prologic

twtxt.net

Problems are Solved by Method\" 🇦🇺👨‍💻👨‍🦯🏹♔ 🏓⚯ 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧🛥 -- James Mills (operator of twtxt.net / creator of Yarn.social 🧶)

In-reply-to » I was wondering why all the twt hashes in my replies today were still so short. I was ahead of the times. The Twt Hash v2 Epoch only begins next month.

That reminds me, I need to update yarnd too. I haven’t done so yet 😅 Been so bloody busy with work 🥵

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In-reply-to » (#tyakazq) @prologic that possible in any profession. Contrary to what @prologic's think, I don't think it is a human weakness. That some people are absolute and despicable assholes? Yep, I agree on that.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, but I consider this to be a flaw in the human species. Think about it, what good does it serve? What possible reason do we have to have such traits today? Survival of the fitness? pffft 😅

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In-reply-to » Apologies to anyone who's seen an uptick in twtxt pings from me today... I've been working on shoe-horning my twtxt reader (TwtStrm) into my editor (TwtKpr, aka the express-twtkpr npm library), and it kind ran amok a few times. So again, sorry - I've added a minimum 10-minute cool-down period between pulls which should help (I hope 🙂).

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Excited to see twtxt tooling in the Node ecosystem! Any plans to implement the Twtxt v2 extensions? Things like Twt Hash + Subject (proper threading), Multiline, etc. — all documented at https://twtxt.dev 👀

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In-reply-to » Apologies to anyone who's seen an uptick in twtxt pings from me today... I've been working on shoe-horning my twtxt reader (TwtStrm) into my editor (TwtKpr, aka the express-twtkpr npm library), and it kind ran amok a few times. So again, sorry - I've added a minimum 10-minute cool-down period between pulls which should help (I hope 🙂).

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com All good here 👌

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In-reply-to » @prologic Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

On the subject of debugging these so-called AI(s) / Black Boxes… the model is a black box sure, but that’s not really the problem. Everything around it — the inputs, the outputs, the decisions it makes — all of that can and should be fully logged, traced and replayed. The “program” isn’t the model, it’s the full context you feed it. That’s what you debug. It’s not so different from any other system really; if you’re running something in production with no logs, no structured outputs and no tests, you’d have the same problem. The model doesn’t change that discipline, it just makes it more important.

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In-reply-to » Haha, someone had a similar idea … https://lpcvoid.com/blog/0018whyiamagainst_genai/index.html

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hah 😅 One thing I’ve learned in my life (as I’ve had many good manegers over the years teach me as much) is:

Strong opinions, held loosely.

I have my opinions too, but I also see positives and benefits and I am optimistic that we will collectively figure out a path forward.

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In-reply-to » It's one of the reasons in fact I've been working on bob so I have a very concrete and strong foundation for how these things work, how they behave and how bad or good they can be. I am on-purpose building bob to be not only a decent coding tool and general task completion tool, but with serious security boundaries, sanitation, auditing and compliance. If I'm going to succeed at building autoonmous agents that can cope with a wider array of varying inputs (mostly natural language, some structural language) then it needs to be both a) Safe and b) Robust

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes 👍

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

LIke with almost everything “big-tech” has done, it’s not the tech you should not trust, but the companies themselves. For example, accessing and using the models (because let’s face it, they have clusters of much larger and more powerful GPU clusters than we could ever afford to build and own ourselves, at least for now) is fine, but trusting their end-user products/services, not so much.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

It’s one of the reasons in fact I’ve been working on bob so I have a very concrete and strong foundation for how these things work, how they behave and how bad or good they can be. I am on-purpose building bob to be not only a decent coding tool and general task completion tool, but with serious security boundaries, sanitation, auditing and compliance. If I’m going to succeed at building autoonmous agents that can cope with a wider array of varying inputs (mostly natural language, some structural language) then it needs to be both a) Safe and b) Robust

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m kind of flag you bring thi sup, because you simply can’t. You wouldn’t even be able to in an atypical neural network either (which is what ehse things are anyway). The problem here really isn’t the so-called “AI” (I wish we’d stop calling it AI), but the flawed usage(s) thereof. I believe I even stated earlier in this thread that sometimes it may not do what you expect, it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic” – those pushing for greater use need to understand this, those not happy with the “push”, should educate the ignorant here (especailly managers pushing for weak, insecure and bad uses).

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

And every time I ask it to do the same thing, it produces basically the same result. It will sometimes not produce a go.mod, but that’s probably because doing so isn’t as statically high as writing the code to sum numbers from stdin.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

So going back to the understanding of how it generated this, is quite simply the most statistically relevant search space of it’s weights it has been trianed on and it has basically just produced a series of tokens, one after another that are relevant to the input, the next token and so on. It’s a trivial example I know, but it basically pattern matches it’s way through it’s vast search space just producing outputs based on context.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

Which it does so in seconds, faster than I can type. The code is correct, it compiles and does exactly what I wanted. And the code looks pretty reasonable. It handles flotas, has error handling and handles space or line separated numbers on stdin.

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think your points are pretty clear to me, that’s fine. I’m just seeing if you can perhaps see things a different way maybe?🤔 I would challenge the assertion that you cannot understand how Claude Code generated an output; which I can demonstrate easily with a fairly trivial example by the input:

Write a program in Go that sums a list of numbers from stdin and prints the result.

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In-reply-to » @bender Well no. Some of us don't. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don't have an inner monologue

Most of the time, I take a very very long time to do anything. If I say, for example, “I’ll build an IRC Web Client”, that may not happen for weeks, if not months, until my sub conscience has has time to process everything. It’s like basically a “feeling” of internal readiness. I never talk through it, never actively think about it, it just happens.

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In-reply-to » @bender Well no. Some of us don't. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don't have an inner monologue

You can basically think of this as pattern-matching. I’m very very good at very fast pattern matching and piecing pices of a puzzle together very quickly, sometimes with very little to go on, it’s often gotten me into a lot of trouble at work in my career because I can make a lot of assumptions very very quickly.

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In-reply-to » @bender Well no. Some of us don't. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don't have an inner monologue

@bender@twtxt.net So yeah, no, I do not have an inner monologue at all. Most of the time my inner mind is busy just replaying music or visuals (or at least it used to before I lost my sight, these days it just replays visuals and sounds), but there is never a time when I “talk to myself”, ever, I don’t ever think through something, a problem or an activity and have self-arguments. I just do.

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In-reply-to » @prologic don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. 😜😅

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely 😅

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered “no”, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said “Yes”, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that “AI” will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

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In-reply-to » (#wflbuia) @arne This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute 😅 Here's something interesting about me... I don't ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, "inner monologue". Maybe I'm odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of "talking to myself".

@bender@twtxt.net Well no. Some of us don’t. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don’t have an inner monologue

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

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In-reply-to » (#wflbuia) @arne This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute 😅 Here's something interesting about me... I don't ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, "inner monologue". Maybe I'm odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of "talking to myself".

@bender@twtxt.net Nope. Trust me I do not. The only time I do is when I’m reading/writing. I otherwise have no inner monologue when doing anything.

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@arne@uplegger.eu This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute 😅 Here’s something interesting about me… I don’t ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, “inner monologue”. Maybe I’m odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of “talking to myself”.

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Is it the fact that “big tech” companies have basically stolen all of human knowledge to their benefit to build these AI(s) that’s the problem? Or is it that these AI(s) can write code better than you can (some of the time)? Or is it that because of all of the above, there’s no joy left in writing code anymore? 🤔

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

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