It’s all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran “had to” respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).

Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?

That’s not how it works at all. If it were as easy as adding a line of code that says “check for integrity” they would’ve done that already. Fundamentally, the way these models all work is you give them some text and they try to guess the next word. It’s ultra autocomplete. If you feed it “I’m going to the grocery store to get some” then it’ll respond “food: 32%, bread: 15%, milk: 13%” and so on.

They get these results by crunching a ton of numbers, and those numbers, called a model, were tuned by training. During training, they collect every scrap of human text they can get their hands on, feed bits of it to the model, then see what the model guesses. They compare the model’s guess to the actual text, tweak the numbers slightly to make the model more likely to give the right answer and less likely to give the wrong answers, then do it again with more text. The tweaking is an automated process, just feeding the model as much text as possible, until eventually it gets shockingly good at predicting. When training is done, the numbers stop getting tweaked, and it will give the same answer to the same prompt every time.

Once you have the model, you can use it to generate responses. Feed it something like “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer:” and if the model has gotten even remotely good at its job of predicting words, the next word should be the start of an answer to the question. Maybe the top prediction is “The”. Well, that’s not much, but you can tack one of the model’s predicted words to the end and do it again. “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer: The” and see what it predicts. Keep repeating until you decide you have enough words, or maybe you’ve trained the model to also be able to predict “end of response” and use that to decide when to stop. You can play with this process, for example, making it more or less random. If you always take the top prediction you’ll get perfectly consistent answers to the same prompt every time, but they’ll be predictable and boring. You can instead pick based on the probabilities you get back from the model and get more variety. You can “increase the temperature” of that and intentionally choose unlikely answers more often than the model expects, which will make the response more varied but will eventually devolve into nonsense if you crank it up too high. Etc, etc. That’s why even though the model is unchanging and gives the same word probabilities to the same input, you can get different answers in the text it gives back.

Note that there’s nothing in here about accuracy, or sources, or thinking, or hallucinations, anything. The model doesn’t know whether it’s saying things that are real or fiction. It’s literally a gigantic unchanging matrix of numbers. It’s not even really “saying” things at all. It’s just tossing out possible words, something else is picking from that list, and then the result is being fed back in for more words. To be clear, it’s really good at this job, and can do some eerily human things, like mixing two concepts together, in a way that computers have never been able to do before. But it was never trained to reason, it wasn’t trained to recognize that it’s saying something untrue, or that it has little knowledge of a subject, or that it is saying something dangerous. It was trained to predict words.

At best, what they do with these things is prepend your questions with instructions, trying to guide the model to respond a certain way. So you’ll type in “how do I make my own fireworks?” but the model will be given “You are a chatbot AI. You are polite and helpful, but you do not give dangerous advice. The user’s question is: how do I make my own fireworks? Your answer:” and hopefully the instructions make the most likely answer something like “that’s dangerous, I’m not discussing it.” It’s still not really thinking, though.

Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren’t the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you’re volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they’ll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there’s more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should’ve pointed to.

This, and see also “minmaxing,” the process of optimizing something (usually your character in a game) to get minimum penalty and/or maximum benefit, usually ignoring anything like realism or storytelling and focusing entirely on the stats and numbers.

The .bin and .cue file are the parts of the actual game disc that you want. The .bin file contains almost all of the data and the .cue file contains some extra information about the structure of the CD. All the rest is Internet Archive stuff (and an image of the game cover of course).

To open it, you can convert it to a .iso disk image instead, which any Linux distribution can open as if it were a real CD. This blog post talks about how to do that. The last paragraph about mount you can probably replace with double-clicking the .iso file in the GUI I would guess.

It’s a new model this year, as Nate Silver took his with him when he left 538. The new one seems to put a lot of emphasis on “the fundamentals” this far out, that is, it “thinks” that the general environment and economy and such is pretty good for the incumbent and that the polls might move in that direction by the time election day comes along. And since it’s fitted to historical data, it’s also implicitly assuming that this election will be similar to past elections (like, say, including a competent campaign by a candidate who can get out there and effectively communicate accomplishments and a plan for their term).

I personally think those assumptions are pretty clearly wrong this year and so I’m more inclined to base my perception of the race on pure polling averages, which are looking quite bad for Biden.

“The US President might be in cognitive decline” is a massive news story, as is “The only opponent to a fascist is one more bad night away from his campaign completely imploding,” and also “the President’s own party says behind closed doors that he’s in massive trouble, but is sticking with him in public.”

Okay, after watching the video twice I think I know what the fuck he’s talking about. He thinks that you’ll request a mail in ballot, go to the polls, they’ll say you already voted, and then you triumphantly show the world that you didn’t vote, you still have the blank ballot, and obviously they’ve put in a vote for Joe Brandon under your name, is what they’ve done, those bastards. He has done a terrible job of explaining his plan, aside from it also being a bad plan.

