Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

    The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

    Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

    While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

    Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

    There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

    To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.




  • I’m happy with the Oxford definition: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”.

    LLMs don’t have knowledge as they don’t actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

    If asked to answer 10*5, they can’t reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren’t in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.



  • Labour are promising the biggest expansion of workers’ rights in decades and the most ambitious environmental policies

    You made me interested in what exactly they’re promising, so I tracked down their manifesto.

    The fines on river and ocean polluting sounds long overdue. Hardly revolutionary (every EU country does this) but it’s definitely needed from some headlines I’ve read. There’s also some stuff there about taxing oil and gas companies. That’s honestly a good thing! Wouldn’t exactly call that incredibly ambitious though.

    EDIT: My eyes completely glossed over the “Clean Power by 2030” investment plan somehow. That sounds pretty great, and definitely counts as ambitious. My napkin math says 95 GW of electricity could power about 18 million homes, which according to this is more than half of UK homes. Pretty ambitious.

    I couldn’t find anything in there about workers’ rights though. Maybe I missed something?

    EDIT2: Why wasn’t Starmer mentioning any of this in the debate, I wonder?