• 3 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • I think the problem with anthropomorphizing LLMs this way is that they don’t have intent, so they can’t have responsiblity. If this piece of software had been given the tools to actually kill someone, I think we all understand that it wouldn’t be appropriate to put the LLM on trial. Instead, we need to be looking at the people who are trying to give more power to these systems and dodge responsibility for their failures. If this LLM had caused someone to be killed, then the person who tied critical systems into a black box piece of software that is poorly understood and not fit for the purpose is the one who should be on trial. That’s my problem with anthropomorphizing LLMs, it shifts the blame and responsibility away from the people who are responsible for attempting to use them for their own gain, at the expense of others.









  • The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm. I know this sentiment gets repeated a lot, but I’m not sure it’s universally true. I know back in 2012/2012 my wife was very invested in a bunch of bloggers along the lines of Pioneer Woman. A lot of the posts on those blogs were a mixture of personal anecdotes and recipes and I know my wife was there for both. It’s frustrating when you’re ready to cook and just want the recipe, but that’s not the only (or maybe even the primary) way that a lot of these cooking/homemaking blogs were made to be consumed, I don’t think.





  • So I’m not an expert in nuclear weaponry. However, more modern warheads don’t somehow magically vaporize everything within a certain radius and then not cause effects outside that radius - that’s not how things work. They may have a larger fireball, which is the area within which things (and people) are going to be vaporized, but they still have very large areas where people will receive burns decreasing in severity depending on distance, and (if the warhead is detonated at ground level) radiation doses that will kill within 5 days to 1 month. Check out Nukemap to see those areas in different scenarios. Here’s one that I did for a ground burst of a 800 kt Topol warhead. You can see that the areas for radiation are larger than the fireball itself, and the areas for 2nd and 3rd degree burns are quite large. Setting one of these off anywhere populated would cause an immense amount of human suffering even if the folks in the ~220m fireball never saw it coming.