randcraw

And it had a MUCH bigger budget than the original, as well as the assurance that it wouldn't be cancelled at a moment's notice.

Frankly, I think we very much _do_ need to be reminded that LLMs are in fact _not_ eating the world.

It's at the forebrain of every executive in America that LLMs imbued with RLHF are on the cusp of replacing every job they can imagine, from robot chauffeurs to carpenters to surgeons. But as this paper suggests, the integration of generally capable vision systems with basic tool handling that will be needed to replace the specific skills essential to most human jobs -- especially using only today's frontier models -- still takes us unforeseeably and undeniably far into the realm of sheer fantasy.

I would have thought that the confidence scores available from CNNs but not from LLMs _would_ be valuable.

Clinically, I'd imagine that choosing the right final diagnosis with relatively low certainty is often less useful than reporting the level of confidence (high or low) of each candidate diagnosis. A set of plausibles is surely better than a single wrong ID.

Clinical tests, especially when used by nonspecialists, are useful not only as diagnostic endpoints. Often they're essential to separate plausible diagnoses from implausible. If a CNN can rule out all outcomes but one with high certainty, that's nothing to sneeze at.

And if it could also _explain_ why the certainty of each candidate was high (or low) -- as non-LLMs often can do better than LLMs. That should have value too, especially in establishing an audit trail to defend the chosen diagnosis.

I think Thompson has no understanding of endeavors like pure math or the theoretical sciences. In the words of Einstein, "I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts; the rest [is] just details."

I think mathematicians aren't bemoaning their lost sunk costs. They're now aware that they may never again have the joy of being the first to pull up the edge of the tarp of ignorance and see the raw truth beneath _for the first time_. Their voyages of discovery, which give life meaning, may never leave dry dock again.

Your loved ones have replaced you with more agreeable robots. Now no one cares whether you live or die.

Still disgusted?

I'm reading Paul Theroux's "True North", on his recent tour of Canada, the country of his birth. Now 84, he claims it will be his last travel book.

Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.

IMHO, audiobooks <--> podcasts. The act of reading is unique, unlike any other medium.

Don't agree. If you know no facts, you'll be unable to think even the most basic thoughts. The more you know, the deeper your thinking can be as well as the more subtle.

For every fact you learn there is a necessary context and numerous exceptions when it's applied in other contexts. If you expect AI to spit all relevant facts at you every time you're clueless, you will have no idea when AI is wrong or lying. You will have to trust everything AI (or its owner) tells you.

I get reCaptchaed-to-death all the time in iOS and MacOS using both Firefox and Brave. I use a big name VPN which probably makes it worse, since I'm routinely blocked outright by Cloudfare services, assuming cluelessly that I'm a bot.

It turns out that some foods counteract the formation of kidney stones. If you drink milk when you eat oxalates, the oxalates will not fuse into stones and will be excreted normally in your urine.

Oxalates are present in tea too, though not coffee, IIRC.

And there were an unimaginable number of tax loopholes available back then that ultimately reduced the individual tax rate enormously. You just had to reinvest your income in a multitude of increasingly bizarre tax dodges devised by increasingly byzantine tax laws.

I think reading short stories is a great way to develop both writing and storytelling skills. A SS compresses the storyline and character development into a more palatable and succinct morsel than can a full-sized book. And the brevity of SSs should make them more digestible.

Classic literature was written in an era when readers had more patience and fewer distractions than today. But classic short stories should offer the best of those, IMO, better-written times: more thoughtful exposition in fewer words.

AI-cloned shows will suffer on day #1 what the original show suffered after the 5th year or so -- the plausible and original plot lines have been used up. So the AI-gen story lines will be implausible or derivative copies of familiar plots from the original series or other shows.