A Tutorial For My 196 Refugees Still Figuring Everything Out. (I Ran Out Of Rantsonas At The End)

Remember it is a competition and you are here to win, you WILL be the faggiest person on the train

Fuck.

Might as well post this here

All fancy smancy generative ai models know how to do is parrot what they’ve been exposed to.

A parrot can shout words that kind of make sense given context but a parrot doesn’t really understand the gravity of what it’s saying. All the parrot knows is that when it says something in response to certain phrases it usually gets rewarded with attention/food.

What a parrot says is sometimes kinda sorta correct/sometimes fits the conversation of humans around it eerily well but the parrot doesn’t always perfectly read the room and might curse around a child for instance if it usually curses around its adult owners without facing any punishment. Since the parrot doesn’t understand the complexities of how we don’t curse around young people due to societal norms, the parrot might mess that up/handle the situation of being around a child incorrectly.

Similarly AI lacks understanding of what it’s saying/creating. All it knows is that when it arranged pixels or words in a certain way after being given some input it usually gets rewarded/gets to survive and so continues to get the sequence of words/pixels following a prompt correct enough to imitate people convincingly (or that poorly performing version of itself gets replaced with another version of itself which is more convincing).

I argue that a key aspect of consciousness is understanding the gravity and context of what you are saying — having a reason that you’re saying or doing what you are doing more than “I get rewarded when I say/do this.” Yes AI can parrot an explanation of its thought process (eli5 prompting etc) but it’s just mimicking how people explain their thought process. It’s surface level remixing of human expression without understanding the deeper context of what it’s doing.

I do have some untested ideas as to why its understanding is only surface level but this is pure hypothesis on my part. In essence I believe humans are really good at extrapolating across scales of knowledge. We can understand some topics in great depth while understanding others similarly on a surface level and go anywhere in between those extremes. I hypothesize we are good at that because our brains have fractal structure to them that allows us to have different levels of understanding and look at some stuff at a very microscopic level while still considering the bigger picture and while fitting that microscopic knowledge into our larger zoomed out understanding.

I know that neural networks aren’t fractal (self-similar across various scales) and can’t be by design of how they learn/how data is passed through them. I hypothesize that makes them only understand the scale at which they were trained. For LLM’s/GAN’s of today that usually means a high level overview of a lot of various fields without really knowing the finer grain intricacies all that well (see how LLM’s make up believable sounding but completely fabricated quotes for long writing or how GAN’s mess up hands and text once you zoom in a little bit.

There is definitely more research I want to do into understanding AI and more generally how networks which approximate fractals relate to intellegence/other stuff like quantum physics, sociology, astrophysics, psychology, neuroscience, how math breaks sometimes etc.

That fractal stuff aside, this mental model of generative AI being glorified parrots has helped me understand how AI can seem correct on first glance/zoomed out yet completely fumble on the details. My hope is that this can help others understand AI’s limits better and therefore avoid putting too much trust into to where AI starts to have the opportunity to mess up serious stuff.

Think of the parrot cursing around children without understanding what it’s doing or why it’s wrong to say those words around that particular audience.

In conclusion, I want us to awkwardly and endearingly laugh at the AIs which mimic the squaks of humans rather than take what it says as gospel or as truth.

i like your website! it looks very nice

especially the gradient colored text!! you used a separate font to make it more legible

whenever i try to do something like that, it always becomes really hard to read... maybe i should learn some basic web design?

my website looks like this and it took two days of fiddling with css

Thank you! The biggest thing with making text legible is making sure there is enough contrast between the text color and the background or make the text big enough that it’s legible even if there isn’t that much contrast. The best guide on color contrast that I know of is the Mozilla docs! If you scroll down to the solution part there it has many tools to check text contrast.

Since your website has a warm bright canvas background darker colors and gradients would work better and end up being more legible.

If you’re looking to learn more about web development and especially CSS I strongly recommend Kevin Powell on YouTube! His videos on flexbox and grid are very helpful in understanding those new browser features and making responsive websites (websites that look great on any screen size). For example, I used grid for the nickname table and for my projects so that on desktop those elements would be wider and shorter while on mobile they’d get narrower and taller.

I love your site too, especially the canvas theme with the green branch/orange leaves and the clever span box to show your favorite color complete with a title tag featuring the hex code!

To be clear my site took me at least 20 hours of fiddling and development to make. Feel free to look at the site code (and my commit history) on GitHub!

Mom, I know what I'll say at your funeral.

I'll tell them three good memories of you. One of you showing me moonflowers.

One of you accidentally admitting to smoking pot in college, blushing and running away. Denying it from then on.

My earliest memory, your finger running over the words of books as you read them.

Then I'll tell them how you put the rabbits outside in their hutch when I could see they were terrified of being in the hot open air. How I begged you not to again and again. Finding their stiff, still bodies when I came home. How you left them alone out there and their hearts couldn't take it.

I wonder what the one who died last thought. I wonder how many hours they were alone, baking, terrified.

I'll tell them about how I found two kittens next to an empty cloth sack in the river. How I never knew if the others had run or just washed away.

I cleaned them and fed them, they were old enough to eat. Old enough to fight and survive. Still so wobbly, so covered in dirt and fleas and their own shit. I gently washed both of them, pet them, showed them kindness.

You called every friend you had to get someone to take them. Eventually they left to be farm cats. I could have run and hid with them, stolen them food- you had already started calling me fat and hiding any food it was easy for a child to make themselves. I knew the taste of baking ingredients, I knew how to steal better. I could have stolen for them. I could have run and kept them. They could have been mine.

But I didn't even understand that I could have just run yet. And I realized how much better they would have it somewhere else, even if it was just as farm cats. I sent them away to live a better life than I could in that house.

I once saw my babysitter being beaten by her father, I was only 12 and she went away to college the next year. I didn't trust my mom enough to tell her, and who else was there to tell? I learned to hide and avoid problems from my Dad, and she was his anchor. Wrapped right around his neck.

If you're young and reading this, just survive. Just get away. College is one way, don't let them talk you into taking extra classes - then move to another county and never pay it back. It'll be cheaper.

Or just run. Find a group that will help you through the Internet and go.

Or sign up to work on a cargo ship the second you turn 18.

Just don't stay there. Don't be like those rabbits dying on the porch, trapped. You're a human. You can open the cage and run. Just keep going one direction. Be kind when you can, but be free first

oh shit, it's 3/21/23, 32123, palindrome day

are you a girl or a boy

not really

I’m convinced pickles are a gift from the gods.