getpost

Wait a minute, didn't I learn in college decades ago that deciding what is true is equivalent to the halting problem? Meaning, it can't be done in principle. There might be practical ways to ascertain the truth for a useful subset of statements in certain domains, but we are a very long way from knowing the truth about arbitrary statements, if that is even possible.

I didn't say it did. I posted the reply that I got, which did slightly improve my motivation to read the article.

It's interesting that you got a different response from Bard! I didn't alter the Bard response that I posted. Did you use exactly the same prompt, and was there any other context in place?

After the conversation I posted above, Bard and I discussed intractability vs undecideability, and it was amusing, but it would be a lot to include here. Then I said,

I still can't believe you don't know about Terry Winograd's PhD thesis.

BARD: I apologize that I do not know about Terry Winograd's PhD thesis. I am still under development, and I am always learning new things. I will try my best to learn more about Terry Winograd's work in the future.

ME:What's SHRDLU?

BARD: SHRDLU is a computer program that was developed in the early 1970s by Terry Winograd at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was one of the first programs to be able to understand natural language to a significant degree.

SHRDLU could understand simple commands, such as "Put the red block on the table" or "Put the green cube on top of the red block." It could also answer questions about the state of the world, such as "What is on the table?" or "What is on top of the red block?"

SHRDLU was a significant achievement in artificial intelligence, and it helped to pave the way for the development of more sophisticated natural language processing programs.

ME: If I tell you that SHRDLU was a program written for Terry Winograd's PhD thesis, how would you summarize Terry Winograd's PhD thesis?

BARD: Terry Winograd's PhD thesis, "Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language", was an attempt to develop a computer program that could understand natural language. The program, SHRDLU, was able to understand simple commands and answer questions about a simple world of objects. Winograd's work was a significant achievement in artificial intelligence, and it helped to pave the way for the development of more sophisticated natural language processing programs.

ME: Baffling! So you did know about Terry Winogra'd PhD thesis all along!

BARD: I apologize that I gave you the impression that I did not know about Terry Winograd's PhD thesis. I have been trained on a massive dataset of text and code, and I am able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search. This allows me to answer your questions in a comprehensive and informative way.

I don't mean to post all my interactions, but here's one more. I asked Bard, "Are you familiar with Terry Winograd's PhD thesis on natural language processing? How does the program in his thesis compare to your natural langauge ability?"

Bard replied, "I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request. I am a large language model, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help you with this request?"

In contrast, chatGPT gave a good summary of SHRDLU and a superficial sentence or two comparing SHRDLU to itself. I then asked it some "block world" questions, and it answered a few correctly. 'Assume there are 3 cubs, red, green, and blue. Can you stack the red cube on the blue cube? Assume there is also a yellow pyramid. Can you stack the green cube on top of the pyramid."....

I can't pull up the exact chatGPT query I used or the reply. Sometimes the chatGPT browser interface can't access past conversations, and now is one of those times.

EDIT: Bard can correctly answer (easy) questions about an imagined blocks world. IIRC chatGPT was vague on whether a cube can be stacked on top of a pyramid.

Assume there are 3 cubes, red, green, and blue. Stack the red cube on top of the blue cube, and describe the result to me.

BARD: The blue cube is now the bottom cube, and the red cube is on top of it. The red cube is touching the blue cube on all six sides. The blue cube is completely covered by the red cube.

Also assume there is a yellow pyramid. Stack the pyramid on the green cube and describe the result to me.

BARD: The yellow pyramid is now resting on top of the green cube. The pyramid is touching the green cube on all four sides. The green cube is still visible from underneath the pyramid.

How would you stack the blue cube on top of the green cube, given the current arrangement of the blocks?

BARD: I would need to move the red cube off of the blue cube first. Then, I could stack the blue cube on top of the green cube.

Can a cube be stacked on top of the pyramid?

BARD: No, a cube cannot be stacked on top of a pyramid.

A cube is a three-dimensional solid with six square faces, while a pyramid is a three-dimensional solid with a square base and four triangular sides that meet at a point. The two shapes are not compatible for stacking.

