Open thread 4/1/2025
Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?
The above video was displayed perfectly when I set this post up. But somehow it then went to “private” mode and is no longer viewable except by invitation. It was a pretty nifty demonstration of the passage of time, showing closeup photos of Prince Philip in backwards order, starting with age 99 and then with a photo every previous year all the way back to babyhood.
I’ve now put up this one, which I admit is a very poor substitute:
Is there supposed to be a video? Or, is this another April Fool
–“Trump Signs Executive Order: Fahrenheit Now ‘AmeriTemp’”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/01/trump-signs-executive-order-fahrenheit-now-ameritemp/
–“Trump Signs Executive Order: Fahrenheit Now ‘AmeriTemp’”
April Fool?
My physics major husband laughed at “And who’s that Kelvin guy?”
My preferred solution is to have Sotheby’s, Christie’s and others submit sealed bids for segments of the business and then have them auction off the Smithsonian’s inventory. Then we can fire the staff and demolish the place. The more of these schmucks we can move into the barista sector, the better.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/u-portland-theology-majors-no-longer-have-to-study-bible-can-take-queer-class-instead/
==
The Church will be better off when this rancid “Catholic” college implodes.
OMG! I HATE APRIL FIRST (FOOLS DAY)!!! I have a hard enough time the other 364 days of the year trying to decide fact from fiction!
Anne:
I admit I had to google that one to be sure it was a fool’s.
It did sound a lot like Trump and the Gulf of America. 🙂
Oh really
https://x.com/willchamberlain/status/1907125423219020236
I believe that, some time ago, I wrote here saying that the way things in the UK were looking, pretty soon we here in the U.S. were going to see a wave of native English seeking refuge.
Unfortunately, I think that the English government’s suicidal immigration, anti-White/English, and anti-freedom policies have changed things so drastically (for instance, the ancient city of London, with a history of more than 2,000 years, is reportedly now only 37% native) that it can be said that the England of tradition will soon fall or, perhaps, has already fallen.
So, I expect to see many of those refugees showing up.
Similarly, so horrific, violent, and systematic has the persecution and spoliation by the majority black government of the white Boers in South Africa been, that President Trump has offered the Boers who want to leave (35,000?) refugee status here in the U.S.
The “lights are truly going out,” in much of Europe.
The two Florida special elections for the House have both been won by Republicans.
Wisconsin polls close in about 45 minutes. No worries; my brother-in-law says he registered all his backyard squirrels and they all voted R. More seriously, various X accounts are reporting high suburban and rural turnout in Wisconsin. Fingers crossed!
Weirdly, it seems even the AI people don’t really know how today’s LLM AIs work. Here’s an amazing paper from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI.
–Anthropic, “Tracing the thoughts of a large language model”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-model
A standard criticism of LLMs is that they are essentially auto-complete on steroids. They start from the prompt and keep adding words according to their training until they stop.
However, now that researchers have got around to real research that turns out not to be the case. They used human neuroscience to investigate:
____________________________________
We take inspiration from the field of neuroscience, which has long studied the messy insides of thinking organisms, and try to build a kind of AI microscope that will let us identify patterns of activity and flows of information.
____________________________________
We may be looking at different architectures — carbon vs. silicon — but the patterns we’re finding are starting to rhyme.
According to the article Claude does a large amount of processing before it starts outputting language. Claude has already “thought” about it in its own representation to the end before it transform its “thinking” into human language.
That’s not news to me. I know I don’t “think” in human language either. That comes after some non-verbal process that I only put together into words later.
huxley, I sent your link on LLM hallucinations to my daughter, who is working with one at her corporation. She tells me that its data field is closed (for security reasons) and it STILL makes things up.
@huxley:We may be looking at different architectures — carbon vs. silicon — but the patterns we’re finding are starting to rhyme.
That’s an old fallacy, thinking that the interiors of two black boxes must be the same because the inputs and outputs match. Not that we got the matches yet, of course, but assuming arguendo that we did, it wouldn’t prove that they are doing the same thing internally.
Niketas Choniates:
You only respond to my comments to disagree or to snark. I don’t think you read me carefully nor am I impressed with the quality of your reasoning.
I qualified my claim with “may.” Nor did I claim that the “the interiors of the black boxes must be the same.”
Furthermore, whether you like it or not, the Anthropic researchers did investigate Claude as though its black box was similar to the human brain black box.
Since LLMs are based on neural networks intentionally designed to mimic human neural networks it isn’t a terrible leap to to attempt to understand LLMs based on neuroscience.
@huxley:the Anthropic researchers did investigate Claude as though its black box was similar to the human brain black box.
No less fallacious even so.
I don’t think you read me carefully nor am I impressed with the quality of your reasoning.
I’m not impressed with your cheerleading for LLMs, if we’re being candid. But feel free to scroll past anything I say which you consider beneath notice. I am relieved that folks are no longer quoting their interactions with LLMs in the comments like they used to: I try to count my blessings.
LLMs are based on neural networks intentionally designed to mimic human neural networks
There is no one who understands human “neural networks” well enough to know if LLMs are in any way analogous. “Inspired” by human “neural networks” I grant you. Our understanding of what neurons actually do and what any of that has to do with thinking and memory is in its infancy, and most of the complexity of real neurons is simplified away in the modeling that computational neuroscientists do to study human neural networks. At best, the kind of network under the hood of an LLM is analogous to a simplified mathematical model of biological neurons, and we have yet no way to know how much of a difference that abstraction and simplification makes.
I’m not a Luddite, but I’m definitely not in love with AI per se, from my limited knowledge about it. I am impressed with its potential in programming, engineering, science etc., but think that it needs to be supervised by humans.
I share Niketas’ weariness with quoted AI output, and skip over such comments. I read an article, the author of which I forget, but it was a well known, credible person, who preferred the term Artificial Stupidity. It may have been the same author who urged not using the term “hallucinations,” but instead just “errors,” I think because the former gave too much respect to the bots. I’m thinking this could also be a case of anthropomorphising.
This also leads me to think about the perils of technology. The Internet has brought many benefits. It also has led to mental disturbances, and has enabled criminals and terrorists in their dirty deeds. I’m not opposed to space exploration; on the other hand I think maybe we should clean up our own backyards, before journeying to strange new worlds, to screw them up too.
PS I read somewhere a while back, don’t know if it’s true, that Amazon’s website is totally run by AI!
PPS – A fun fact which popped into my mind, was that sci-fi author Ray Bradbury insisted that the Internet was a “hoax.”
Gosh! How did THAT happen?!
“Report: Over 1,000 child deaths disappear from Hamas casualty list;
“Analysis by Honest Reporting board member and NGO Monitor analyst Salo Aizenberg shows Hamas has removed about 3,400 “verified deaths” on its 2024 casualty reports from its latest casualty report.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/406249
Re: “getting all kinds of colds as I age”–great immune booster, and likely how my grandma got seven children to their 90s without antibiotics or vaccines:
https://x.com/PittGuru/status/1907785129696579771
(You can freeze the “recipe” to copy it.)
The entire thread:
https://x.com/PittGuru/status/1907785105239630326