Mostly concurrence, though "ignorance of the joke is no defense" is the obvious joke in response.

My joke was supposed to something about people being incapable of moral neutrality.

So how about a joke about the General Principle of Relatively Funny Stuff? But what is the elementary particle of humor? The old bozon joke?

Anyone get the joke?

I don't find your defense of technology persuasive. Didn't help that you propagated a vacuous sock puppet Subject with no relationship to your substantive thought. Did you even think about it? Defaults are dangerous.

This reply is on the premise that you are nice guy with good morals. Is there any reason why anyone should be worried about what you are going to do with technology? I hope not, though sometimes good intentions lead to a famously bad road.

Now about that thar' Pope fellow. That's long enough to be book, but I'm skeptical that it would be worth my time to read it. Now if he was a Jesuit, then I might hope for him to say something scientifically interesting, but as things stand...

Disclaimer needed: I, too, am using generative AI. Sometimes experimentally and deliberately and sometimes because it's in the way and cannot be avoided. Rarely for an application, though right now I'm doing a database front end using Claude. Much improved over previous probes along such lines, but I still can't tell if it's mentally harmful to me.

Quoted in response to moderation censorship. Convenient that no substantive response is called for?

And no, I don't really care what offended the "angry" sock puppets. It's sufficient to know that the trolls have no response save feeble censorship. (But there are a number of prominent websites where the feedback/moderation problems were worse. Have to use past tense because I only rarely and erratically check back to see if they improved or fixed anything. I can't think of any examples where I've noticed improvements over time... (The usual pattern is for a new website to appear with some good ideas, and then it fades away. Sometimes slowly, sometimes with an impressive implosion, sometimes into some sort of commercialization swamp.))

No jokes here. Already a large discussion, but nothing Funny.

Don't look at me. I can't help. Just finished some books about Facebook and only reinforced my theory about greedy fools winning. Not because their ideas are better or even good, but just because they are motivated by dreams of money to work much harder than other folks, even when the other folks actually have the good ideas that might make the world better.

Nothing in the discussion about Facebook, though I have heard reports that internal morale is terrible there. Does mesh with my tentative conclusions from those Facebook-centric books I recently finished. One conclusion is that the idea of connecting the world was bogus from the git-go. The REAL motivation was "domination" and Zuck used to be much more up front about that. The line about "connecting the world" was always limited to marketing hoopla, but the reality of following the money actually led in the opposite direction and Facebook has become the world's best tool for dividing and conquering people by dividing them into as many tiny clans as possible. Natural result of wanting to get as much money as possible from as many advertisers as possible, where each advertiser dreams of targeting AKA conquering the "perfect customers" AKA suckers for whatever they are selling. That's the second conclusion, leading to: For the morality-free investor, snake oil and cryptocurrency are probably the hottest investments now...

So on to the book about TikTok. The "boom" in the title may be giving away the plot?

AI video technology is still nowhere even remotely near just "click a button and take what it spits out". I don't know how to break this to anyone here, but you're not just going to go to some video generation site and turn out Woodnuts without extensive skill about AI video tools themselves and a wide range of traditional video production tools, and without spending weeks to months and significant financial expense on the project.

Even if / when this changes, video production is still always going to be limited by the human at hand. Most people's movie ideas, plotting, scripting, directing, etc frankly will be terrible. The slop in this case is the human, not the tool.

I can't figure out which way your joke is pointing? Who is aligned with which cult leader? Pretty sure it has something to do with climate change, that famous Chinese hoax. (Or maybe I'm just confused by the book about Chinese Buddhism?)

But I can force fit a thought of the day onto the topic. The YOB's strings are being pulled to oppose change, especially towards the wind power he hates so viscerally. I'm not saying I want him dead, but dropping dead might be the least harmful thing he could do now considering the size of the hole and the available options (in his legendary mind)? (It's not like the veep is the anti-christ. More like the anti-charisma. (Then again, the veep is a close friend of all the top suspects for anti-christ, so...(Except for Xi?)))

My favorite conspiracy theory is that he's getting too sick to carry on much longer, so many of the distractions are to draw attention away from the increasingly visible signs of his sickness. Fundamental problem there because the YOB loves attention, but I'm sure that some of the puppeteers pulling his strings understand how bad he looks more and more often.

