Perspectivist

There are plenty of similarities in the output of both the human brain and LLMs, but overall they’re very different. Unlike LLMs, the human brain is generally intelligent - it can adapt to a huge variety of cognitive tasks. LLMs, on the other hand, can only do one thing: generate language. It’s tempting to anthropomorphize systems like ChatGPT because of how competent they seem, but there’s no actual thinking going on. It’s just generating language based on patterns and probabilities.

I have next to zero urge to “keep up with the news.” I’m under no obligation to know what’s going on in the world at all times. If something is important, I’ll hear about it from somewhere anyway - and if I don’t hear about it, it probably wasn’t that important to begin with.

I’d argue the “optimal” amount of news is whatever’s left after you actively take steps to avoid most of it. Unfiltered news consumption in today’s environment is almost certainly way, way too much.

Large language models aren’t designed to be knowledge machines - they’re designed to generate natural-sounding language, nothing more. The fact that they ever get things right is just a byproduct of their training data containing a lot of correct information. These systems aren’t generally intelligent, and people need to stop treating them as if they are. Complaining that an LLM gives out wrong information isn’t a failure of the model itself - it’s a mismatch of expectations.

Trust what? I’m simply pointing out that we don’t know whether he’s actually done anything illegal or not. A lot of people seem convinced that he did - which they couldn’t possibly be certain of - or they’re hoping he did, which is a pretty awful thing to hope for when you actually stop and think about the implications. And then there are those who don’t even care whether he did anything or not, they just want him convicted anyway - which is equally insane.

Also, being “on the list” is not the same thing as being a child rapist. We don’t even know what this list really is or why certain people are on it. Anyone connected to Epstein in any capacity would dread having that list released, regardless of the reason they’re on it, because the result would be total destruction of their reputation.

My word filters reliably block 3rd of my front page here. Includes every keyword seen here and much more.

Well, I didn’t literally mean there’d be just a single place. Obviously, once you set that precedent, other places like it would start popping up too. But it’s not obvious to me that this is a bad thing - or at least worse than the alternatives. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with people wanting to live among like-minded people and, in effect, build echo chambers for themselves.

I do think the philosophy behind it is immoral from my perspective, but that’s not really the point. What matters is the concrete effect this ideology has in the real world. And if, in our current cities, we have racists committing racist violence against minorities, then is it really so much worse to just let them all move off into their own little enclave where they can live out their perfect lives without any black people around, if that’s what they want? At least then the rest of us wouldn’t have to deal with them on a daily basis.

Way to move the goalposts.

If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.

Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.

So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.

Well let's hear some suggestions then.