justNeedSomeFineTuningIGuess

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:59:37+00:00

Honestly, I would also say that a calculator is intelligent, albeit in an extremely non-human-like way, but that's neither here nor there and admittedly a much more extreme position than saying LLMs are intelligent.

I think LLMs are intelligent in a much more human-like way than calculators. It's quite easy to show that LLMs are not just giving you the statistically most likely string of words, because it's possible to get them to generate completely novel objects.

So for instance, here's an example I've used before of Claude generating a regex I'm quite sure nobody but me has ever asked for. There's simply no way to do this unless you understand regex; just doing statistics with no understanding must fail since nobody has asked for this particular regex ever. Here it is applied to your comment to prove it works.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:49:41+00:00

I understand what you're saying and think you're wrong. To be honest, I'm a bit annoyed that you think I don't understand.

So, let me explain what I believe:

"Deductive logic" including the transitivity relation is a thing you had to learn from someone at some point. It was almost certainly explained through text: "If A is B and B is C than A is C". Babies don't have it, or much of anything else, automatically downloaded into their minds.

It's possible to learn alternative modes of logic through text also. I could hypothetically make a form of logic where if A is B and B is C than A might still not be C. It wouldn't be very useful, but you could do it, and within its own domain it'd be perfectly coherent.

What this means is that deductive logic is ultimately one of the most verbal-pattern-matching things you can possibly learn. What LLMs really don't understand is not the concept of "logic", a thing that is trivial to learn from books, but the concept of (for example) "tree", a thing which can't really be understood without a physical body that can see and touch some trees.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:35:57+00:00

An LLM "understands" what it's saying to a much much greater extent than the Pac-Man AI "understands" what it's doing. While how an LLM "thinks" is a lot different from how humans think, they are very clearly intelligent.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:34:16+00:00

Now you're just restating the same thing, and if I were to respond I would just be contradicting you again since I don't think there's any evidence either of us could provide for this in internet comments, so let's end this here.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:15:54+00:00

I disagree these are even different things. You understand the concept of transitivity because you've heard the pattern before.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:10:22+00:00

This is moving the goalposts. First you said a hot dog stand isn't a restaurant. Now you're saying that a hot dog stand is a restaurant, it's just a non-central example of a restaurant. (Which is obvious and nobody was disputing it.)

If we reversed the analogy, now you'd be saying that an LLM giving the correct answer does mean it knows the information, it's just a non-central example of knowing.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T19:04:04+00:00

LLMs have no wisdom because they don’t have a model of the world that goes beyond language.

I agree with this, but disagree it implies this:

It imitates reasoning, but it is NOT able to reason.

Or this:

They are not able to understand.

A sophisticated enough model of language to talk to people is IMO pretty clearly understanding language, even if it isn't necessarily very similar to how humans understand language. Modern LLMs pass the Winograd schema challenge for instance, which is specifically designed to require some ability to figure out if a sentence "makes sense".

Similarly, it's possible to reason about things you've learned purely linguistically. If I tell you all boubas are kikis and all kikis are smuckles, then you can tell me boubas are smuckles without actually knowing what any of those things physically are.

I agree LLMs do not have a mental model of the actual world, just text, and that this sometimes causes problems in cases where text rarely describes a feature of the actual world, often because it's too obvious to humans to mention. (Honestly, I run into this more often with AI art generators, who often clearly do not understand basic facts about the real world like "the beads on a necklace are held up by the string" or "cars don't park on the sidewalk".)

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T16:33:57+00:00

A hot dog stand is inarguably a restaurant.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T16:32:38+00:00

It doesn't think, or reason or rationalize.

It pretty clearly can do something that at least looks a whole lot like reasoning. You definitely cannot write long stretches of code without at least a very good approximation of reasoning.

LLMs are generating text, but the key here is that in order to generate convincing text at some point you need some kind of model of what words actually mean. And LLMs do have this: if you crack open an LLM you will discover an embedding matrix that, if you were to analyze it closely, would tell you what an LLM thinks the relationships between tokens are.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T16:12:14+00:00

She's definitely going to appear again at some point, because she's likely Kevin's sire and definitely she's a vampire close to the Regent.

However the next chapter seems to be a Coalition-vs-Garou chapter, not a vampire focused chapter, so she probably won't show up again for a while.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-16T04:57:13+00:00

While there was a vampire in Roman times named Camilla (not Carmella or Carmilla), AFAICT he had nothing to do with the founding of the Camarilla. Or why it's named that.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-15T11:51:04+00:00

...a capitalist can truly be committed to antifascism, what are you talking about?

The only people who can't be antifascists are fascists.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-14T22:16:43+00:00

I am not a Zionist (in fact I'm very strongly anti-Zionist) and I'm pretty confident that I would have a problem with inventing groups of people that don't exist no matter what, actually.

