Autism Is An Evolutionary Advantage Because If I Wasn't Talking To Myself Walking Home At 2am It Wouldn't

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.

why don't the mitochondria cause cancer. if i was a mitochondria i would be suddenly struck by tremendous joie de vivre and remember my youth as a bacteria and be like holy shit why am i listening to this fucker. im gonna eat all my surroundings im freeeeee. ig probably its bc they depend a bunch on proteins encoded in the nucleus but like. cmon dude

i've been realizing that when people give you their number/social media they like. want you to text them somewhat often or start talking to you by text. which... seems intuitive, but for me, giving people my contact info is more like "hi, i think you're cool. i would like to be able to contact you if needed/i want to hang out." if i met you in person, i would rather get to know you more wherever we met. frequent communication by text is reserved for close friends and long distance friendships.

idk if anyone else is like this but. i feel like i should tell the people ive become friends with recently that this is how i function socially.

i need my space unless youre the right person then dont go anywhere

a wall of motherboards ,,,, she's so beautiful

3 am which is both day and night and simultaneously neither

Night

This reminds me of my silly little web projects where I’d just play around with distance functions or GPGPU or whatever

mobile-friendly personal websites

@agentreynard wanted to hear more about how I made my website mobile friendly, so here's what I did:

First, crucially, I already had a one-column website that used css to style the HTML.

This made it easy to adapt to smaller screens...as soon as I learned the following three things thanks to Christopher Heng's How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: Responsive Design in CSS:

1. You need this magical incantation in the HEAD section of every page:

2. You need to tell your images to simmer down and not be stretching out the screen by being as wide as they want. They can be 100% wide and no more!! Add this to the css:

3. And then you'll probably need to give the page special instructions on how to act if it's being displayed on a small screen. This is the fiddly bit. What you put in here will be specific to your website, but it'll all go at the end of your css, tucked inside one of these:

That's what's known as a media query and it can take a variety of forms. This one says that if a screen is 320px wide or smaller, these rules apply. You can also use "min-width" if you want to tell it what to do if a screen is larger than a set number, and you can put whatever numbers in there you want.

Mine looks like this:

Those were all classes I used for the original layout, only now I want them to display differently on smaller screens. So I shrunk all the margins to remove white (and pink) space and now that same page looks something like this on mobile:

I did the same thing for the story files themselves, shrinking the margins so there's more room for text, but that took a different set of rules because they've got a different structure. I also added "back to top" links to the bottom of all my navigational pages.

Now, this is clearly not a foolproof or comprehensive plan. Everything I know about HTML and CSS I learned through trial and error, so I am barely qualified to say even this much. But these were the three things I needed to know before I could stick my hands in there and really shove stuff around.

My latest comic for The Nib was written by my friend Mike Thompson- it’s his first published comics work! 

The Nib has been a steady source of income and a huge support to me and many other indie cartoonists for years. They publish amazing work, but will be cut loose by their financial backer in July. You can read the official post about it from editor Matt Bors here.  They are still running their kickstarter-funded print magazine, but have to put digital publishing on hiatus until they figure out their next steps. If you’ve been thinking about supporting their membership program, now would be a good time. They have levels from $2 to $40 per month. I really don’t want this to be my last Nib piece! 

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