PupBiru

americans use “liberal” to only mean socially liberal, however liberal describes both economic and social philosophies

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

economic liberals are all about the free market, social liberals are all about human and civil rights (among many other things)

3rd party, in america, is mathematically and sociologically a waste of a vote

you have FPTP; you do not have STV or RCV etc

i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…

this could lead to a few interesting situations:

• more ubiquitous ML could lead to enforcement of laws more evenly… ML doesn’t make “oh sorry sir i didn’t know who you were” decisions, and if that’s coupled with transparency then maybe we will be left in less of a “laws for thee and not for me” situation as it becomes more difficult to break laws for people in power
• more ubiquitous ML, as long as it’s fairly openly available, will absolutely be used by media to piece together complex structures and do investigative journalism. it could help to hold people to account
• more ML in tax could mean less tax evasion? or setting it to task on suggesting fixes for tax loop holes if it can see a lot more invasive data?

i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original

democrats almost always win the popular vote… the electoral college is part of the mechanism that gives smaller states that tend to be more republican greater voting power than larger states

and as far as FPTP, third party candidate votes tend toward more democratic candidates. given the spoiler effect (a 3rd party candidate draws the most votes from the 2 party candidate they’re closest to: if they didn’t run, most of their votes would have gone to their closest candidate. given they’re unlikely to win due to how the mathematics and sociology of voting systems work, a successful 3rd party candidate is always bad for their voters), that means that if RCV or similar were implemented, on balance those votes for 3rd parties would mean democrats get more votes

electoral college and first past the post helps republicans and hurts democrats… if you want systemic change, vote for the party that has the most to gain from the systemic change you’d like to see, and then work to make that systemic change happen

you can, but that’s a wasted vote… you have a 2 party system, vote republic or vote democrat are mathematically your only viable options

if you want different options, you first have to work to change the system

i have a friend here in au who’s a barrister, and he said that one of the witnesses started going on about their 5th amendment rights… the judge rolled his eyes and just explained that we aren’t in the US, we don’t have the 5th amendment, and if he refuses to answer the question he will take it as an admission of guilt

it’s crazy how ingrained in just… global culture… the US is

rule 2: when someone tells you who they are, believe them
rule 1: trust but verify

that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”

it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it

when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way

and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?

but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?

experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections