Lolol modded down by someone who knows nothing as usual.

"AI" is not thinking. It chews up data and shits out data. If the shit is valid it's only a coincidence.

He comes up with the most mind-bogglingly stupid ideas based on how twisted his conception of reality has gotten. Basically, in his reality, news articles are probable lies, but people who get lots of likes on Twitter are probable truths.

Nobody knows how to do that, at least not for a model of useful size. It would have to be reasoning in order to explain, but they aren't doing that.

Good to see we're abandoning the premise that the logic behind LLMs is "simple".

LLMs, these immensely complex models, function basically as the most insane flow chart you could imagine. Billions of nodes and interconnections between them. Nodes not receiving just yes-or-no inputs, but any degree of nuance. Outputs likewise not being yes-or-no, but any degree of nuance as well. And many questions superimposed atop each node simultaneously, with the differences between different questions teased out at later nodes. All self-assembled to contain a model of how the universe and the things within it interact.

At least, that's for the FFNs - the attention blocks add in yet another level of complexity, allowing the model to query a latent-space memory, which each FFN block then outputs transformed for the next layer. The latent space memory being.... all concepts in the universe that exist, and any that could theoretically exist between any number of existing concepts. These are located in an N-dimensional space, where N is hundreds to thousands. The degree of relationship between concepts can be measured by their cosine similarity. So for *each token* at *each layer*, a conceptual representation of somewhere in the space of everything that does or could exist is taken, and based on all the other things-that-does-or-could exists and their relative relations to each other, are transformed by the above insane-flow-chart FFN into the next positional state.

Words don't exist in a vacuum. Words are a reflection of the universe that led to their creation. To get good at predicting words, you have to have a good model of the underlying world and all the complexity of the interactions therein. It took achieving the Transformers architecture, with the combination of FFNs and an attention mechanism, along with mind-bogglingly huge scales of interactions (the exponential interaction of billions of parameters), to do this - to develop this compressed representation of "how everything in the known universe interacts".

The systems do in fact allow you to choose less than 3 seconds' following distance. People are literally complaining that the system won't let them drive unsafely.

The faster you go, the more space you need between cars to maintain safe following distance. If I have a safe following distance between me and the car ahead, if someone merges into that space then I no longer have safe following distance, so now we need even more space. At commute times there is not enough road available for all the cars to have safe following distance at speed. This is what happens on any overutilized road. If you wait for that much distance to appear then traffic backs up at the point of entry.

What is "a few" about 316 billion parameters, let alone before you exponentiate their interactions?

What is "simple" about the extremely complex interactions of 316 billion parameters?

Honestly I question how much of the training was actually done with Twitter data.

It certainly was a source, but I seriously doubt it was the only data or even majority of the data.

Either way, doesn't really matter with RAG. RAG doesn't have to "know" much, just how to summarize things others have written.

Interesting. Honda has gone back to radar now.

"Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data." That's just RAG. Retrieval Augmented Generation. All Grok is doing is acting as a summarizer. This is something you can do with an ultra-lightweight model, you don't need a 314B param monster.

Also, you don't need an X Premium subscription to "get access" to Grok, since its weights are public. To "get access" to an instance running it, maybe.

I've not tried running it, but from others who have, the general consensus seems to be: it's undertrained. It has way more parameters than it should need relative to its capabilities. Kinda reminiscent of, say, Falcon.

I also have an issue with "A snarky and rebellious" LLM. Except people using them for roleplaying scenarios (where you generally don't want a *fixed* personality), people generally don't want it inserting some sort of personality into their responses. As a general rule, people have a task they want the tool to do, and they just want the tool to do it. This notion that tools should have "personalities" is what led to Clippy.

So ancient societies without slaves didn't and couldn't exist? Say, the Incas? The Harappan civilization? None at all? *eyeroll*

Incan society is IMHO really interesting. It's sort of "What if the Soviet Union had existed in the feudal era", this sort of imperial amalgam of communism and feudalism. There was still a heirarchy of feudal lords and resources tended to flow up the chain, but it was also highly structured as a welfare state. People would be allocated plots of land in their area of specific size relative to their fertility, along with the animals and tools to work it, including with respect to the family status (for example a couple who married and had more children would be given more land and pack animals). Even housing was a communal project. The state would also feed you during crop failures and the like In turn however all of your surpluses had to go to the state (and they had a system to prevent hoarding), and everyone owned a certain amount of days of labour to the state (mit'a), with the type of work based of their skills. It was very much a case of "each according to his ability, each according to his needs" - at least for commoners.

