I don’t know what you’re trying to argue here. Do you want my opinion? The opinion of Christians? The opinion of people who view nature to be god?

In my opinion, no. Obviously not. But I also am not a Christian.

People have free will, because that is the greatest good, but not freedom of consequences (even from god) when they behave bad with that free will. Even though they behave bad, if bad is an objective scale, their bad bahvior was still less bad than having no free will. On this scale, god not punishing them for their bad behavior is more bad than gods punishment. So, because he always has to let the most good thing happen he both has to allow free will and people to do bad and also punish people for doing bad even though he knows they will be bad and he could prevent it. Again I think it’s bs, and there’s a lot of bad logic in Christianity, but that’s their subjective stance (usually but, like you said, not a monolith). It “works” because good and bad isn’t something you can logic out very wrll since it’s highly subjective.

Yeah I’m not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is “more good” than the bad things it leads to are bad.

Not super common or super niche. I use R. And it completely made up code a year ago. Sometimes I still does, but less. And when I ask it for citations it can make shit up too. I really stand by the assertion that it needs a lot of babysitting.

But, between it getting better and me getting better at asking and some patience, I get what I want. But, it does require a lot of fine tuning and patience. But its still just faster than googling. And I could see the argument that the models haven’t improved but that they just have access to search engines now and that I’m mostly using them and a search engine. And sometimes they’re so whacked out I’ll ask them to search for something but theyll tell me they don’t have access to the internet and they’re so absolutely convinced of that that I have to close that chat and start a new one.

If you feed it in documentation or ask it to search for its answers in substack (or really just whatever search constraints you want) and then tell it to give you the links it used, you might have a better time. This forces it to look up an answer instead of hallucinate one. And when it gives me code, more complicated things usually fail pretty hard at first and I have to feed it the error output for a few rounds and guide it a lot.

I don’t know what to tell you. I have them successfully compiling tables of search outputs to compare different things for method development and generating code, saving me hours of work each week. It all needs to be checked, but the comparison comes with links and the code is proofread and benchmarked. For most of what I do it’s really just a jacked up search engine, but it’s able to scan webpages faster than me and that saves a lot of time.

As a hobby, I also have it reading old documents that are almost illegible and transcribing them pretty well.

I really don’t know what you’re doing that you’re just getting nonsense. I’m not.

Technology these days works in that they always lose money at the start. Its a really stupid feature of modern startups IMO. Get people dependent and they make money later. I don’t agree with it. I don’t really think oir entire economic system is viable though and that’s another conversation.

But LLMs have been improving exponentially. I was on board with everything you’re saying just a year ago about how they suck and they’re going to hit a wall even. But the don’t need more training data or the processing power. They have those and now they’re refining the LLMs. I have a local LLM on my computer that performs better than chat GPT did a year ago and it’s only a few GB. I run it on a shitty laptop.

LLMs with access to the internet are usually about as factually correct as their search results. If it searches someone’s blog, you’re right, the results will suck. But if you tell it to use higher quality resources, it returns better information. They’re good if you know how to use them. And they aren’t good enough to be replacing as many jobs as all these companies are hoping. LLMs are just going to speed up productivity. They need babysitting and validating. But they’re still an extremely useful tool that’s only going to get better and LLMs are here to stay.

I get the desire to say this, but I find them extremely helpful in my line of work. Literally everything they say needs to be validated, but so does Wikipedia and we all know that Wikipedia is extremely useful. It’s just another tool. But its a very useful tool if you know how to apply it.

AI comic?

I don’t have cartridges and I’ve had no issue with the ink heads in the years I’ve had the printer.

You’re probably right, but I’m just printing random documents on occasion.

I have an epson eco tank. No more ink cartridges.

Democrats are pragmatically there for the money. They aren’t comically evil, but they are corrupt. They will throw an election before they ever give up AIPAC money and count on the next election swinging back to them. They get to sit back and watch the republicans be the bad guys and stir shit up for a few years. Then, when they get back in power, they fix the things that’s don’t make them money and look like he good guys but conveniently leave the unpopular policy the republicans enacted that makes them money and they don’t have to look like the bad guys. They just look incompetent. But they aren’t. This is all very purposeful. They love this dynamic. They benifit from it.

The democrats as they are for sure need to go. But we need to be more pragmatic ourselves about removing them instead of throwing elections to the republicans hoping it will teach the Democrats a lesson. Because it won’t. We need to focus on getting a foothold and changing the party. And that means turning out to vote in every election no matter what. Vote third party. Vote write in. Vote whatever. But sitting out of elections to teach democrats a lesson just isn’t going to do anything. It’s just throwing away the small amount of political capital most people have. If we don’t vote now its either corporate feudalism or civil war in the future.

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I did that for years and then I emigrated because it didn’t work.

Removed by mod

They aren’t the same. But they don’t need to be the same for them to both suck and not deserve to be in power. But harm reduction is real.

OK. But what are you actually doing right now? What are any of us doing right now?

Poison the cancer slightly faster than the whole organism! My dad cancer treatment gave him liver disease that eventually turned into a cancer that was way more deadly than his original cancer.

I haaate “equal rights means equal lefts.”

These dudes fantasize about a woman picking a fight with them so they can beat the shit out of one and have it be socially acceptable.