Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.

Your splitting hairs. The OP complained that having your grade affected by the grades of your peers was wrong. Then you said, well it would be fine if they based the grades on the "top score" which is still having your grade determined by what (one of) your peers did.

If your 40% on the exam would be an A if the brightest kid got a 44% but would be a B+ if the brightest kid got a 48%, I doubt the OP would be any "happier" with that situation.

My daughter recently took a course where the average final exam score was around 30%. Nobody hit 50%. Nobody completed the test. They were graded on the curve, as everyone expected they would be, and the A's, B's and C's were distributed pretty appropriately in the end.

In your world, apparently this was simply the dumbest cohort of 4th year university students ever to walk the halls, and they all deserved an F ??

Or maybe, just maybe, it was a brutally difficult exam.

Grading on the curve works perfectly fine if you realize that the student cohorts tend to be more consistent than the tests are from professor to professor, year to year.

The only way "your way" makes any sense at all at approaching fairness is if the tests are standardized... but that creates a whole whack of new problems. -- If the test is standardized, then students are incentivized to just study the test, not the material. Meanwhile, In many advanced degree courses, the material taught from semester to semester varies by professor and year for the same course. How do you standardize the test when even the material is variable?

Unsurprisingly the teaching staff at Harvard know a lot more about this than you do.

High level undergrad course work, and graduate level course work isn't like a primary school arithmetic or spelling test.

The program is still deterministic - the output is determined *entirely* and deterministically by the input. (Where the input is the set of the prompt, the sequence of numbers returned by the calls for random(), and the LLM data model itself.)

Your "mistake", if we want to call it that, is treating the random() function as an innate quality of the LLM. It isn't it is simply part of the input.

Provide the the system with the same model, the same prompt, and the same sequence of numbers, and you WILL get the same answer, regardless of how complex the question is, or who asks it.

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?

The difference, of course, is that we currently DO actually know EXACTLY how an LLM works. We can snapshot the model and seed the random number generator to make it generate exactly the same output from exactly the same input every single time. We can pause it, set breakpoints, inspect and dump data structures.

It IS simply a program running on a CPU, and using RAM.

Is it possible that's all humans are in the end? Sure its possible, I can't prove otherwise. But we are not remotely in a position to assert that its the case.

You invoke philosophy which is entirely appropriate. There are fairy tales for example of artists painting things so realistic that they come to life. And it poses an interesting question here: is there is a difference between a simulation and a real thing? Can a simulation of life, be "alive"? Or must it forever remain a simulation.

And a related, and perhaps ultimately simpler question is can a *turing machine simulation of life* be "alive".

A lovely illustration of the question:
https://xkcd.com/505/

Can what you and I perceive as our lives, the universe around us, and everything REALLY be underpinned by some guy in a desert pushing pebbles around in a big desert somewhere?

Can the arrangement of stones in a desert, and some guy updating moving them aorund, in some pattern he interprets as representing the information that describes our universe actually "BE" our universe?

Is is the pattern of rocks is JUST a pattern of rocks. Is the guy moving them around JUST moving them around. Is the interpretation of the pattern as a representation of the state of a universe, just that, a representation?

Or you truly think there is a galaxy with a planet with people on it having a conversation on slashdot,'frozen in time' waiting for some guy to move the rocks into the next pattern and that somehow results in the experience we are sharing right now?

Or put more succinctly - can an abstract representation of a thing be the thing? be it bits in a DRAM module memory or pebbles arranged in the sand? can it be the thing it represents? Can the painting of a zebra if its done skilfully enough be a zebra?

The parent poster acknowledges this, they are saying the randomization is *introduced artificially*.

The same as any dice rolling app. All you have to do is seed the pseudorandom number generator the same for each run, and it will roll the same dice, in the same order, every time.

Likewise, if it wants to spit out the next word/phrase and 2 of them have 33% probability, and two have 17% ...

Then if you seed the random number generator with the same seed for every instance / run, you'll get the same output from the same input on the same model.

The system is entirely determininistic. The same as any other software, from the ghosts in pacman to the bots in quake arena, to a chess engine. We introduce "randomness" to make it more enjoyable, but its pseudorandomness, that we artificially insert. We could just as easily seed the random number generator the same way every time, and then it would do the exact same thing every time. None of these are actually thinking and making decisions.

Its a mere 200 pages, and its the inspriration for "Blade Runner". Yeah, its worth reading.

Reading Philip K Dick for the prose itself is pretty much missing the point. The themes, ideas, and questions it poses are generally worth the effort.

The movie adaptations are hit and miss. Blade Runner I think was well done (not just as a movie on its own, but as an adaptation of the book)

The Minority Report movie adaptation on the other hand shits the bed so hard its painful to watch.

Assuming the small business is local, it generally also circulates money through the local economy instead of siphoning it all away, which provides jobs in your local community, and ensures a healthier local tax base from businesses. The increased foot traffic tends to bring halo benefits to nearby eateries and so forth. It results in more and better job prospects for your kids than "amazon delivery driver" too.

These all combine to make the community you live in more economically vibrant, with things to do and places to go. Instead of a desolate suburban hellscape.

Its more a philisophical point than a direct benefit to you that can be measured in the $1 more something cost you, but its real.

"Of course audiobooks also have their downsides."

It's rapidly approaching trivial to have the audiobook created by an llm narrator. Whether it will be worth listening to such a book is a separate question.

On the one hand it makes a lot more books accessible for the blind, which is a godsend... even a bad narration by an ai is potentially much better than simply not being able to consume the book.

But on the other, its going to make finding a good audiobook read by a narrator worth actually listening to much much harder for those who are listening to audiobooks for the value-add that good narration brings.

If only there was some way to get at this sort of information, some article containing it.

You might be misremembering why Netscape became irrelevant. Microsoft using their operating system monopoly to release an inferior but free browser was one element. Companies then making webpages work for IE, which didn't follow web standards was another. Netscape throwing out their perfectly good source code and starting from scratch was another. Netscape losing their revenue stream was another, since Microsoft could subsidize IE costs with Windows. Yes, money was a factor, but it wasn't the sole factor, and possibly not the most important.

Nah, Mozilla has been naming things after things that already exist for years.

Remember Mozilla Phoenix? Mozilla Firebird?

https://www.mozillazine.org/fi...

I have tried it. It's not really a solution for me.
- good for watching local content

but

- netflix support is a kludge at best, unofficial and no 4k (is the plugin a web browser wrapper?)
- other streamers are in the same boat
- no F1TV support at all

I don't blame kodi, its the streaming services that are the root problem here. But I can't make them support open platforms and I understand why they don't.

The upshot is that picking up a dedicated streaming box seems to be the best solution to get official support from the streaming services. The boxes tend to generally work well with kodi/plex/jellyfin etc to give you a way to play your local content alongside the streamers own apps in a small remote-control friendly manner.

I like the roku and the shield pro -- although both have been adding ads to their home screens. I'll probably pickup an appleTV box next since its still pretty clean. Its bad enough the streaming services themselves are devolving into ad-ridden crap, but as long as the ads are limited to the app itself, and i can delete the app and cancel the service if it goes to far. So far netflix generally just pushes its own content which is fine, and F1 is ad-free unless you count all of f1 as just being a giant sponsor circus.