• 5 Posts
  • 130 Comments
Joined 18 days ago
cake
Cake day: February 27th, 2025

help-circle
  • That’s something people really have to get into their heads: an “answer” by an LLM ist just a series of high probability tokens. It’s only us humans who interpret reason and value into it. From the system’s standpoint it’s just numbers without any meaning whatsoever. And no amount of massaging will change that. LLMs are about as “intelligent” as a fancy database query.










  • Every couple of years I try out the latest “assistant”. I ask very simple queries, stuff that you might expect it to be able to handle. It always disappoints hilariously.

    Questions where previous assistants consistently and utterly failed: “What’s the weather going to be like today?” “I want to go to [address], using public transport, can you tell me which routes I have to take?” “What are my appointments today?”

    You’d think these are pretty obvious use-cases, but every iteration of assistants was completely incapable of getting even close to a satisfying answer. I don’t expect LLMs to fare better this time around.




  • This is a well written piece full of astute observations. I have a problem with one point, though:

    The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft*.* Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.

    It’s not the difference between “hard” and “soft” that matters here, it’s the difference between “simple” and “complex”. Trump, in every conceivable way, is a simple man, and his followers find that one of his most attractive traits. He, like them, neither understands nor accepts complexity and that informs his world-view and actions.