chonglibloodsport

Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!

Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!

Yeah. Sometimes I think people are so used to media (TV, movies, video games) and the distancing effect of being in a vehicle (looking out a window at people) that they’re actually capable of travelling to another country without actually believing that they are there in person.

Apart from stories like this, there are countless other stories of clueless travellers who walk around treating locals like NPCs, not really realizing how annoying and offensive they are. These big blowback stories are just the tip of the iceberg on that whole genre of stupidity.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Thailand’s lèse majesté laws are very strict. The government treats insults to the monarchy as a harm to the entire country.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway?

The $100K rocket was never about warfare or strategy. It was just plain grift. Pork barrel politics all the way.

Ukraine is innovating the hell out of warfare because they’re desperate. They have no other choice: find ways to defeat the Russians as cheaply and effectively as possible or be conquered. I am so proud and impressed of their courage and ingenuity in the face of overwhelming odds.

Just don’t wear an American flag on anything and you’ll be fine!

They don’t replace each other. Aircraft carriers didn’t replace battleships. It simply made battleships non-viable without a replacement.

What it led to was smaller ships such as corvettes, destroyers, and cruisers taking over the role of battleships but still never replacing them in raw firepower.

That’s what APCs and lighter infantry vehicles are for. They’re not going away. It’s main battle tanks (the ones that cost millions of dollars) that are going away.

Moving troops around in safety is going to be extremely challenging but that’s because of enemy drones, not enemy tanks. Drones can fly recon around a moving personnel carrier just as easily as planes fly recon around an aircraft carrier.

For the price of one tank with cope cages you could buy thousands of drones instead. Tanks are not cost effective anymore. They’re the land equivalent of battleships in an era of aircraft carriers.

The land equivalent of an aircraft carrier is a soldier with a couple of drones in a backpack.

Blowing up Putin would be nice but it’s not a guarantee the war would end. It would lead to a power struggle in the Kremlin, no doubt, but there are loads of hawks in that regime and many are much more extreme than even Putin.

Of course, a more extreme war hawk might end up benefitting Ukraine by hastening the collapse of Russia. Or it might lead to nuclear war. It’s really hard to predict exactly what will happen.