type systems are censorship. proof assistants? how dare you imply I would need to prove anything
…fuck, I’m flashing back to the one time a Verilog developer told me formal verification wasn’t real because mathematicians don’t understand engineering
that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @dgerard@awful.systems later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.
I’d really like to know too, especially given how many times we’ve already seen LLMs misused in scientific settings. it’s starting to feel like the LLM people don’t have that notion — but that’s crazy, right?
like fuck, all you or I want out of these wandering AI jackasses is something vaguely resembling a technical problem statement or the faintest outline of an algorithm. normal engineering shit.
but nah, every time they just bullshit and say shit that doesn’t mean a damn thing as if we can’t tell, and when they get called out, every time it’s the “well you ¡haters! just don’t understand LLMs” line, as if we weren’t expecting a technical answer that just never came (cause all of them are only just cosplaying as technically skilled people and it fucking shows)
uh huh
it’s fucking amazing, all these words and you’ve managed to post exactly zero facts. time for you to fuck off
We’d be better off not trying to censor it
this claim keeps getting brought up and every time it doesn’t seem to mean a damn thing, particularly since no, censoring the output of an LLM doesn’t do anything to its ability to predict text. censoring its training set would, but seeing as the topic of this thread is a fact an LLM fabricated by being just a dumb text predictor — there’s no real way to censor the training set to prevent this, LLMs are just shitty.
I summarize all of that by saying AI is a useful tool
trying to find a use case for this horseshit has broken your brain into thinking these worthless tools would have value if only they weren’t “being censored” or whatever cope you gleaned from the twitter e/accs
believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @dgerard@awful.systems and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested
non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider
It would be a simple matter to have it summarize the output it’s about to give you and dump the output of it paints the subject in a negative light.
“it can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong”
lisp machines but networked
urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own
speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand
Also, I’m shockingly infuriated that the tech workers that would end up being the ones replaced the soonest are so busy licking boots rather than throwing their shoes into the machinery.
so much of our industry is dedicated to ensuring that tech workers, most of whom consider themselves experts on complex systems, never analyze or try to influence the social systems surrounding and influencing their labor. these are the same loud voices that insist tech isn’t political, while turning important parts of our public and open source tech infrastructure into a Nazi bar.
I can see that as being one of the influences that fed into the formation of the TESCREAL belief package — “I have an automaton that behaves like a person but with supernatural qualities” really is an ancient grift, and the TESCREAL belief in omnipotent AGI being just around the corner is that same grift taken to an extreme
I mean, in the worst case, we find out if these database backups are worth a damn? but realistically, we see so much spam from activitypub already that it should be hard to make things fall over*