Mullet Of Sadness

cause like. apart from the (potential) exception of writing code, there is not really anything useful that a Large Language Model can do.

it imitates patterns in the text that it takes in

that's fundamentally how it works

Yes, haha funny, the AI is bamboozled by spelling, but seriously: I asked Google the same question 5 different times just now, and not only did I get 5 incorrect answers, I got 5 completely different incorrect answers.

The fact that they're different every time demonstrates just how much of an LLM's output is up to random chance. This is how LLMs imitate human language: each stage of constructing the text has built-in randomness, just like how human language has variation and flexibility.

This is my problem with using these things in the workplace. Like, imagine you're using an LLM to fill out a report of an accident that happened, or to write dietary recommendations for a patient, or to give feedback on a paper a student wrote...really anything you can think of.

Even if the LLM-generated text doesn't say anything technically flat-out wrong, the words and details are still randomized instead of being chosen by you for an actual reason.

Sometime in the past ten years, consumer-grade technology has hit a point where it just...doesn't really need to be more powerful. In the tech industry (or at least its shareholders), this is a disaster because they have been accustomed to rendering everyone's tech completely obsolete every so often and then getting massive influxes of cash as people replace their old hardware. Back in 2006, a desktop PC from 2000 would be completely useless. Today, a high-end laptop from 2020 is not only serviceable, it's still high-end.

Nvidia's business model has been about releasing a brand new hyper-powerful graphics card every single year for like over two decades, and they don't want to change that, but like, 4K literally quadruples your power demands and it doesn't look THAT different from 1080p. even the gaming enthusiasts don't really need em, and the cards have kind of scary power demands anyways. like am i going to find out something interesting about my home's wiring after i plug this thing in?

Crypto kept the computational power arms race dream alive for a little while, but you can't actually do anything with crypto, and it's regulated by a lot of governments now so you can't even do crimes with it anymore, but hey, you know what else uses lots of fast linear algebra? Large Language Models.

While LLMs don't do anything well, they SEEM like they can plausibly do some things so long as you, the user, don't know anything about doing the thing, which is convenient because C-suite folks almost universally don't know how anything anywhere actually gets done, and tech investors tend to be excitable bc they want to invest in the next unexpected runaway success and all you really need to do is bluster at them a bit.

Nvidia is making a lot of promises and saying a lot of big numbers, and Ed Zitron has done a lot of fantastic research into how the economics(don't) work and what's actually getting built, and the short version is that none of this shit adds up. Personally, I'm pretty sure AI is a confidence game of some kind, but it's pretty obvious that AI is smoke and mirrors. The real question is: what happens when the music finally stops?

I can't know the exact future, but right now, LLMs are VERY heavily subsidized, and Microsoft has basically stated that their business model is just the Walmart scam, where they convince companies to fire all of their graphic designers, writers, and programmers by offering a cheap alternative, and then jacking up the price once the companies are reliant on it. the question here is whether or not a profitably-priced LLM is ACTUALLY cheaper than hiring the graphic designers back (i have my doubts).

I suspect that one of the other possibilities in play is that Nvidia and Microsoft are trying to build the infrastructure they'd need to force all of us into having to rent our entire operating system from them and owning only a remote terminal that we can use to access their servers. This is a very stupid idea that can't work for a lot of reasons (the main one is that lots of enterprise technology needs to function without doing that and your consumer tech market isn't wholly independent of enterprise tech), but that doesn't mean they're not going to try building it anyways, and I suspect it will actually mean that we all switch to using Linux and buying bootleg Chinese GPUs.

Once I had someone do the whole "that seems so hard, you must be so patient" standard routine. I ask her, "why's that?" You know, why do I need to be some kind of virtuous martyr to watch 90s cartoons with other disabled people for $30 an hour?

And she says to me, with full seriousness and a look of utter dread on her face,

"All the biting."

OK mate. What do you mean. What biting. What are you on about.

"The biting," she repeats, as if it's obvious and I ought to intuitively know what she means. Then she kind of snaps her teeth to demonstrate. "You know?"

No I don't know. What do you mean biting.

"They bite," she says. Eyes wide, dead serious. "The, um, the Slow People. They bite."

Stop wishing death on Viv, you shithead.

Stop saying fans of Helluva/Hazbin are all terrible people you wish would all suffer, you shithead.

Stop equating people casually enjoying the show to “literally being pro rape”, you shithead.

Granted, I think this person is a teenager, so hopefully there’s time for them to learn how to rightfully shit on Viv and her shows without being a raging turd, but it’s really obnoxious to see in the critical tag. I don’t consider it criticism in the slightest.

God, fucking right? Viv sucks, but she's your pretty standard rich (normal human being rich) asshole.

Donald’s family is composed of three branches. The McDuck Clan, Coot kin and the Duck family.

Coots are smaller birds that often get mistaken for ducks and while Coot can be used as a last name like how Duck or Mouse are common last names in the duckverse (like Johnson or Smith etc) I doubt that Barks and Rosa went out of their way to give them a last name without it having some biological meaning as well.

Donald’s dad, Quackmore Duck, is the son of Elvira Coot and Humperdink Duck. Now, unfortunately we don’t know much about Humperdink’s parents but we’re given enough tools at our disposal to figure enough out.

Donald’s mother is Hortense McDuck, a fiery duck from Scotland. As far as I can tell, duck is all she has.

So that’s it right?? Donald is part duck part coot??

NOPE

THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE

DONALD’S PART GOOSE AS WELL

The guy who looks high at the bottom left corner of the picture there?? That’s Gus Goose. He’s a semi-distant cousin of Donald’s related to him from his father.

Now it’s implied from the family tree that the goose part for Gus came from Luke Goose which is fine and dandy and it could very well have been from him. But again, it doesn’t have to be the only source of goose in his family. (and it already isn’t considering Gladstone Gander canonically being half goose half duck)

Humperdink’s parents are unknown right?? Who’s to say he isn’t part goose as well? Maybe he got it from his dad or mom who knows they’re not in the tree. And if he’s part goose part duck, then Quackmore is goose-duck-coot mixed.

And Della goes “hm? Oh, no idea. I’ve never actually been with a guy before.” (and obviously everyone’s confused but like, come on, Webby is literally a clone. Weirder things have happened)

So then this leads into a whole adventure, culminating in going to Ithiquack on the assumption of, “hey, Selene might know, she’s magic!” So they go ask her, and she does the scrying or whatever, and the only result is more/less the picture shown above. Now obviously they’re confused, so she tries again, triplet by triplet, probably checking Webby or whoever else is there just to be safe, and in the end just… pokes one of the boys.

Then she has to drag Della away like “I think it’s me I don’t even know how this happened but there’s a tiny bit of moon magic in them and it says we’re their parents I DON’T KNOW”

So long story short the boys get kind of another weird aunt 👍

tifa!!!!!

day 1: idk man i thought itd be funny