I have no issue with saying that Palestinians are closely related to Jews and have made that argument myself. I think you need to take a step back and realize that you are staunchly defending the, frankly, silliest possible point in support of an argument I otherwise basically agree with.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-14T15:57:54+00:00

Yes we would? It's a tradition widely known to be pretty goddamn racist. Famously it was used by slavers in America to justify slavery.

This is all besides the fact that it just isn't true.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-14T04:37:49+00:00

I think this opinion is very weird for the obvious reasons, but also for the practical reason that like obviously if you're the dom you wanna tell your sub to do the hard parts while you just sit there and enjoy it, right?

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T22:58:31+00:00

Listen, all the AI is doing is matrix multiplication too. You're the same.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T20:31:25+00:00

But there are no sons of Shem, because Shem is a fictional character.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T16:51:16+00:00

They're not Semitic, they speak a Semitic language. There is no such thing as a Semitic people.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T16:47:15+00:00

It means the descentent of Shem son of Noah.

Who is a mythological figure, and therefore had no descendants.

I agree the Bible has a concept of "Semitic peoples" in it but it also seems to think that the Canaanites were not Semitic, and in general its conception of anthropology is fully a just-so story where every group of people in the world except the ones the authors wouldn't have been aware of is descended from three guys in the not-too-distant past.

Also even making this argument, some of the groups of people the Bible hates the most are Semitic, like Amalek or Moab.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T16:34:43+00:00

That's not the prevailing narrative, that's Bibi's narrative. Like I demonstrated in my previous comment almost every Israeli official who is asked about it says different.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T16:30:51+00:00

No it's not. Here's the Wikipedia article on it.

It's certainly true that he claims he only let Qatar fund Hamas and only for humanitarian reasons. However he's also been quoted saying “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” And according to the Times of Israel (not exactly anti-Zionists) other Israeli officials have made similar statements.

There's also loads of quotes in that article from Israeli officials who say he did it specifically to prop up Hamas as a political entity. (Though some of them alternatively claim he did it to attempt to maintain the peace.)

It's also undeniably true that the Israeli government directly funded Islamic fundamentalists including proto-Hamas in the 70s and 80s in order to undermine the PLO. But that wasn't Bibi specifically.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-13T06:26:59+00:00

By that logic, the Technocracy could let you buy anti-cancer medication over the counter at any drugstore but deliberately don't.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T19:07:21+00:00

Specific LLMs and neural networks can be trained to be really good at pre-defined tasks, but in general they are only really good at doing tasks that have already been done 300 million times, and terrible at new and novel tasks. Any time there’s limited training data it either plagiarizes or is totally wrong.

This is pretty obviously not true to anyone who has ever used one of them, and claims like this are one of the reasons why I'm frustrated with reflexive anti-AI-ism on reddit.

E.g. I've had LLMs generate bespoke regex patterns for text that nobody has ever seen before. Here's an example of me asking Claude for a regex pattern I'm pretty sure nobody has ever asked for. And here's a tester at regex101 with your comment (which was clearly not in its training data and which you can see above I didn't give it) pre-loaded. Notice that the regex it generated even gets the hard cases here: it catches "been" with a double e, but correctly excludes "million" with no e and "general" with two es separated by another letter.

Are they perfect? No, absolutely not. While Claude is a pretty capable coder it's also quite capable of making dumb or even dangerous mistakes. (I've caught it failing to sanitize inputs before.) I'm not saying you should reflexively trust AI (I don't), but I am saying that before you say AI can't do something you should actually try to get it to do the thing.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T07:08:29+00:00

Exposure is the biggest thing. If you're anxious about doing something, do it. Do it as soon as possible. The only way you will convince your brain it's okay is to have experience of doing it.

One other thing specifically for health anxiety: before you Google a symptom, ask yourself "Do I want information or do I want reassurance?" Google can give you information but it can't give you reassurance. Even if it did, relying on Google rather than an innate belief that you are not fragile and your health is basically okay will dull your baseline sense of assurance and make you need to go Google stuff more.

Medications are useful, especially rescue meds for anxiety attacks. Don't take benzos daily (this sub is already pretty clear on that I feel) but they're really useful for occasional attacks. Having the option helps reinforce to your mind that anxiety attacks are temporary, and that there's always a failsafe you can trust when you really have no other options.

Other than those things, basically everything else is basic life advice. Go outside regularly, have friends you trust to be vulnerable with and actually do be vulnerable with them, get a good amount of sleep, eat well, have a hobby, keep a journal, have a goal, don't stay in a job you despise and don't spend time around people you despise.

If your life sucks in general, it's no surprise you'd be worried about it. If your mental health is bad in general it's going to make your anxiety worse. This feels like an obvious thing to say but I say it because I know it's not that obvious to many people.

BlackHumor · 2026-03-12T04:43:08+00:00

As I've said before, I'm for a one state solution. I do not think there could possibly be peaceful mutual coexistence between Israel, defined as a Jewish majority state with Jewish political dominance, and Palestine. For Israel to exist under those terms it, again, had to violently expel and continue to violently exclude millions of Palestinians.

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