flashman

> "If it's going to make me more money to paint my face, clown me up," she said.

Oh you're already a clown

When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.

His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.

Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?

You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.

I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

The current ID verification requirements for phones were introduced to Australia in 1997

> Claude and ChatGPT are not indoctrinating into the manosphere users asking about discounted cash flow formulae.

You're defining an extremely narrow case and then saying bias is irrelevant within it. At the risk of Godwin's Law that's kind of like saying it's okay if my accountant is a Nazi as long as they only ever have conversations about accountancy.

In the same way that a photograph is not dissimilar to the thing it represents, that is, in the most important way.

vast oversimplification of the experience of brain damage

Maybe when the system can generate its own state, rather than that state existing as a deterministic output of its inputs, maybe then we can consider it to have the interiority and reflexiveness required to call something 'thought'.

A very convincing simulation of thought is not thought, especially without memory or any evidence of an independent will. LLMs have the same kind of consciousness as a nematode, albeit with less-complex behaviour.

well we could [HN terms of service violation]

I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.

Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.