As a former election judge in Minnesota, I can tell you exactly how this would go in real life in that state (where, to brag a bit, we have a very progressive voting system that makes it very easy to vote, all the things Republicans hate). You’d get your mail in ballot, then show up to your polling place with your blank ballot. Then when you ask to vote, they’ll say “yep, sure, come on in” and you can just go in and vote as normal.

(The rule is that even if you request an absentee ballot, you can still cast a vote as normal, and even if you have mailed it in, either they have already counted it and then the registration system will bar you from voting in person, or if you get there before it gets processed and vote in person instead, they’ll toss it out when they get to it.)

Worst case scenario, the election judges see that you’re carrying around an absentee ballot, and they’ll ask you to get rid of it because no one wants ballots floating around a polling place that aren’t valid. That’s the only thing I can think of that would be cause for a Republican to make a ruckus, but… like… yeah, you can’t just bring extra ballots to the polling place. And they won’t scan into the machine because they’re the wrong type. I really, really want to see videos of these people trying to catch the evil Democrats and then just, like, being treated normally though. (Even better if they raised a ruckus and then didn’t actually vote.)

I think that joke’s been around for a while, but there is the Terry Pratchett line about how if you had a button with a sign next to it saying “pressing this button will end the world, do not touch,” the ink wouldn’t even have time to dry.

How many do you think it is, and how much more acceptable is that number than this one?

“There was a particular bad guy near them” and “they all probably have bad opinions about Jews” are not sufficient justifications for indiscriminately bombing innocent people. What if there had been an Israeli leader at that rave? People in both refugee camps and at a music event should be able to exist without fear that they’ll die because they were near the wrong person. One seems to provoke a different reaction than the other for some reason though, and that might be worth thinking about.

These models aren’t great at tasks that require precision and analytical thinking. They’re trained on a fairly simple task, “if I give you some text, guess what the next bit of text is.” Sounds simple, but it’s incredibly powerful. Imagine if you could correctly guess the next bit of text for the sentence “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is” or “The solution to the problems in the Middle East is”.

Recently, we’ve been seeing shockingly good results from models that do this task. They can synthesize unrelated subjects, and hold coherent conversations that sound very human. However, despite doing some things that up until recently only humans could do, they still aren’t at human-level intelligence. Humans read and write by taking in words, converting them into rich mental concepts, applying thoughts, feelings, and reasoning to them, and then converting the resulting concepts back into words to communicate with others. LLMs arguably might be doing some of this too, but they’re evaluated solely on words and therefore much more of their “thought process” is based on “what words are likely to come next” and not “is this concept being applied correctly” or “is this factual information”. Humans have much, much greater capacity than these models, and we live complex lives that act as an incredibly comprehensive training process. These models are small and trained very narrowly in comparison. Their excellent mimicry gives the illusion of a similarly rich inner life, but it’s mostly imitation.

All that comes down to the fact that these models aren’t great at complex reasoning and precise details. They’re just not trained for it. They got through “life” by picking plausible words and that’s mostly what they’ll continue to do. For writing a novel or poem, that’s good enough, but math and physics are more rigorous than that. They do seem to be able to handle code snippets now, mostly, which is progress, but in general this isn’t something that you can be completely confident in them doing correctly. They make silly mistakes because they aren’t really thinking it through. To them, there isn’t really much difference between answers like “that date is 7 days after Christmas” and “that date is 12 days after Christmas.” Which one it thinks is more correct is based on things it has seen, not necessarily an explicit counting process. You can also see this in things like that case where someone tried to use it to write a legal brief, where it came up with citations that seemed plausible but were in fact completely made up. It wasn’t trained on accurate citations, it was trained on words.

They also have a bad habit of sounding confident no matter what they’re saying, which makes it hard to use them for things you can’t check yourself. Anything they say could be right/accurate/good/not plagiarized, but the model won’t have a good sense of that, and if you don’t know either, you’re opening yourself up to risk of being misled.

That’s part of the point, you aren’t necessarily supposed to have an empty mind the whole time. I mean, if you can do that, great, but you aren’t failing if that’s not the case.

Imagine that your thoughts are buses, and your job is to sit at the bus stop and not get on any of them. Just notice them and let them go by. Like a bus stop, you don’t really control what comes by, but you do control which ones you get on board and follow. If you notice that you’ve gotten on a bus, that’s fine, just get off of it and go back to watching. Interesting things can happen if you just watch and notice which thoughts go by, and it’s good practice for noticing what you’re thinking and where you’re going and taking control of it yourself when it’s somewhere you don’t want to go.