Bard accepts URLs, which is a nice feature compared to chatGPT. Example described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250641

When I asked it about a different URL, it seemed to reference an older version of the page, and couldn't answer a question about the text content. chatGPT correctly answered the same question when I pasted the text. I tried pasting the same text in Bard, and Bard still couldn't answer.

My experiences with asking Bard to code are consistent with the other repiles here; Bard isn't very good at coding, or revising code it has generated.

I am interested to see that Bard offers multiple drafts of each reply. I wonder how it chooses which draft to show first.

I had a hard time understanding this article with phrases like, "However, with great power comes ~~great responsibility~~ undecidable type systems, whose undefined behavior may involve summoning eldritch abominations from the Black Abyss of Rěgne Ūt." I was pleased so see that Bard accepts URLs, so I asked it to summarize it. Here's Bard's summary:

  The author of the article, Erik McClure, rants about Terra, a metaprogramming language. He argues that Terra is not well-documented, that it does not work well on Windows, and that it is not as good as other metaprogramming languages.

  He also claims that Terra is not a good choice for writing production code, as it is not as stable as other languages.

  Overall, the author is not a fan of Terra. He believes that there are better options available for metaprogramming.

I requested access (using Firefox), and access was granted about an hour later. I used my gmail.com account. A friend with a Google workspace account was unable to request access. My initial observations are:

Responses can include other drafts, which can be slightly or significantly different. It is not clear why a particular draft is shown first.

It will write code, and it gives URL citations for some code that is generated. However, it doesn't even try to modify the code, at least in cases I tried. (chatGPT will help revise code).

It is interesting to compare chatGPT and Bard. In my small sample so far, Bard appears to have no sense of humor. Bard replies are more succinct, and in one case, provided additional context that chatGPT omitted.

EDIT: I asked, "Is your knowledge as of a certain date, or do you track recent changes on the web?"

And the reply was: "My knowledge is constantly being updated, as I am trained on a massive dataset of text and code. I am able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results."

This has been posted many times before, but I thought of it yesterday when I saw this essay by Chomsky in the New York Times, "The False Promise of ChatGPT."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

I have no idea what Taleb actually means, but to the extent it isn't dramatic rhetoric, I imagine his claim is based on the idea that humans can never be completely right, due to the limits of our perception and memory. The best we can hope for is to be right enough to survive until the next iteration of our learning process.

Tangentially, Taleb tweeted a nice quote yesterday, "You don't do well by trying to be right; it is impossible for humans. You do well by figuring out when you're wrong faster than others do."

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1627765781168619520

I had one trip, westbound, as a small child in 1963 or '64. Don't know what class, but I did get seasick. How do you get seasick on a ship that size?

For me there's no increase in spam delivered to my inbox.

But, for years, emails from regular correspondents are marked as spam. I have to make rules to ensure I get non-spam emails.

Gmail doesn't seem to learn from interactive choices. Did it ever? Emails I manually designate as spam aren't considered spam in the future.

1983 TV ad for Lisa with Kevin Costner, "I'll be home for breakfast." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJRx79sl1yk

>attachment theory was developed to explain why children of drug addicts are so messed up

Citation? As far as I know, the roots of Attachment Theory are in the World War II work of John Bowlby, investigating the effects of children separated from their parents when major cities were evacuated during the Blitz.

It is much later that the association of insecure attachment and addiction was scrutinized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowlby

The idea that toxoplasmosis is a contributing factor to mental illness is decades old. This paper is merely an incremental restatement of that hypothesis. The abstract says, "Instead of just alleviating symptoms with drugs, the parasite x genotype x stress model emphasizes that schizophrenia treatment should focus on detecting and treating possible underlying microbial infection(s), neuroinflammation, gut dysbiosis, and chronic stress."

Chris Palmer's treatment emphasizes reduction of inflammation and dysbiosis via dietary means. This hypothesis is not limited to treatment of schizophrenia, but also other mental illness, such as bipolar disorder. The following two recent podcasts are illuminating.

https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-p...

https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-evolving-our-a...

