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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.

    We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.

    You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.

    A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.

    ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.


  • You’re the one who made this philosophical.

    I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”

    ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.

    All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.





  • You’re giving me flashbacks to the online training my work makes me do every year.

    I almost failed the first of 7 courses because I made the mistake of trying to do actual work while listening to the training, and didn’t realize there was a 5 minute timer for inactivity on the video player. And no, there was no additional time provided to complete the training. It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.




  • Microsoft has a terrible track record with hardware.

    About the only hardware they’ve ever sold that didn’t crap the bed was the Xbox, Xbox one, and Xbox series whatever the fuck.

    The 360 would cook itself, instead of fixing it, they added red LEDs to tell you it was fucked. The windows phones were unresponsive and unimpressive garbage, and every tablet they’ve made has been mired in various hardware and screen issues.

    It’s almost like a software company that has a business model that depends on selling people regular updates, can’t get its head around the idea that hardware should just work for the task it’s designed to do. They want you to buy a new tablet every year or two, because it makes them money. They don’t really care if the battery is going to cook itself in 5 years, when the plan is you’ll buy a new device in 2 years, because you really need to edit PowerPoint™ presentations while on the train and with a touchscreen.