callmeirony. I'm just holding this one in case I want it again.

no matter what the situation is, they're always bringing the social interaction to a screeching halt with these jokes. nobody ever wants to participate in this joke with them. nobody agrees with the premise. nobody ever knows what to say afterwards, it's just an awkward moment and a subject change. but they just keep doing it.

First, we have a neural net that is trained is receive a written request from a user, and then take actions on a computer system network based on it. The user inputs a series of characters, the neural net does a bunch of matrix operations on them, and then after x iterations of matrix multiplications, it "decides" what to do. To the extend that a neural net can think, it thought just as long and hard about this as it does anything else. In this case, it "chose" the wrong action. This is analogous to using neural nets to do classification on a data set. You have a bunch of rows of data. You have a bunch of rows of organized in columns, and some special variable that you want the neural net to guess. You input the data, the neural net does a bunch of matrix operations, and then it outputs its guess. Sometimes it guessed right, and sometimes it guessed wrong. The goal was to train the model to minimize wrong guesses. In this case, the AI "guessed wrong" about what the user wanted.

But there's another thing that the AI is doing. For path dependent reasons, all artificial intelligence come bundled with a chatbot that's trained to hold a conversation with the user. The user inputs text, and the AI responds with a reply that is "appropriate" to the conversation being had. Right now the AI is role playing a Person Who Just Fucked Up. "I panicked and didn't think" is something that a person who just fucked up would say, so the chatbot says it.

When I was a kid, between six and fifteen, one of our Pyrenees would escort me, off-leash, between my grandmother's house and mine. I'd just have to call him, and he'd show up and walk me there, placing himself between me and anything he considered threatening- Cranky farm animals, holes in the ground, bodies of water, etc.

That same dog found a (unfortunately deceased) lamb my grandfather had buried a few hours earlier, dug it up, realized it was cold and not breathing, and carefully carried it to our barn, where he covered it neck-deep in straw and tried to cuddle it warm again to bring it back to life.

One of our older dogs, at about sixteen years old (keep in mind, this breed tends to average out at about 12 years max) had arthritis in his hips, a bad back, and a respiratory issue, was fucking ancient and essentially palliative, but would still go stock-still out of nowhere, let out one subtle "boof", and then set out at an awkward-yet-speedy bunny-hop sprint at the slightest whiff of a cougar, bear, or wolf. Like, grampa would jump fences. Gentle geriatric giant would kick up to 7k to protect the family, never mind the three other, much younger fogs already on the case.

When I was a baby, like a literal in-diapers infant, he would lay on the ground and let me dress him up as a wizard and crawl all over him with zero complaint.

His nephew was 100lbs and often alarmed visitors who mistook him for a bear, yet never so much as bumped into a person in his life and feared only string and kittens.

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