Just a little technical note;

White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon because it operates primarily by heat and flame rather than toxicity, making it an incendiary weapon. Its use is governed by Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW)

Not saying that it can’t be used in bad ways but it has legitimate uses in combat areas (mostly as a flair) so the issue of supply, etc is not as simple as were it an actual chemical weapon

If you ask it to make up nonsense and it does it then you can’t get angry lol. I normally use it to help analyse code or write sections of code, sometimes to teach me how certain functions or principles work - it’s incredibly good at that, I do need to verify it’s doing the right thing but I do that with my code too and I’m not always right either.

As a research tool it’s great at taking a basic dumb description and pointing me to the right things to look for, especially for things with a lot of technical terms and obscure areas.

And yes they can occasionally make mistakes or invent things but if you ask properly and verify what you’re told then it’s pretty reliable, far more so than a lot of humans I know.

Why would I rebut that? I’m simply arguing that they don’t need to be ‘intelligent’ to accurately determine the colour of the sky and that if you expect an intelligence to know the colour of the sky without ever seeing it then you’re being absurd.

The way the comment I responded to was written makes no sense to reality and I addressed that.

Again as I said in other comments you’re arguing that an LLM is not will smith in I Robot and or Scarlett Johansson playing the role of a usb stick but that’s not what anyone sane is suggesting.

A fork isn’t great for eating soup, neither is a knife required but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly useful eating utensils.

Try thinking of an LLM as a type of NLP or natural language processing tool which allows computers to use normal human text as input to perform a range of tasks. It’s hugely useful and unlocks a vast amount of potential but it’s not going to slap anyone for joking about it’s wife.

People do that too, actually we do it a lot more than we realise. Studies of memory for example have shown we create details that we expect to be there to fill in blanks and that we convince ourselves we remember them even when presented with evidence that refutes it.

A lot of the newer implementations use more complex methods of fact verification, it’s not easy to explain but essentially it comes down to the weight you give different layers. GPT 5 is already training and likely to be out around October but even before that we’re seeing pipelines using LLM to code task based processes - an LLM is bad at chess but could easily install stockfish in a VM and beat you every time.

That’s only true on a very basic level, I understand that Turings maths is complex and unintuitive even more so than calculus but it’s a very established fact that relatively simple mathematical operations can have emergent properties when they interact to have far more complexity than initially expected.

The same way the giraffe gets its spots the same way all the hardware of our brain is built, a strand of code is converted into physical structures that interact and result in more complex behaviours - the actual reality is just math, and that math is almost entirely just probability when you get down to it. We’re all just next word guessing machines.

We don’t guess words like a Markov chain instead use a rather complex token system in our brain which then gets converted to words, LLMs do this too - that’s how they can learn about a subject in one language then explain it in another.

Calling an LLM predictive text is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, it’s somewhat true on a technical level but only when you understand that predicting the next word can be a hugely complex operation which is the fundamental math behind all human thought also.

Plus they’re not really just predicting one word ahead anymore, they do structured generation much like how image generators do - first they get the higher level principles to a valid state then propagate down into structure and form before making word and grammar choices. You can manually change values in the different layers and see the output change, exploring the latent space like this makes it clear that it’s not simply guessing the next word but guessing the next word which will best fit into a required structure to express a desired point - I don’t know how other people are coming up with sentences but that feels a lot like what I do

Ha ha yeah humans sure are great at not being convinced by the opinions of other people, that’s why religion and politics are so simple and society is so sane and reasonable.

Helen Keller would belive you it’s purple.

If humans didn’t have eyes they wouldn’t know the colour of the sky, if you give an ai a colour video feed of outside then it’ll be able to tell you exactly what colour the sky is using a whole range of very accurate metrics.

I use LLMs to create things no human has likely ever said and it’s great at it, for example

‘while juggling chainsaws atop a unicycle made of marshmallows, I pondered the existential implications of the colour blue on a pineapples dream of becoming a unicorn’

When I ask it to do the same using neologisms the output is even better, one of the words was exquimodal which I then asked for it to invent an etymology and it came up with one that combined excuistus and modial to define it as something beyond traditional measures which fits perfectly into the sentence it created.

You can’t ask a parrot to invent words with meaning and use them in context, that’s a step beyond repetition - of course it’s not full dynamic self aware reasoning but it’s certainly not being a parrot

But also the people who seem to think we need a magic soul to perform useful work is way way too high.

The main problem is Idiots seem to have watched one too many movies about robots with souls and gotten confused between real life and fantasy - especially shitty journalists way out their depth.