This seems consistent with Chris Palmer's hypothesis, that mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain, discussed in his new book Brain Energy[0]. He's done lots of podcast interviews[1], if you don't want to read the book.

[0] https://www.chrispalmermd.com/ [1] https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=chris%20palmer%20md&so...

McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZIR [1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=NZNV-NZIR [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZSP

I agree the most likely reason is that voice calls have become much more rare. But, a novelty-wearing-off effect may also be in play. When multiple fonts first became available, lots of people used lots of fonts-- the ransom note effect. Today there are more fonts than ever, but the vast majority of text is in the default proportional and monospace fonts.

Or the library! The GIF spec was published in a magazine IIRC. I wrote a GIF viewer that supported CGA, EGA, VGA, ... displays.

The GE XA100 is intriguing, not that it would be available for a corporate jet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_XA100 https://www.geaviation.com/press-release/military-engines/ge...

Pyblosxom itself is no longer in active development. Most recent tweet in 2018. https://twitter.com/PyBlosxom

By coincidence, I listened to this 2012 biographical interview only a few days ago. This is a good summary of his life's work. He was unbelievably lucid at age 94, and more recently. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h

I've always wondered whether turning it off merely hides it from the end-user.

Also, I couldn't find a way to preview a song to see whether it's one I want to buy. Searching for the song works, but when I press the play arrow to preview it, I'm prompted to join Apple Music. Canceling that prompt just returns to the search results, so there's no way to hear the song!

I agree, except the last sentence about "leftist activists" can be omitted.

I'm grateful for experiments like Copilot and replit's[0] "generate and explain." Maybe there are issues with software licenses and "ai assistants," but the way to surface the issues is with working software. I don't think this is a case of "move fast and break things." It's always been possible to abuse open source licenses without "ai."

There are plenty of alternatives to GitHub if you don't like it. There's no need for the hypercritical tone in this piece.

[0] https://twitter.com/tylerangert/status/1540013772693245958

Symantec Q&A was released in 1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_%28Symantec%29

For various definitions of query, the work goes back to the 1950s https://developer.ibm.com/articles/a-beginners-guide-to-natu...

I'm doing a trial of Sugar Shift[0][1], inspired by William Davis[2]. There may be a small improvement in my mood, but not enough to say with certainty. I'm not doing any tests to monitor for the other possible benefits of the supplement. Two weeks into the trial, I have a mouth sore, which is rare for me (less than one occurrence per year). This may be coincidental, but I discontinued the supplement for the time being.

I don't have a blood glucose problem particularly, but I am hoping to reduce inflammation. The manufacturer offers several probiotic supplements, and Sugar Shift seems to be the most comprehensive.

[0] https://biotiquest.com/pages/sugar-shift [1] https://biotiquest.com/blogs/blog/sugar-shift-challenge-the-... [2] https://drdavisinfinitehealth.com/

It's been possible to increase growth hormone by injection for a couple decades now, and I thought there was a cancer problem[0].

Also, there's the drive for homeostasis. In my own experiments with dietary supplements, I get a short term boost due to the supplement, but the body gradually re-configures itself accordingly, so there's no long term benefit. e.g., caffeine[1]

[0] Growth Hormone's Links to Cancer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30500870/

[1] Chronic Caffeine Alters the Density of Adenosine, Adrenergic, Cholinergic, GABA, and Serotonin Receptors and Calcium Channels in Mouse Brain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3437321/

EDIT: Author has a wikipedia article and a website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hanley_(microbiologist) https://bf-sci.com/

Production sites like YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, Reddit, ...? https://www.botreetechnologies.com/blog/top-15-websites-buil...

$29/mo seems high for the vast majority of podcasts, which are labors of love run on shoestring budgets. Of course, it's peanuts for the high traffic sites. Did you consider a Dropbox-like pricing model, e.g., free for low-traffic sites?