Is Dan the loud one? I’ve never learned their names, but I’m waiting for him to scream something about them horning in on their territory.

I gotta find out what the Knowledge Fight folks have to say about this.

Oh yeah, just don’t read about what happens to our prime ministers when they attempt to defy the empire. Totes democracy we got over here.

To the ASIO agent assigned to tracking my every online move:

1. I didn’t see this comment.
2. I don’t understand it.
3. I would never do such a thing.
4. I’m sorry this is what your life has been reduced to. Your patriotism is misplaced and you would be happier if you worked against the creeping surveillance state rather than for it. You know better than any of us how horrible it is, and you have the skills we need.

Fun fact: in Australia we don’t have a bill of rights of any kind, so the cops can just force you to reveal your passwords. The maximum penalty for refusing is 2 years imprisonment.

Yes, the companies have a reputation to protect, but it’s also just a standard hype-cycle. If you pay attention to tech history these things always go in cycles like this.

Whether the tech is actually useful or not doesn’t actually matter. What matters is whether you can convince investors to fork over the cash with a shiny presentation.

The tech industry has basically habituated to surviving on selling us bullshit through hype cycles. I think it’s become dependent on them.

Why do they have to “WANT” that? Ignoring the fact that they literally said they were happy it was changed back, why does that matter to the criticism? If it’s true, it’s true, and the fact that corporations are the ones in a position to habitually make terrible decisions about FOSS is a big problem. It’s valid to point out that it would be good to find a better way.

If anything it sounds like you “WANT” to ignore it.

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Almost like it does work on Firefox but for some reason they don’t want you using it. Honestly it’s so damn weird, why do that? Is there some incentive for them?

My apologies, I see that I have made a mistake. There are in fact 3 w’s in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries.”

It’s an illusion. People think that because the language model puts words into sequences like we do, there must be something there. But we know for a fact that it is just word associations. It is fundamentally just predicting the most likely next word and generating it.

If it helps, we have something akin to an LLM inside our brain, and it does the same limited task. Our brains have distinct centres that do all sorts of recognition and generative tasks, including images, sounds and languge. We’ve made neural networks that do these tasks too, but the difference is that we have a unifying structure that we call “consciousness” that is able to grasp context, and is able to loopback the different centres into one another to achieve all sorts of varied results.

So we get our internal LLM to sequence words, one word after another, then we loop back those words via the language recognition centre into the context engine, so it can check if the words match the message it intended to create, it checks them against its internal model of the world. If there’s a mismatch, it might ask for different words till it sees the message it wanted to see. This can all be done very fast, and we’re barely aware of it. Or, if it’s feeling lazy today, it might just blurt out the first sentence that sprang to mind and it won’t make sense, and we might call that a brain fart.

Back in the 80s “automatic writing” took off, which was essentially people tapping into this internal LLM and just letting the words flow out without editing. It was nonesense, but it had this uncanny resemblance to human language, and people thought they were contacting ghosts, because obviously there has to be something there, right? But it’s not, it’s just that it sounds like people.

These LLMs only produce text forwards, they have no ability to create a sentence, then examine that sentence and see if it matches some internal model of the world. They have no capacity for context. That’s why any question involving A inside B trips them up, because that is fundamentally a question about context. "How many Ws in the sentence “Howard likes strawberries” is a question about context, that’s why they screw it up.

I don’t think you solve that without creating a real intelligence, because a context engine would necessarily be able to expand its own context arbitrarily. I think allowing an LLM to read its own words back and do some sort of check for fidelity might be one way to bootstrap a context engine into existence, because that check would require it to begin to build an internal model of the world. I suspect the processing power and insights required for that are beyond us for now.

I’d be happy to help! There are 3 "w"s in the string “Howard likes strawberries”.

(though some might consider this an anti-feature)

To be fair, not everyone would say that, and the only reason you would call it an “anti-feature” is if you had an accurate understanding of the issues.

Thanks! As far as I know I’m not describing anything too unusual with the mixed-up signals, I think pins & needles is essentially that, just a bunch of nerves randomly firing, so you probably do know what it’s like in little doses.

I’ve been paying attention to it since I wrote that, and it definitely is still slightly more numb on the affected side, I think I was right that not all the nerves regrew completely.

Thanks, I hope they don’t do it. I would expect the security community to be able to find something like this, since it’s not hard to hook up some devices and do packet sniffing to detect if they’re talking to each other.

This would be an excellent use case for LTT’s faraday cage room for instance.

I’d be interested to see more information on that. I don’t doubt companies would do that, but some good information on when it happens and how to prevent it would be useful.

See, I just don’t connect it to the network. It complained when I set it up but now it just works as a screen.

I’ve got a raspberry pi steaming my desktop to it with gamestream/sunshine/moonlight, and it’s now as smart as my computer. It can even stream from different computers no matter where they are in the house, watch anything with stremio, and play games from them too. It’s way better than using the youtube or netflix button on the TV, most of the services it offers I don’t use anyway.

But actually pihole does sound like a good idea and maybe I should get that set up one of these days.

I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.

They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.

At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I’d get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn’t grow successfully and remained near that site.

It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven’t had a pins & needles experience for a few years.

The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right… yeah I don’t see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.

I found this: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens/redress/what-should-i-do-if-i-think-my-personal-data-protection-rights-havent-been-respected_en

Can you report that somewhere?