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11·6 days agoCached responses are healthy and natural, and they aren’t any more likely to be wrong than well-reasoned arguments.
Like, suppose you were planning a dinner party with friends. One of them goes “person X? Ugh, can we not invite them?”, to which another friend goes into a long argument about why person X is totally better now. The first friend can’t really articulate what’s wrong, they just have a shitty feeling, and the arguments they use to explain that feeling are weak and full of holes. Which friend’s judgment would you be more inclined to trust?
I for one would trust the friend with the feeling rather than the friend with the clearly reasoned argument 9 times out of 10.
And so it is with LLMs/genAI. The reflexive repulsion towards them and towards people supporting them is well-earned. It’s healthy for people to set boundaries conservatively when so many genAI proponents are trying to weasel their way into acceptability with bad-faith comparisons, deliberate violation of “no genAI” boundaries as a form of gotcha, and a systematic lack of integration of critiques of genAI when trying to find new implementations. The Luddites were right, and so are anti-AI movements.
All of which is to say, I think you got a false positive here, but you’ll get 'em next time.
(You are correct that people do keep thinking about stuff and adding the impressions of those thoughts to the cached response. The analogy of a archive isn’t quite correct, it’s more like a giant pile of complaints that keeps getting added on to, that you need to shovel through to get back to that good point you heard 524 days ago, if it hasn’t disintegrated into abstract impression. I don’t think this changes the fundamental point, though, that usually the best reasons people have for believing something are not stored in their brain in a legible, rational format, and so the best actions - such as opposition to LLMs - are driven by emotional impression rather than thought).
Most LLM implementations to have come out in the past year have had introspection - a section of text where they’re prompted to think1 about the problem at a meta level which isn’t shown to the users. LLM engineers are actively working on expanding this into a more persistent, consistent, and functional world model - a bunch of text statements that other parts of the implementation are trained to treat1 as probably factually true, which it is regularly prompted to curate1 based on its interpretation1 of user input and other data.
For example, an LLM might have a world model statement that says “As an LLM I may be running at different times. Before stating the current time with confidence, check the current time with an external source such as the UTC API.” so an introspection scratchpad it generates might be “To answer that question accurately I need to know the time. I will refer to the UTC API. Ah, it returned 12:17 on June 3rd 2026. Since Britain is currently at UTC+1 I can confidently say the sun is up in Britain”, and then the text the user sees is “Thank you for asking, the sun is currently up in Britain”.
As for the lack of thought behind LLM backlash, that’s a factor of human psychology. In order to free up limited mental capacity, the human brain automatically simplifies rules it has learned consciously, imperfectly archiving the conscious method of learning it to long-term memory. People made up their minds about LLMs, and now the reasons are archived and no longer necessary for people’s response to LLMs. So now when people see LLMs, they don’t use the thought, they can just do the behavior they decided on and move on with their life.
Re-litigating LLMs feels like going to an old archive and digging through dusty tomes. It can absolutely be worth it, but it’s an effort you’re not going to put in just because you see someone using it or praising it.
Personally, my opposition to non-local LLMs is enshittification. Every habit you let become dependent on LLMs will be used to exploit you. Your habits before LLMs will be archived and too much effort to relearn, so you’ll pay out your ass for a worse service than what you used to be able to do yourself. My opposition to all LLMs is veganism, but that’s a story for a different comment.
1: LLM instruction text anthropomorphises LLMs. LLMs don’t do these cognitive tasks the same way a human would.
God forbid a woman doesn’t want to hang out with you.
(repeat for all women until no woman wants to hang out with you)
How fast space expands is described by general relativity. For the space between atoms to expand faster than the speed of light, you need a shitload of energy crammed together very densely, like a galaxy worth of stuff in every atom. This is called cosmic inflation, and it’s what happened during (and possibly before) the first part of the big bang.
We don’t know exactly how there can be this much energy in this little space, or where it all went, but we do know it was there because there are waves imprinted on the density of the universe.
This is actually the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. It was built by the Nazis in the 1930s.
Yeah I got nothin’ for that. Sorry Kamala. You can’t run because you’re a black woman. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ooh! That’s it, that’s the feeling. Right there. That’s what people who stayed home because of Gaza felt.
This moral red line where you just throw up your hands and let the democratic system vote itself out of existence if this is what they want you to sacrifice in name of electability. Try to hold on to that feeling and see if you can project it onto leftists and see if you can spark some empathy.
It’s interesting how you treat a factual explanation as a moral statement. The assertion that Harris lost because she’s a black woman does not mean a black woman should not run. Unless, of course, you care about electability more than about morality. Can you feel the cognitive dissonance grating in your mind?
Imagine doing useful work because there is work to be done. Now imagine having more people to do that useful work with so more work gets done.
Capitalism is fucking stupid.
Because the DNC ignored polling data on what policy stances would win the election?
Because they didn’t have a backup plan for if Biden became senile, and then tried to hide his senility for as long as possible so Harris was the only available candidate and the Harris campaign had very little time to get going?
Because they ran a black woman against a white man and the US is racist and sexist?
0·25 days agoIf you’re issuing challenges, then I have a challenge for you: How do you defeat the $5 wrench? I have given the answer, but can you comprehend it?
“the government”? Of what?? Every single country at the same time?)
