I would put love above health. Suppose you are perfectly healthy and even rich but have no friends to share anything with, life must be meaningless then.
The two are related, bad health makes it difficult to have meaningful relations and lack of meaningful relations fucks up your health. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is worse for life expectancy than loneliness.
I'm sorry to read that. In fact I meant love in a more broad sense. There are many kinds of love, it does not need to be having a spouse. I work every weekday mainly for having good relations with people, money comes second.
But coming back to your story of life (ignoring the last sentence) : it's not too late to find love and also: try knowing and loving yourself, being content a bit more. When that succeeds, it is more easy to find love.
The first half of your message led me to write a well meaning reply to tell you you still have time to be happy and meet that girl from high school or someone else. The second part is so dark and evil that I regret wasting my time.
How sure are you that comprehension is not a mere form of advanced pattern matching? We have the intuition that ideas and words appear trivially in people's mind, based on comprehension. I think chances are, that intuition is wrong.
Ideas and words aren’t the same thing, or from the same model - words are a communication layer, with robust error correction - but ideas stem from intuition, which is more of a lossy aggregative/associative model. There’s a balance to be had in each when operating a human mind, I find - let the latter suggest ideas and potential association, let the former robustly prove or disprove them. So yes, it’s pattern matching on all levels, but pattern matching within words doesn’t produce new ideas as readily - instead the idea-space is queried directly.
IMO we really are just a bunch of models that interoperate.
Maybe it is, but if it is, it is one that includes more parts in our system.
The way LLMs lack broader context, have a narrow focus, and hallucinate, strike me as similar to people that have had traumatic brain injuries to their right hemisphere. Those people may hallucinate that the left side (the right hemisphere senses the left side of the body) of their body is made of wood and hinges and can talk to you about it like it is the most natural thing in the world. When the information gets to the left hemisphere to construct language about what they sense, there is a failure of the right to deliver the broader context to the left hemisphere that that's not possible, but they won't bat an eye discussing what they believe.
So, we have a left hemisphere where we do most of our focused thinking, logic, constructing language, etc. and LLMs seem pretty similar to a lot of that. But, we also think without language, thinking does not require language. A lot of thinking is also happening in the right hemisphere and it isn't using formal logic, isn't using narrow focus but rather intuition based on broad contextual and experiential embodied knowledge. And this type of thinking isn't binary, it accommodates paradoxes without issue. LLMs don't currently have anything analogous to this type of knowledge and this type of processing AFAICT.
In addition, that intuition might be tied to a feedback system with the body, for example, our second brain, the gut, provides a lot of control over how our body performs and provides a lot of feedback to the brain about how we feel. In fact, all feelings are sensed in the body (gut feelings, cold feet, weak in the knees, lump in your throat, burning ears, tight fists, etc.). Part of our intuition is based on considering an idea, sensing how we feel about that idea, sensed in various parts of the body, and then bouncing that back and forth across hemispheres to decide.
I wonder, what sort of pattern matching can we build that models embodied feelings. How would you model boredom, hunger, lust, fear, humor, etc? I think that's possible, but I don't know that we'll be able to do that with a normal computer, I think the way the brain works is more analogous to a symphony of simultaneous signals being processed with an emergent thought and less like a single-threaded process assembling words.
Maybe we can enumerate and model the human drivers of behavior and get something closer to what we're calling comprehension here, but token predictors for language are not getting us any closer to human comprehension. The human brain might just be an anticipation machine, but LLMs only deal with one dimension of human behavior, language, and there's little reason to think you can skip modeling everything that leads to human comprehension and still get anything more than just word babel with compounding error rates in predicting words that represent human comprehension.
It requires some kind of signal. Words of a language are a signal.
We choose words for an llm to interact with us, but other transformers work on pixel values or audio sample values. There exist transformers used on brain probe generated values.
I would see human language processing as a kind of coprocessor sitting in another side of the brain. But the same can be said about transformers in general. The words side is only part of them, to be able to communicate.
I think you got a but too much negativity, from a crowd that became more easily irratated because their AI sensor became very sensitive by e.g. reviewing a lot of AI generated code and comments.
I regularly had a depression for years without even knowing it was a depression. Until a neurologist told me, after examination of brain imaging, it's best to take this pill for at least a week. Only after feeling its effect, I knew it was really depression causing the symptoms, even though I did not feel depressed! I felt exhausted and stressed and had several physical side effects like dizzyness and stomach ache.
> Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost
I understand what you mean but... "permanently lost" sounds dramatic. When I trow away old pictures, old drawings or pieces made by my son at school, they are lost as well. Not that I do that often, but it begs the question, should every 'ip' made by humans be preserved?
It sounds dramatic because it’s dramatic. You’re combining two things — whether something is, in fact, completely lost, and if it is something that should be kept. Something that should not be kept is still completely lost if it’s destroyed. It’s difficult to imagine they’d digitize it if it was worthless.
The post is quite (too?) cynical. In fact you can awe or ruminate over many things, even over the output of AI. The truth is, AI is getting so ubiquitous that our sense of awe has been numbed. That's why many things feel like slop, you know it did not take much effort.
Bearblog got not comment function and no one would know it exists in the first place. I got a whole slew of very similar posts by now, but this one is the one where its all feelings, less logic. I was curious if anyone would say anything.
About it being to cynical, what do you mean? I am willing to concede that that, as much as I hate it emotionally, those prompt coding things actually achieve results and even good results if wielded properly, about the state of the world I would want good arguments why not everything is lost, I would love them tbh.
reply