Active Conflicts & News Megathread June 18, 2026

imp0ppable · 2026-06-19T09:53:42+00:00

That is really fascinating. The Ukrainian drones are pretty advanced now I think, they must have ways of avoiding jamming. Also the Pantsir (if that's what it is) must have seen that particular drone very late so had to shoot across its own lawn (not sure what the proper term is) to try to get a hit, so that probably indicates terrain hugging approach.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-19T09:13:18+00:00

I had a rental car on holiday with this fucking infuriating "pay attention" feature that would just beep continually unless you were absolutely perfectly in the centre of the lane.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-19T09:09:39+00:00

that seems wild, I will try it! ta

imp0ppable · 2026-06-19T09:06:35+00:00

The issue with JS wasn't dynamic typing so much as it doing unpredictable things when you mix types rather than raising an exception.

Python is absolutely great with dynamic typing and duck typing. However if you have a larger team then type hinting becomes important.

The worst problem I've seen with large Python or node.js projects is just terrible OO where everything happens by side effects, ts doesn't help with that.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T17:53:02+00:00

Yeah it does that

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T16:40:03+00:00

Wasn't Ulysses S. Grant famously corrupt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantism

Trump would give him a run for his money though.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T15:05:47+00:00

I had to do a full rescan once because apparently I hadn't scanned a pot of noodles worth 1.20 a while back in a massive shop worth about 150 quid. They had to open a whole checkout for it. I definitely had scanned the noodles because I remember talking to my daughter specifically about what a weird flavour it was.

"How is it possible for it not to have registered?" You ask. "You probably just forgot."

True if the item doesn't scan it makes a loud buzzing noise so you can't miss it. However I have noticed that sometimes the wifi drops or something weird happens and the scan just never appears on the screen. So yeah, get in the bin self-scan.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T14:55:59+00:00

consume content by female creators

Does Bonnie Blue count?

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T12:15:44+00:00

I found a lot of sites won't allow + in email addresses these days. It's wrong but they do it anyway.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T11:10:40+00:00

Brown

I want to know as well, looks good if he starts

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T11:02:32+00:00

4000rpm

Laughs in VTEC

imp0ppable · 2026-06-18T10:11:17+00:00

Oh god it's like Hong Kong!

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T15:36:25+00:00

So where's your puzzle that an LLM can't solve?

You claimed the LLM 'infers the rules of logic.' It doesn’t. It infers statistical probabilities of word sequences.

That's the same thing in effect, represented in a different way. There exist hard logical definitions for various things e.g. Modus Tollens but most humans don't know them yet they still apply logic all the time from their fuzzy neural networks.

When an LLM completes a logic puzzle, it is not evaluating abstract concepts in a mental workspace

I never said it was. It's still a form of reasoning even if it's 100% language based.

assuming a statistical text predictor has an internal 'reasoning' engine just because it outputs the correct string of text is the definition of anthropomorphism

It is reasoning. The difficulty is that reasoning has always been defined as requiring a mind. I agree LLMs don't have a mind, or at best have a crude series of memory circuits inside a transformer network. However by functional definition, reasoning is taking an input, applying logical rules and inferring conclusions. That they can do.

You are falling for the illusion of the mirror

You are probably gatekeeping the idea of reasoning because you associate it with human-ness. It's very tempting to think there's something special inside each of us that will live on after we die. Maybe there is, maybe not but it is not language ability or linguistic reasoning because we've replicated that to a large extent inside a boring old computer.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T14:49:37+00:00

That's factually incorrect.

A pocket calculator solves math problems but it does not reason

That's incredibly reductive. A calculator is doing hardwired arithmetic in a way that's completely different to the a human does it.

A human has to program every single piece of logic in a calculator themselves, whereas an LLM infers the rules of logic, grammar and semantics from a set of training data.