Of the person reading this sentence, obviously. In my case EU lawmakers are making moves to restrict encryption which would make Bitcoin non-secure.
Finally, my challenge which still has not been met, is to explain how Bitcoin works and then why it will fail. Care to try to be the first?
Bitcoin is a currency divided among wallets as described in the blockchain. The blockchain is a ledger file synchronized across all users. Bitcoin can fail when synchonization is lost, such as in the scenario I described where ISPs only allow encryption if it is authorized by specific organisations. Bitcoin can be sabotaged by hacking the software you use to transfer it. And bitcoin can be useless when people ostracize you the moment you mention having it.
Explain why countries who experience hyperinflation see massive inflows into Bitcoin? What’s going on there in your mind? Mass psychosis?
Because in those cases bitcoin is more stable, being supported by the global bitcoin economy which in turn is supported by liberal capitalism. I intend to destroy the latter and boycott the former.
Relevant xkcd:
Though more practically at scale, the banks could lobby that every encrypted message on the internet has to be endorsed by a major corporation or else ISPs have to block it. Thus you can’t sync with the blockchain and you can’t sell your bitcoin for anything. It is yours but it is frozen.
Or, alternatively, the OS of the device you use to authorize bitcoin payments could have a backdoor so that next time you authorize a transaction, the device swaps the receiver to [insert megacorp] and the amount to everything in your wallet without telling you. Nobody is taking your bitcoin, you’re giving it to them.
And yes, as I said, the answer isn’t to put money in banks, but in supplies, barter goods, survival skills and social capital. Why sell bitcoin for a can of beans when you can have a can of beans? Why try to convince someone to accept bitcoin when you can give them clean bandaids or a drinking water filter?
Why pay someone bitcoin to fix the hole in your roof when you can help them set up solar panels? Why use bitcoin to hire someone to guard you from wrench attacks when you can have friends who will protect you for free?
All of this is breadcrumbing the way to anarchocommunism. Friendships and bonds of trust can not be stolen. Skills can not be expropriated. Hoards run dry but useful labor doesn’t.
You are free to buy more bitcoin. On my desk I have a Roman coin of someone who followed the same logic as you, 1700 years ago. It didn’t help them, but maybe you will have better luck.
So your answer to tech fascism, where computer parts get incredibly expensive and the free internet is replaced with applications with mandatory backdoors, is to put all your money into a digital currency that you may no longer be able to access? Imagine the government appropriating your life savings with a click of a button.
Why not hoard stuff people will actually want in a crisis, like shelf-stable food or medication?
In the US, the age of majority for drinking alcohol is 21, so it likely is.
Because of their effect, their media positioning, and their cost. These monuments are from the 20th century, when clean alternatives were more expensive and less efficient, so the defunding of nuclear directly fed into increased fossil fuel consumption. And thus into increased pollution, climate change, war, and airborne radioactive waste. Any activist could have seen this.
As for media positioning, it is always very clear whether corporate media support or oppose a cause. Climate activists are disruptive weirdos that get arrested while people whose lives they slightly inconvenienced are interviewed over shots of backed up traffic or a wide-angle shot of a handful of activists amidst a lot of context. Anti-nuclear activists are concerned citizens who get interviewed to low crowd shots that show even small groups as a throng, or lower-middle class moms and pops interviewed at home about their worries for their kids’ health, cut with ominous shots of drinkwater-safe water vapor coming from cooling towers.
As for cost, first there’s the monuments themselves. Grassroots activism tends to have lots of people with hodgepodge equipment, while astroturfing has fancy tools and either a handful of people to operate them or contractors. These monuments are massive projects built by contractors designed by handfuls of individuals. It fits the pattern.
Second, there’s all of the expensive storage. No capitalist government is going to waste millions of dollars listening to their people’s objectively excessive safety concerns, unless it directly benefits the rich people they have made corrupt deals with. Nuclear safety laws were designed to keep nuclear power more expensive than fossil fuels, because if the safety standards were reasonable then it would blow fossil fuels out of the water and threaten the justification for funding the military-industrial complex.
Even now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, if nuclear power safety standards were reduced merely to those of wind turbines and solar panels - where people regularly die from falling, electrical fires, electrocution, etc. - nuclear power would probably be cheaper than renewables.
These monuments are some of the most blatant fossil fuel propaganda to hit the mainstream.
Oh no, nuclear is so scary, we have to warn our possible descendants 100,000 years in the future even if all cultural continuity is lost because we care so much for the distant future. Climate change? Oh don’t worry, it’s just your grandchildren and everybody after them that will have to live through a mass extinction event, you have nothing to worry about.
Nuclear waste? Well, sure, you could keep it perfectly safe by putting it on a grate in a bathtub, but that would require maintenance once every decade or so, and that’s just not acceptable. Now by law you have to bury it in a geologically inactive region where it can be guaranteed to not leak in the slightest for the next million years without any human intervention. Leaded gasoline and car exhaust made half the population angry xenophobes and kills hundreds of thousands of people per year? Cost of doing business, I’m afraid.
This is the way. Voluntary support of artists rather than mandatory support of IP holders and gatekeepers.
If you don’t like getting TPKed because you’re out of position and you didn’t use knowledge skills to determine what “out of position” is, then you should not be using D&D’s combat system. It’s a waste of admin effort to have all those systems without being willing to use them.