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ForceBru

266 karma · joined August 25, 2024

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ForceBru··on What Is Ruliology?
The Wolfram Engine (essentially the Wolfram Language interpreter/execution environment) is free: https://www.wolfram.com/engine/. You can download it and run Wolfram code.

Wolfram Mathematica (the Jupyter Notebook-like development environment) is paid, but there are free and open source alternatives like https://github.com/WLJSTeam/wolfram-js-frontend.

> WLJS Notebook ... [is] A lightweight, cross-platform alternative to Mathematica, built using open-source tools and the free Wolfram Engine.

ForceBru··on What Is Ruliology?
Isn't this his personal blog? The domain name is "stephenwolfram.com", this is his personal website. Of course there will be "I"'s and "me"'s — this website is about him and what he does.

As for falsifiability:

> You have some particular kind of rule. And it looks as if it’s only going to behave in some particular way. But no, eventually you find a case where it does something completely different, and unexpected.

So I guess to falsify a theory about some rule you just have to run the rule long enough to see something the theory doesn't predict.

ForceBru··on Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
Sorry, I was just trying to be funny, no gotcha intended. Yeah, I once found some massive prompt that was supposed to transform the LLM into some kind of spiritual advisor or the next Buddha or whatever. Total gibberish, in my opinion, possibly written by a mentally unstable person. Anyway, I wanted to see if DeepSeek could withstand it and tell me that it was in fact gibberish. Nope, it went crazy, going on about some sort of magic numbers, hidden structure of the Universe and so on. So yeah, a state that resembles psychosis, indeed.
ForceBru··on Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
The military. The robots will roam the battlefield, imagine consequences of shooting people and performing actions that maximize the probability of success according to the results of their "imagination"/simulation.
ForceBru··on Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
> psychosis in the AI itself

I think you're anthropomorphising the AI too much: what does it mean for an LLM to have psychosis? This implies that LLMs have a soul, or a consciousness, or a psyche. But... do they?

Speaking of reality, one can easily become philosophical and say that we humans don't exactly "have" a reality either. All we have are sensor readings. LLMs' sensors are texts and images they get as input. They don't have the "real" world, but they do have access to tons of _representations_ of this world.

ForceBru··on King – man + woman is queen; but why? (2017)
You shoehorned politics into a completely unrelated discussion, consequently making it worse
ForceBru··on The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
In fact, I agree with the article! For instance, many indeed offload thinking to LLMs, potentially "leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains". It also makes sense that students who use LLMs are not "learning to parse truth from fiction ... not learning to understand what makes a good argument ... not learning about different perspectives in the world".

Somehow "pushing back against preconceived notions" is synonymous to "correcting societal norms by means of government-approved LLMs" for me. This brings politics, dystopian worlds and so on. I don't want LLMs to "push back against preconceived notions" and otherwise tell me what to think. This is indeed just one sentence in the article, though.

ForceBru··on The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
Yep, fully agree with this
ForceBru··on The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
True, but teachers don't train LLMs. Good LLMs can only be trained by massive corporations, so training an "LLM for schools" must be centralized. This should of course be supervised by the government, so the government ends up deciding what needs pushback and what kind of pushback. This alone is not easy because someone will have to enumerate the things that need pushback, provide examples of such "bad things", provide "correct" alternatives and so on. This then feeds into data curation and so on.

Teachers are also "local". The resulting LLM will have to be approved nation-wide, which is a whole can of worms. Or do we need multiple LLMs of this kind? How are they going to differ from each other?

Moreover, people will hate this because they'll be aware of it. There will be a government-approved sanitized "LLM for schools" that exhibits particular "correct" and "approved" behavior. Everyone will understand that "pushing back" is one of the purposes of the LLM and that it was made specifically for (indoctrination of) children. What is this, "1984" or whatever other dystopian novel?

Many of the things that may "need" pushback are currently controversial. Can a man be pregnant? "Did the government just explicitly allow my CHILD to talk to this LLM that says such vile things?!" (Whatever the "things" may actually be) I guarantee parents from all political backgrounds are going to be extremely mad.

ForceBru··on The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
> pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate

Who decides what needs to be "pushed back"? Also, I imagine it's not easy to train a model to notice these "preconceived notions" and react "appropriately": machine learning will automatically extract patterns from data, so if enough texts contain a "preconceived notion" that you don't like, it'll learn it anyway, so you'll have to manually clean the data (seems like extremely hard work and lowkey censorship) or do extensive "post-training".

It's not clear what it means to "challenge users to reflect and evaluate". Making the model analyze different points of view and add a "but you should think for yourself!" after each answer won't work because everyone will just skip this last part and be mildly annoyed. It's obvious that I should think for myself, but here's why I'm asking the LLM: I _don't_ want to think for myself right now, or I want to kickstart my thinking. Either way, I need some useful input from the LLM.

If the model refuses to answer and always tells me to reflect, I'll just go back to Google search and not use this model at all. In this case someone just wasted money on training the model.

