• 2 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle



  • I find your resistance to offering thoughts on the things you share in a forum strange, because you seem friendly and well spoken. Just a quick sentence describing what this video was and why you wanted people to see it probably would have got you my upvote instead.

    Joseph Anderson may have millions of views, but I’m not in those millions. I never heard of the guy until you posted this. So all I had to go on was that its something about Lies of P and it’s 48 minutes long. That’s a lot of time to spend on figuring out whether a random Internet post is worthwhile or not. Cute cat pictures can stand on their own, those only take a second to look at and tell if they’re good or bad, but a long form video really needs some context before I can say whether I’m interested in seeing it or boosting it to other people. And if I don’t have the context to say whether the post is good, I’ll downvote it to make room for the posts that are definitely good.


  • I downvoted it for the total lack of context. The video title is opaque at best and clickbait at worst. Neither OP nor the video’s creator offer any description of what this “critique” is supposed to be. Are we roasting the game? Are we defending the game? Are we trying to give a more fair and balanced treatment than others have? From the post, the video title, and the video description I have no idea what this is or why I should give it any of my time, so I consider it spam and I downvote.

    Generally, when videos get posted to a forum like this I want to see OP chime in with why this video is worth our time. If you’re posting it, you should already have watched it, so you’re the first person in this community who can tell us what’s good or bad about it. That’s incredibly valuable! Even a one sentence blurb about what made you post this particular video here is a huge help to people looking for info about this topic, especially when the video is 48 minutes long.


  • Mostly Cities Skylines 2. The performance is not great, but it’s passable with the settings turned down and the actual city building is really good. Right now I’m working on a big expansion to my city further down the highway, just got the water/power lines run between them so it’s one big happy grid exporting the extra to other cities. Already looking forward to the things I’ll do differently in my second city!

    Also playing some Super Mario Wonder on the side, which is fantastic. Great mix of easy fun levels and hard-as-nails secret special levels. Very fun!





  • Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.

    Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.

    As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.





  • Agreed. I find Bing chat is really good when I know almost nothing about what I’m searching, or when I know a whole lot about what I’m searching. Like in your example, if I know exactly what I need but can’t remember its name Bing will read all the spammy beginners’ guides for me and get the answer. And on the opposite end, if I’m looking to buy a gift in a hobby I don’t remotely understand Bing does a pretty good job of holding my hand through the search process.

    Weirdly, medium knowledge questions seem to still do better as a basic Google search. If I need to fix an appliance I’ve fixed before, but it’s been a long time so I really need a full walkthrough, the first few results on Google are faster than waiting for Bing to talk through it.



  • I use the term “autocomplete on steroids” because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.

    LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we’ve come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it’s a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn’t make sense. They hallucinate facts that don’t fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they’re saying.

    I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.



  • Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that’s not what the AI actually does.

    Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That’s all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we’d apply to a human.

    To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy “bright line” for what counts and what doesn’t. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI “creates” is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.


  • I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?

    If it’s coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It’s not “I want to play one more game” anymore, it’s “this game is pressuring me to play one more game.” Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.

    If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it’s a question of priorities. If I’m spending time watching one more video on this platform, there’s something else I’m not going to get to. So the question for myself is “out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?” Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven’t checked in today. But if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.