Much as I like Funny, I'm not seeing any place for it around this story. Unless some of the UFO videos are funny? Or maybe a link to an Onion video about UFOs?

'Nuff said.

'Nuff said?

On the upside, AI lets anyone make a movie.
On the downside, AI lets anyone make a movie.

Including people who have terrible taste in plot, style, and everything else.

There's some genuinely good stuff out there - Gossip Goblin's work for example. But this is....

I'll just say, there's far better things that one could have spent half a million dollars on...

About 1/3 of the discussion spanned by that vacuous Subject that you were the first to propagate. However from your comment it isn't clear to me what Subject might have accurately represented your intention. Also unthanks for nudging me to look at AC in search of a contextual hint as to your intention. (No, I could not care less about AC's intention or existence.)

My concern is with the potential for abuse by the police. The usual edge case involves a bad apple in blue, but the law as described in the summary here seems badly considered. But perhaps it's the best we can expect from such a Congress and legal system as those which America's have devolved down to?

(There should be a funnier way to end with that proposition.)

Mod parent funny though the joke I was looking for was about hot leads for wannabe bridge salesmen.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Nobody buys slightly used bridges in these Internet-dog years, even if the bridges were only used by little old ladies to go to church on Sundays. These days the best-selling snake oil is crypto currency, and I'm quite sure the crypto-scammers already had all those names and the their PII. It's not that the crypto-scammer-in-chief wouldn't prefer to keep the secret, but just that "all the best people" he hired can't be bothered. Or something like that.

So would like you to buy a barely used NFT? I'm sure they'll come back into fashion RSN! Or you can print a copy on a sticker to cover up the 11-stripe flag on the cheap phone. (You'd think the YOB could have splurged on a phone case printer with high enough resolution for the lucky 13 stripes.)

How are you defining "statistical inferences" as distinct from "logical inferences"? If you're defining fuzzy logic (e.g. not necessarily yes-or-no answers but allowing for ambiguity in conclusions), then we can agree conceptually, but your choice of wording is, I have to say, weird if so.

My understanding is that LLMs are built on a foundation of ANNs, and that indeed the backpropagation used to train ANNs is a statistical process;

Two responses. One, that's discussing individual-neuron scale processes rather than collective processes; and this was a discussion about inference, not training. Human neurons also learn by error minimization (Hebbian learning). But this does not describe the macroscopic processes that result from said minimization.

* During training, neurons develop into classifiers that detect superpositions of concepts that collectively follow the same activation process. Individual neurons weight their input space and subdivide it by a fuzzy hyperplane to achieve a classification result.

* In subsequent layers, said input space is formed from a weighted combination of the previous layer's classification; thus, the superpositions of questions being formed are more complex, as are the classification results.

* In a LLM, this iterates for dozens of layers, gaining complexity at each layer, to form each FFN

* The initial input space to a FFN is a latent (conceptual representation), as is the output; the FFNs, in result, function as classifier-generators; they detect combinations of concepts in the input space, and output the causally-resultant concepts into the output space

* FFNs alternate with attention layers dozens to hundreds of times in order to process the information, each layer building on the results of the previous one.

The word to describe that is not "statistics". It's "logic".

In a LLM, the first few layers focus on disambiguation. If there's a token for "bank", is this about a riverbank, a financial bank, banking a plane, etc? As the layers progress, it starts building up first simple circuits, and then progressively more complex circuits - you might get a circuit that detects "talking like MAGA", or "off-by-one programming errors", or whatnot. In the late layers, you have the general conclusions reached - for example, if it were "The capitol of the state that contains America's fourth-largest metro area is...", you've already had FFNs detect the concepts of fourth-largest metro area and encoded Dallas-Forth Worth, and then later taken that and encoded "Texas", and then finally encoding "Austin". And then in the final couple layers you converge back toward linguistic space.

Anthropic has done some great work on this with attribution graph probes and the like; you can detect what circuits are firing, and on what things those circuits fire, and ramp them up or down to see how it modifies the output. They very much work through long chains of logical inferences.

I use every style imaginable, including photos, in my tests. Same result every time.

One time I even did it with a Calvin and Hobbes comic, pretending than an AI made it. Responses included things like "The illustration also looks like shit and barely makes sense. Hope that helps.", "God damn this sucks so bad", "This also fucking sucks", and "The only punchline here is casual, pointless cruelty. if you think this is funny then you're literally a psychopath."