ForceBru··on AI sycophancy panic
In fact, I'm not sure I just have my favorite movie sitting around in my mind before being prompted. Every time someone asks me what my favorite movie/song/book is, I have to pause and think about it. What _is_ my favorite movie? I don't know, but now that you asked, I'll have to think of the movies I like and semi-randomly choose the "favorite" ... just like LLMs randomly choose the next word. (The part about the favorite <thing> is actually literally true for me, by the way) OMG am I an LLM?
ForceBru··on AI sycophancy panic
"Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality" — since LLMs also can choose to comply or not, this suggests that they do have personalities...

Moreover, if "personality is the thing ... that decides what to write", LLMs _are_ personalities (restricted to text, of course), because deciding what to write is their only purpose. Again, this seems to imply that LLMs actually have personalities.

ForceBru··on AI sycophancy panic
Wait, if "the style and content of the text they return" isn't a personality, then what's a personality, if you're restricted to text-based communication?
ForceBru··on Floor796
Is it just me or is the phrase "human beings" used more often than simply "humans"? I've just started to notice this: the next word after "human" is very often "beings". Whenever someone wants to emphasize our humanity (as opposed, say, to a horse's horseness), they almost always say "human _beings_" instead of "humans". Somehow "human beings" seems to emphasize the "human spirit/soul".
ForceBru··on Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster
You can simply not upgrade to Tahoe and iOS 26. I didn't upgrade and am simply waiting for the next version which will hopefully ditch liquid glass. If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.
ForceBru··on When compilers surprise you
You're probably thinking of another post (https://xania.org/202512/11-pop-goes-the-weasel-er-count) where an entire loop was optimized to a single instruction
ForceBru··on How getting richer made teenagers less free
Care to elaborate? Why do you think it's bullshit?
ForceBru··on AI capability isn't humanness
> LLMs are still trained on significantly more data pretty much no matter how you look at it ... 10-15 million words ... vs trillions for LLMs

I don't know how to count the amount of words a human encounters in their life, but it does seem plausible that LLMs deal with orders of magnitude more words. What I'm saying is that words aren't the whole picture.

Humans get continuous streams of video, audio, smell, location and other sensory data. Plus, you get data about your impact on the world and the world's impact on you: what happens when you move this thing? What happens when you touch some fire? LLMs don't have this yet, they only have abstract symbols (words, tokens).

So when I look at it from this "sensory" perspective, LLMs don't seem to be getting any data at all here.

ForceBru··on AI capability isn't humanness
Yep, LLMs have a greater breadth of knowledge, but it's shallow. Humans are able to achieve much greater depth because they have more data about the subject.
ForceBru··on AI capability isn't humanness
> Compared to humans, LLMs have effectively unbounded training data. They are trained on billions of text examples covering countless topics, styles, and domains. Their exposure is far broader and more uniform than any human's, and not filtered through lived experience or survival needs.

I think it's the other way round: humans have effectively unbounded training data. We can count exactly how much text any given model saw during training. We know exactly how many images or video frames were used to train it, and so on. Can we count the amount of input humans receive?

I can look at my coffee mug from any angle I want, I can feel it in my hands, I can sniff it, lick it and fiddle with it as much as I want. What happens if I move it away from me? Can I turn it this way, can I lift it up? What does it feel like to drink from this cup? What does it feel like when someone else drinks from my cup? The LLM has no idea because it doesn't have access to sensory data and it can't manipulate real-life objects (yet).

ForceBru··on Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft)
Interesting, thanks!
ForceBru··on Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft)
> Gaussian mixture models

In what fields did neural networks replace Gaussian mixtures?

ForceBru··on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
No I mean _arXiv_ has had experimental support for generating HTML versions of papers for years now. If you visit arXiv, you'll see a lot of papers have generated HTML alongside the usual PDF, so I'm trying to understand whether the article discussed any new developments. It seems like it's not new at all
ForceBru··on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
Is this new or somehow updated? HTML versions of papers have been available for several years now.

EDIT: indeed, it was introduced in 2023: https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv...

ForceBru··on Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode
Unfortunately, the whole point is that along with the fridge/whatever tech you purchase a billboard and willingly bring ads into your home. Of course ads on purchased devices should be mandatory AND we customers will soon be expected to pay a "subscription fee" to temporarily unsubscribe from the ads. What kind of company would possibly make ads opt-in? IMO allowing the owner to turn off ads is a problem (for the company), not a solution
ForceBru··on DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]
When it's a competition among individual producers, we call it "a free market" and praise Hal Varian. When it's a competition among countries, it's suddenly threatening to "disrupt American AI markets and efforts". The obvious solution here is to pour money into LLM research too. Massive state funding -> provide SOTA models for free -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards (from the free models).
ForceBru··on SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python
Reading the next sentence clears the confusion:

> SPy is not a "compiler for Python". There are features of the Python language which will never be supported by SPy by design. Don't expect to compile Django or FastAPI with SPy.

ForceBru··on Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)
Are LLMs still trained by (variants of) stochastic GRADIENT descent? AFAIK what used to be called "backprop" is nowadays known as "automatic differentiation". It's widely used in PyTorch, JAX etc
ForceBru··on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
Wow, I'm NOT upgrading to iOS 26, this looks terrible. Moreover, I see people complaining about poor performance and worsening battery life.
ForceBru··on Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
LMAO that actually fits really well given all the πthon jokes
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