This big gotcha ‘they don’t live upto the hype’ is 100% people who heard ‘ai’ and thought of bad Will Smith movies. LLMs absolutely live upto the actual sensible things people hoped and have exceeded those expectations, they’re also incredibly good at a huge range of very useful tasks which have traditionally been considered as requiring intelligence but they’re not magically able everything, of course they’re not that’s not how anyone actually involved in anything said they would work or expected them to work.

But he’s British and we have a good NHS so that’s kinda a weird argument

I hate the royal family but for reasons that many sense

Oh there is but it’s sorted through rich people filters, if a hundred show ideas contain important and useful thoughts about our current society and one show Idea boils down to ‘capitalism is good actually’ then we already know which one will get made without any other information

I don’t mind watching a ‘capitalism is good’ show occasionally if it’s risen to the top because it makes important and informative statements but i can’t abide a landscape where other opinions don’t have that same ability.

Yeah but it’s still corporate pandering and drowning your brain in bullshit. ‘did you see the latest show that rich people decided we should be brainwashed with, it contains all the talking points they think will help society to continue to benefit them’

I much prefer stuff that’s free because it’s made by people who want to make it, I’ll even put a few coins in their patreon if I really like it.

Six year old, easy choice - do something mildly special for a kid that age and get on TV then when they ask you a question the answer is ‘well it was a dream i had, there was a pale horse riding towards us snd the horses name was Tod, it was going to run over everyone but an angel told me to call out to the faithful and save them…’

Kid can’t even read and from an atheist family then starts quoting bible and making up complex visions and messages no child could ever create - plus very clear predictions that come perfectly true, knowledge of science before it’s discovered… Admit it, you’d get sucked into my cult.

Could have a huge portion of the world believing, teach them the need for luxury gay space communism then when we’re all living in utopia be like ‘oh btw it was just a time travel prank lol’

That’s exactly what I came in here to post

But no one believes simulation theory on faith so it makes no sense

Ok so when you compare things it doesn’t mean that you think they’re identical, for example if i compare the similarities between the number one with the number two I’m not saying that 1=2; they are both sigle digit integer values and someone can say that without equating them.

The statement made was that Christian music fans and nazi music fans share a trait, though the trait is expressed differently - that trait being that they are very easy to identify from outward appearances and that it would be hard to know one without knowing about their beliefs. People who listen to Christian music tend to wear crosses and talk about Jesus a lot, Nazis get swastikas tattooed and talk about Hitler.

That doesn’t mean they’re the same in every regard or morally equivalent, I have a lot of things in common with Hitler and so do you, if someone pointed out the fact we all have respiratory systems that doesn’t mean they think we’re culpable for genocidal war crimes.

Maybe if you read the comment that you replied to which explained the analogy then you’d know

Yes this is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I think it’s basically inevitable that it’ll happen eventually but an actual effort to make it happen faster would be such a positive thing in the world.

The reason I say it’s inevitable is because design tools are getting consistently better, hardware is cheaper than ever, and ever more useful stuff is being added to the commons. With ai assisted CAD and ai assisted manufacture we’re going to see so many amazing new open source designs getting built.

People are going to start moving away from for-profit designed homegoods like washing machines and printers because they’ll be able to get a community designed and tested product modified to their specific needs and tastes then have that fabricated at whatever local firm or tinkerer you want to give your business to.

Someone I watch was sponsored by a PCB fabrication company and the way he described their service I realized I could save a lot of time and money doing it that way.

I don’t think advertising always has to be manipulation, it could just be making you aware of the advantages of a product. Though most adverts are nothing but lies and bullshit.

Yeah, personally I enjoy seeing adverts for things I think are dumb because it’s like a shitty game company is paying my favourite creators to amuse me and they’re doing it by collecting money from rubes that’d only be wasting their cash on something worse anyway.

It feels like the sort of thing a chaotic hero would do in a cyberpunk romance.

What you’re saying is during an active war they haven’t heavily publicised what their special forces and secret agents have been doing?

I say heavily because they have mentioned various success their covert units have had, one example is them sneaking into a tunnel while everyone was busy firing rockets at Israel then taking all the secret documents revealing the location of other tunnel networks and fighters.

Of course Israel wants to find the kidnapped people and free them, of course they want to kill or capture the Hamas leaders, and of course they don’t want to kill innocent people. Those aren’t easy things in the situation they’re in.

The leader of Hamas assuming he’s back from his recent trip to Iran is at home in Doha, the local commanders are in their bases deep under hospitals, the fighters are dressed as civilians and of course get added to the civilian casualties lists - especially the teenagers fighting for Hamas…

People act like Israel is in an easy position but that really isn’t close to reality.