danbmil99

One factor might be this: LLM's know orders of magnitude more stuff than humans. They are experts in whatever subject is being discussed at the moment. I think they often respond as if the human user has a similar baseline of factual knowledge in every field.

People who are knowledgeable in a particular obscure area tend to do the same thing.

Let's unblock that gate

Saw them in New York probably 1985ish. I love the band but I wouldn't attend another concert. During the encore, they ignited two toasters on fire. It was at the Kitchen in downtown Manhattan and the place was packed.

Streamed it a few days ago. Remarkable film.

The only thing they got wrong was Stephen Hawking-era TTS.

I have a friend who builds instruments. A bass player who worshiped Jaco, at first he made a couple fretless bass guitars.

One day he called me with a fascinating question. He was making his first guitar, and he wanted to know: Where do I put the frets?

I think the most fascinating thing about music (from a mathematical/scientific perspective) is the fact that the principal harmonics of equal temperament are so close to the mathematical ideals. Fourths and fifths are so close trained musicians typically cannot hear the difference. Major thirds are farther from the ideal but still are less than 1% off. That can be heard by the trained ear, but in the real world there are chorus effects (multiple voices/instruments at nominal but slightly varied pitch), vibrato, reverb etc. such that in most cases a just major 3rd sounds fine.

Without just temperament, we would never have had "The Well Tempered Clavier", Bobby Daren's "Mac The knife", and basically all of western music from the baroque period on.

It is nearly incontrovertible that perfect (aka absolute) pitch is either 100% innate or picked up in very early childhood. A product like this could easily discourage kids from learning music.

It's also a well-established fact that many of the most famous musicians in history, from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky did not have perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch can even be a negative factor in one's musical training. For example, in musical theater, cabaret, and jazz, transposition is a necessary skill. Singers routinely ask the accompianist (on piano) to move the key up or down to match their vocal range. I have heard anecdotally that perfect pitch actually makes it difficult to transpose, because if you learned a song in a certain key, the transposed version sounds like a different tune.

Wow, lots of words!

And yet it turns

I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.

We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.

Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).

This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.

Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.

Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").

Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?

In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!

They said FORTH!!

You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).

I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.

Cray cray

Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"

Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.

Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable