The First Point And The Third Point Are Absolutely Correct. It’s Really Crazy To Think About How Everything

I love how slightly crazier makeup always makes me feel more androgynous! It also has the added bonus of impressing the queers while simultaneously being unappealing to straight men :D

Rule

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.

Odious Cryptobro Coworker is… slowly turning into a... not friend. Patient? I think he comes to me for a weird kind of therapy. Idk.

He’s the most transparently terrible man, a layer of empty-eyed greed and rightwing manosphere bullshit covering a surprisingly tormented sense of self entirely built on personal exceptionalism and continuous achievement, stable only as long as the numbers go up, creating a rift of disconnection with others and an unresolvable sense of discontent with himself. Smells of high-functioning autism tbh.

He’s trying to date to replace a 12 year relationship, but I genuinely think he may just be gay or asexual, and in profound denial. I don’t know.

When we hang out we discuss his various dates, and while he has a Girlfriend-Shaped Hole(TM), he (unsurprisingly) doesn’t seem to like women very much. He’s wealthy and conventionally attractive and has a taste for the BPD type (blonde, hot, and emotionally unstable), yet also, most of his dating attempts sort of die out around the 3rd date, when the women start expecting some kind of physical sign of affection and he’s just… not into that. He heavily prefers women who are cruel, ruthless, and unavailable for some reason.

He likes that I call him on his bullshit; sometimes I suspect he may be getting some kind of humiliation kink met.

Anyway, I’ve been having weekly restaurant dates with him for a while now. It feels weird. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? I always have a strangely excellent time but also expect every moment for this thing to turn sour.

(My husband and QPP know about him; QPP has started calling him my “little project”, husband calls him The Horrible Mr. Crypto, like he’s a supervillain.)

m1=52.3 m2=97.4 m3=62.6 (solar masses) v1x=-2.801 v1y=-1.534 v2x=5.925 v2y=2.449 v3x=-0.815 v3y=-2.604 (km/s) x1=-35.0 y1=-17.0 x2=32.0 y2=9.0 x3=1.0 y3=-28.0 (AU from center) Music: Prelude in C-Sharp Minor – Rachmaninoff

I wrote a poem about my first love about a month into our relationship. Today they broke up with me. Here is that poem:

Light Rays

Light rays filtering in all the way from the sun.

Sometimes after a detour to the moon

Filtering in through leaves or bouncing off the snow or ricocheting off someone‘s iris into my pupil.

So much light entering my soul.

So much distance that ray has traveled

All so that my soul can become enthralled with another’s.

When I look someone in the eyes I feel their soul capturing mine; overwhelming me with awe

I bathe in the depths of another’s pupils. Become absorbed by the ever-expanding darkness. Let everything else fade. The darkness strengthened by the photon ring surrounding their pupils;

flecks of light which absorb and reflect rays, surrounding and contrasting the center.

I know I shouldn’t stare into the sun, for I might go blind from the magnitude of pure white light

But when I peer into the darkest depths of another all other senses fade away, consumed by my captivation.

I often look just shy of someone’s gaze;

Their nose, their eyelid.

Otherwise, I’d always be getting lost exploring the souls of others.

If I truly look you in the eye you’ll watch as I get absorbed by you.

If I look you in the eye it means I want to feel totally embraced by you.

If I look you in the eye, it might even mean I love you.

Otherwise, I hope hanging by the hawking radiation, just out of reach of being absorbed, will suffice.

A tutorial for my 196 refugees still figuring everything out. (I ran out of rantsonas at the end)

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!

wheres a feminine touch. i need to see a feminine touch rn