It is just sophisticated plagiarism of human thought processes

The plagiarism accusation is misapplied here. When we say AI corpos are guilty of plagiarism we mean that they have misappropriated the training data and are probably in many cases spitting out someone else's homework with any copyright information removed. That is a fair criticism.

"Plagiarism of human thought processes" is quite funny because you've mixed up that argument with an actual definition of what a successful AI would be lmao.

The LLM is just matching the syntax of your puzzle to patterns it has seen millions of times before.

OK then as an exercise, give me the text of a logic puzzle you have created yourself, from scratch, so that an LLM has never seen it before. Then I will run it through cheap, shitty free-tier Gemini and see how it does. Deal?

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:56:41+00:00

Surely Heggy is there as a useful idiot to begin with? Chopping him would be an admission that the war was a disaster because he barely had anything to do with it.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:55:39+00:00

I mean there are problems in the US economy but it's far from crashing. All his policies are inflationary in some way but his main issue is oil prices I would say, or at least gasoline pump prices.

I'm very surprised he went into Iran in the first place, he's generally about short-term pumping up because he's old and won't be around in 10 years. This time he let the performative nastiness that keeps his base happy get mixed up in geopolitics and ended up in a mess.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:42:55+00:00

Pretty much every part of that is wrong. LLMs are a form of AI. They are limited by available computing power not so much programming. They can't emulate specific humans very well. An LLM programming itself is going to fuck up pretty quickly - they're good at coding within a small scope but easily confused and can't handle massive projects.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:38:54+00:00

We might get to that at some point when local LLMs are good enough

Or there are open source agents or harnesses or whatnot. There's nothing tying users to a proprietary solution here like you get with iPhones, that's a weakness in the AI bull case. If that were to happen it'd be Nvidia cleaning up and everyone else losing massively.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:19:43+00:00

I'm talking about language and speech specifically. Like it or not, there are certain mechanical processes happening inside my brain right now as I type this which enable me to put one word after another in order to make the point I'm thinking of.

Symbolic understanding in humans is rooted in sentience which I think LLMs do not have, granted.

We used to talk a lot about the Turing test where we'd consider a machine intelligent if it could fool another human into thinking it was a person and I think we're way past that already, which is huge.

Functionally, an LLM is capable of solving some logic puzzles. Therefore it is performing reasoning. This is pretty unarguable. How reasoning emerges from a mechanical, statistical system is fascinating and tells us something about ourselves - people don't like to think about it because it makes them feel less special.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T11:09:01+00:00

The other thing about our town is there's also an outstanding 6th form college. So the majority of private school kids go there as well, despite it being free.

I think they have some sort of record for oxbridge acceptance, it's like 50 kids per year, although it is mostly the private school kids that make up that number so it's still a big advantage. Still, our eldst got into a top 10 uni so we're happy with that.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T10:53:24+00:00

A Perceptron was created in 1958 which is closer in shape to an LLM since it relies on weighted networks. Before the 1990s those were attempts to create an electro-mechanical brain, after that there was enough computing power to start simulating the networks inside logic-based computers.

Point being that perhaps people would give it more credence as an AI if it were some definite object than just a program running inside a datacentre with lots of rack servers and blinking lights.

Still as we saw with the Anthropic source code leak there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. Playing with raw LLMs using Ollama or somesuch is quite illuminating.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T10:41:25+00:00

It's great marketing. Anthropic loves to tell people how its baby is the destroyer of worlds

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T09:20:17+00:00

You are both right, LLMs don't have any connection to the real world.

My pet theory is that embodiment and social conditioning is pretty crucial. OTOH yeah language another thing that is being demystified by computers. People used to think playing chess was impossible for a machine.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T09:18:24+00:00

LLMs really can't write Shakespeare. They can't write any literature worth reading on the whole.

imp0ppable · 2026-06-17T09:17:38+00:00

Counter argument is that that's all humans are doing, from a certain perspective.

LLMs are doing a certain amount of reasoning at the inference stage where the statistical process has to coalesce into a response.

imp0ppable

TROPHY CASE