The Incans saw their conquest as bringing civilization and security to the people under their control, as a sort of "workers paradise" of their era. Not that local peoples wanted to be subdued by them, far from it, but the fact that instead of dying trying to resist an unwinnable war, they could accept consequences of a loss that weren't apocalyptic to them, certainly helped the Incan expansion. They also employed the very Russian / Soviet style policy of forced relocations and relocation of Incan settlers into newly conquered territories to import their culture and language to the new areas while diluting that of those conquered within the empire.

The closest category one might try to ascribe to "slaves" is the yanacona, aka those separated from their family groups. During times of high military conquest most were captured from invading areas, while during peacetime most came from the provinces as part of villages's service obligations to the state, or worked as yanacona to pay off debts or fines. These were people that did not continue to live in and farm their own villages, but rather worked at communes or on noble estates. But there really doesn't seem to be much relation beyond that and slavery. Yanacona could have high social status, even in some cases being basically lords themselves (generally those who were of noble descent) with significant power, though most were commoners. But life as a yanacona is probably best described on most cases as "people living on a commune". There was no public degradation for being a yanacona, no special marks of status, they couldn't be randomly abused or killed, there were no special punishments reserved for them, they had families just like everyone else, etc. Pretty much just workers assigned to a commune.

It makes it feasible to punish the biggest offenders, who are engaging in the bulk of the crime. Whether it actually happens is another question, but at least it does sometime.

First off, it's simply not true that ancient wars had only two options, "genocide or slavery". Far more wars were ended with treaties, with the loser having to give up lands, possessions, pay tribute, or the like. Slaves were not some sort of inconvenience, "Oh, gee, I guess we have to do this". They were part of the war booty, incredibly valuable "possessions" to be claimed. Many times wars were launched with the specific purpose of capturing slaves.

Snyder argues that the fear of enslavement, such an ubiquitous part of the ancient era, was so profound as to be core to the creation of the state itself. An early state being an entity to which you give up some control of your life in order to gain the protection against outsiders taking more extreme control over your life. For example, a key aspect to the spread of Christianity in Europe was that Christians were forbidden to take other Christians as slaves, but they could still take pagans as slaves. States commonly converted to Christianity, not by firm belief of their leaders, but to stop being the victim of - and instead often be the perpetrator of - slave raids.

First slaving focused on the east, primarily pagan Slavic peoples. With the conversion of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, some slaving continued even further east into Asia, but a lot of it spread to the south - first into the Middle East and North Africa, but ultimately (first though intermediaries, and later, directly) into Central Africa. Soon in many countries "slaves" became synonymous with "Africans". Yet let's not forget where the very word "slave" itself comes from: the word "Slav".

Italy and Japan have shrinking populations. We would too, if it weren't for immigration. However our population growth rate is still low, and if it were any lower we'd be facing serious economic and social challenges. Sure, a shrinking population would drop housing prices, but we are far from having so many people there isn't space to fit them. Our real problem is seventy years of public policy aimed at the elimination of "slums" and the prevention of their reemergence.

If you think about it, "slum" is just a derogatory word for a neighborhood with a high concentration of very affordable housing. Basically policy has by design eliminated the most affordable tier of housing, which eliminates downward price pressure on higher tiers of housing. Today in my city a median studio apartment cost $2800; by the old 1/5 of income rule that means you'd need an income of $168k. Of course the rule now is 30% of income, so to afford a studio apartment you need "only" 112k of income. So essentially there is no affordable housing at all in the city, even for young middle class workers. There is, however a glut of *luxury* housing.

In a way, this is what we set out to accomplish: a city where the only concentrations of people allowed are wealthy people. We didn't really think it through; we acted as if poor to middle income people would just disappear. In reality two things happened. First they got pushed further and further into the suburbs, sparking backlash by residents concerned with property values. And a lot of people, even middle-class young people, end up in illegal off-the-book apartments in spaces like old warehouses and industrial spaces.

They also destroy it, but they should be printing more of it (and not destroying the same amount) when GDP expands.