IlliOnato

What brought me to read this article was a confusion: how can two locations related to air traffic be 3600 nanometers apart? Was it two points within some chip, or something?

Only way into the article it dawned to me that "nm" could stand for something else, and guess it was "nautical miles". Live and learn...

Still, it turned out to be an interesting read)

In reality HIV does have to deal with pressures described by Duesberg, but the virus found a workaround: extremely long "incubation period".

As you probably know, it can stay dormant for 10 years or more, but then gets into active stage, causes AIDS, and relatively quickly kills the host.

You have a point...

I once gave a 10-dollar bill to a young man serving at the cashier at a store, and he gave me 14 dollars back as a change. I pointed out that this made no sense. He bent down, looked closer at the screen of his machine, and said "Nope, 14 dollars, no mistake". I asked him if he thought I gave him 20. He said no, and even shown me the 10-dollar bill I just gave him. At that point I just gave up and took the money.

Now that I think about it, there was an eerie similarity between this conversation and some of the dialogues I had with LLMs...

I understand that, but the article we are discussing points out that LLMs are so good on many tasks, and so good at passing tests, that many people will be tricked into blindly "taking their word for granted" -- even people who should know better: our brain is a lazy machine, and if something works almost always it starts to assume it works always.

I mean, you can ask an LLM to count letters in thousand of words, and pretty much always it will come with the correct answer! So far I don't know of any word other than "банан" that breaks this function.

Hmm, looks to me like just trading some words for others. Do bacteria have ideas? Does the navigating system in your car? How do you know?

We need to be at least somewhat pedantic, otherwise it's impossible to know what we are even talking about, and no way to establish anything.

To make any progress on this question at all, we need first to come up with some definition of internal monologue. Even if we may need to modify it later, there has to be a starting point.

Otherwise, nothing can be established at all, because for any statement there always will be someone's understanding of "internal monologue" for which the statement is true, and someone's else understanding for which the statement is false...

Well, I remember Richard Feynman came up with an interesting experiment. He found he could not count objects when he read aloud some text at the same time. He had to name the numbers, and it was impossible if he was already engaging his speech.

He thought this was universal, but doing this experiment with friends, he discovered a guy who could count while reading aloud. So when Feynman asked him, how he does this, turned out that the guy instead of "pronouncing" numbers was "seeing" colored numbers in his imagination, so his speech was not involved.

I supposed this experiment can be modified and generalized, and at least to shed some light on this problem.

> "why we simply can't take their word for it"?

As someone who was involved in spiritual practice of "stopping internal dialogue" for years, I can tell you that one learns that that dialogue (or monologue, pretty much the same thing) is quite subtle and complex, essentially multi-layered.

Typically, when you think that you "think about nothing at all" it's just the most surface layer that has stopped, and more subtle talking to yourself is still going on. It takes training just to become able to notice and recognize it.

After all, it's just such a constant and monotone hum at the back of one's mind, one learns to completely ignore it.

So no, I would not take a word of people who were not trained to notice their internal monologue that they haven't any :-)

This is a cool one, but I know of other such "failures".

For example, try to ask (better in Russian), how many letters "а" are there in Russian word "банан". It seems all models answer with "3". Playing with it reveals that apparently LLMs confuse Russian "банан" with English "banana" (same meaning). Trying to get LLMs to produce a correct answer results is some hilarity.

I wonder if each "failure" of this kind deserves an academic article, though. Well, perhaps it does, when different models exhibit the same behaviour...

Sorry, by your logic an ISSN would be a good key for a database of scientific journals. It's exactly what ISSN is invented for! Right? Right?

Been there, done that. Journals that changed their names (and identities) but not ISSN. That changed the ISSN but not the name/identity. Journal mergers which instead of obtaining a new ISSN kept one of the old ones. "Predatory journals" that "borrow" an ISSN (you may not consider them real journals, but you've got to track them anyway, even if only to keep them from being added to the "main" database). The list may go on and on.

And don't even start me on using even more natural ID, the journal name, perhaps in combination with some other pieces of data, like year the publication started, country of origin, language, etc... Any scheme based on this will need to have caveats after caveats.

(A fun fact: there were journals that ceased publication but later on "returned from the dead". Such resurrected journals are supposed to be new journals and to get a new ISSN. Sometimes this rule is followed...)

At the end, a "meaningless number" you assign yourself is the only ID that reliably works (in combination with fields representing relationships between journals).

The problem with keys that "have meaning" is that they appear to carry information about your entity. And in vast majority of cases this is correct information! So it's almost impossible to resist "extracting" this information from a key without doing actual database lookup at least mentally, and often in your software too. Hidden assumptions like this lead to bugs that are really hard to eliminate. A meaningless number on the other hand does not tempt one :-)

I guess support for XML would be tricky, because XML is just way more complex format than the ones already supported. It is still essentially a tree, but with additional structure.

Representing elements and their contents is easy enough. But attributes, comments, processing instructions, entities... And remember, an XML document can include a DTD (it does not have to be in a separate file).

To present it as a file system in a useful, non-convoluted way? I will be very, very interested if it's possible, but not holding my breath.

Maybe I am entering that age, but in more and more areas of human endeavor I start to see the same signs, that seem to tell "this house of cards is about to collapse".

Maybe this is not a bad thing. A crisis is a necessary stage in evolution of any complex system. I just hope it does not bury us in a perfect storm...

Same here

Comparing to the following, chargers might not be the biggest issue...

> Sometimes the kludgy system erroneously showed cars as missing, resulting in hundreds of innocent Hertz customers getting arrested on charges of stealing rentals they’d actually returned.