paying rent. He contributed nothing to the household (didn’t cook or clean) while also feeding the cat enough treats to make it obese (something that is having follow on consequences years later). He also didn’t eat home cooking, and racked up a massive debt by eating McDonalds almost daily.

    His above actions left my now-wife with a drained bank account and in a horrible mental wellness condition. She needed to travel for work, and so as she left, he moved in with his “big farming daddy” on the other coast and I had hoped he was going to be out of our lives forever.

    Apparently that relationship didn’t work for him. So he moved back to his parent’s place where he struggled to keep a job. After ~2 years of no job or education/training, he was eventually kicked out of his parent’s place.

    And so right as my wife and I finally have a stable working situation with our careers that we could make work for the next 25-ish year (read as: to a slightly early retirement), ol’ boy shows up on our doorstep with <24 hours notice saying he needs a place to stay while he “attends college”…in one of the most expensive areas to live in the U.S…“just out of coincidence”

    He is the same age as I am, and I’m having to take my ass who worked through a STEM college degree, a military enlistment, and YEARS of network building to build a stable life for me and my wife and put it on hold for him. We had hopes of an early retirement that are being postponed to ensure this leech has money for gas and food to eat in campus.

    So yeah, I hate that bastard. But he’s my wife’s friend and is reasonably charismatic, so no one “gets what my beef with him is”.













  • Liquor Bottle by Herbal T. Has a nice faux-upbeat rhythm with jazzy kinda beats, but lyrics.are dark. Definitely helps me keep a sane face on the dark days:

    And that’s why / I keep a

    A liquor bottle in the freezer ♪

    In case I gotta take it out ♫

    Mix me a drink

    To help me

    Forget all the things

    In my life that I worry about ♪ ♫



  • Right.

    I don’t mean to say that the mechanism by which human brains learn and the mechanism by which AI is trained are 1:1 directly comparable.

    I do mean to say that the process looks pretty similar.

    My knee jerk reaction is to analogize it as comparing a fish swimming to a bird flying. Sure there are some important distinctions (e.g. bird’s need to generate lift while fish can rely on buoyancy) but in general, the two do look pretty similar (i.e. they both take a fluid medium and push it to generate thrust).

    And so with that, it feels fair to say that learning, that the storage and retrieval of memories/experiences, and that the way that that stored information shapes our sub-concious (and probably conscious too) reactions to the world around us seems largely comparable to the processes that underlie the training of “AI” and LLMs.


  • Thats not what I intended to communicate.

    I feel the Turing machine portion is not particularly relevant to the larger point. Not to belabor the point, but to be as clear as I can be: I don’t think nor intend to communicate that humans operate in the same way as a computer; I don’t mean to say that we have a CPU that handles instructions in a (more or less) one at a time fashion with specific arguments that determine flow of data as a computer would do with Assembly Instructions. I agree that anyone arguing human brains work like that are missing a lot in both neuroscience and computer science.

    The part I mean to focus on is the models of how AIs learn, specifically in neutral networks. There might be some merit in likening a cell to a transistor/switch/logic gate for some analogies, but for the purposes of talking about AI, I think comparing a brain cell to a node in a neutral network is most useful.

    The individual nodes in neutral network will have minimal impact on converting input to output, yet each one does influence the processing of one to the other. Iand with the way we train AI, how each node tweaks the result will depend solely on the past I put that has been given to it.

    In the same way, when met with a situation, our brains will process information in a comparable way: that is, any given input will be processed by a practically uncountable amount of neurons, each influencing our reactions (emotional, physical, chemical, etc) in miniscule ways based on how our past experiences have “treated” those individual neurons.

    In that way, I would argue that the processes by which AI are trained and operated are comparable to that of the human mind, though they do seem to lack complexity.

    Ninjaedit: I should proofread my post before submitting it.


  • Yes? I think that depends on your specific definition and requirements of a turing machine, but I think it’s fair to compare the almagomation of cells that is me to the “AI” LLM programs of today.

    While I do think that the complexity of input, output, and “memory” of LLM AI’s is limited in current iterations (and thus makes it feel like a far comparison to “human” intelligence), I do think the underlying process is fundamentally comparable.

    The things that make me “intelligent” are just a robust set of memories, lessons, and habits that allow me to assimilate new information and experiences in a way that makes sense to (most of) the people around me. (This is abstracting away that this process is largely governed by chemical reactions, but considering consciousness appears to be just a particularly complicated chemistry problem reinforces the point I’m trying to make, I think).


  • and exercise caution when you’re unsure

    I don’t think that fully encapsulates a counter point, but I think that has the beginnings of a solid counter point to the argument I’ve laid out above (again, it’s not one I actually devised, just one that really put me on my heels).

    The ability to recognize when it’s out of its depth does not appear to be something modern “AI” can handle.

    As I chew on it, I can’t help but wonder what it would take to have AI recognize that. It doesn’t feel like it should be difficult to have a series of nodes along the information processing matrix to track “confidence levels”. Though, I suppose that’s kind of what is happening when the creators of these projects try to keep their projects from processing controversial topics. It’s my understanding those instances act as something of a short circuit where (if you will) when confidence “that I’m allowed to walk about this” drops below a certain level, the AI will spit out a canned response vs actually attempting to process input against the model.

    The above is intended ad more a brain dump than a coherent argument. You’ve given me something to chew on, and for that I thank you!