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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it’s not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.

    When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things

    That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but “voodoo death” is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.

    I’d reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.

    Edit: the downvotes on this with absolutely no explanation of what’s wrong are a perfect example of why science struggles with these concepts. Anything that doesn’t immediately fit the schema of what western respectable rational people expect gets dismissed out of hand.

    I know by making this edit I’m inviting the most incurious assholes to mansplain to me why I’m wrong, but maybe someone will actually engage with the points.



  • It’s also the smallest community unit that we can reasonably be broken up into whilst still reproducing labourers for the economy.

    The more society is ground down and split apart the less we can help one another out of solidarity, and the more we have to spend on housing, transport, and every other appliance that needs to be duplicated for each separate dwelling, and the more dependent we are on money, capital and the state to provide for our needs. The lonelier we are, the more profitable we are and the less power we have.

    You could argue that a lot of this was just a gradual evolution of society into a form that suits the ruling class, but also neoliberalism was a deliberate project to bring this about. Thatcher knew what she was doing when she said, “There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.”





  • He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

    Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

    Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.


  • Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

    It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

    And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

    Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

    GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

    And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

    Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

    Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

    Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.






  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettocats@lemmy.worldI got my first cat!
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    9 months ago

    I’ve always had a lot of success with holding out my hand towards the cat, palm down, limp, and allowing the cat to inspect it in their own time.

    I’ve heard this is also a technique from experts, but I just found it when we had a cat. It seems to work on dogs too.

    It’s non-threatening, and it doesn’t put any pressure on them for a response. Just get it close enough to be just outside their personal space. If they stretch their nose towards it to sniff, you can bring it closer, and then you may just get the coveted nose bump and cheek nuzzle.

    You may also get the, “what are you doing, you freak, leave me alone” body language, in which case you just have to wait and try again later.