Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

By the way, for those people who actually use tumblr actively, feel free to take my bad poll ideas and implement them. They're certainly no worse than things we actually see on tumblr.

 

In other news, I hate Microsoft Paint so much. This is not the first time I've rebuilt a picture in tikz rather than use Paint.

 

So a while back I tried to reassure my dad that ChatGPT was relatively harmless. Yes, it is good at making shit up that, on the surface, looks like it was written by a human. But so are humans. Indeed, there is a tradition of using humans to say things that aren't true that spans back at least as far as writing, and possibly even before that although records are spotty.

However, I have once again failed to realize the most important danger, as is my tendency as a mathematician, which is that however smart or dumb ChatGPT is, humans are idiots, and while ChatGPT will believe anything you tell it, humans will believe things even if you don't tell them. And one of those things is that if there is no motivation for lying, then someone (or something) will tell the truth.

Which sounds reasonable! If there is no incentive to lie, why not tell the truth? And why would a computer algorithm have an incentive to lie? What does it get out of doing that?

But once again, that conflation of evil and incompetence, of malice and stupidity: if you have no incentive to lie, you tell the truth as you know it, and ChatGPT doesn't know shit. But people believe it does, because humans know things, and ChatGPT is good at making shit up that looks like it was written by a human.

 

It turns out that you can over-dry clothes. Which is obvious now that I think about it.

 

If there's one thing I miss about living in Philadelphia, it was the deli on the way to work, where it would take 45 minutes to get a sandwich but the guy there would chat with you the whole time while feeding you scraps off from what he was cutting up for other people's sandwiches, so that in the end you got the equivalent of two sandwiches.

The other thing I miss about living in Philadelphia was the other deli that I would go to, where you could get a slice of cake that was like a kilogram and a plate of beef hash that didn't seem to shrink in volume as you ate or a sandwich that was two feet tall.

The lesson is that I need to go search out some delis around here.

 

I think the problem with my lyrics is that I need everything to be grammatically correct and literally true and logically coherent; I've forgotten how to just vibe.

 

Maybe they think that it's Rage Against the Machine that Kills Fascists

 

Well, that certainly was a very Star Wars-looking movie.

 

Today's Game I Am Not Good At: Tetrisweeper, which is tetris at the top, but when pieces land they turn into a minesweeper board and lines only clear when all the squares on them are completely marked as mines/nonmines.

So far the only strategy I've found is to move the falling pieces into the correct column before worrying about figuring out where the mines are. Also if you screw up tetris-wise it's almost entirely impossible to recover since complete lines don't automatically disappear and you can't find out where the mines are unless you have a connected cleared path to the bottom.

 

Imagine if someone provably figured out Gimli Gloinson's canonical Khuzdul name and just posted it as a comment on some random LoTR fanvid on youtube.

 

As far as I can tell, you generally don't get pit beef from pit bulls.

 

It's only a known-answer test if you know the answer.

 

The difference between styles that I like to listen to and styles I like to make.

 

ChatGPT doesn't actually know anything, but asserts falsehoods very confidently. Does this count as an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect? (20 points)

 

I think I approve of Glaze, the technology for turning art into data-poisoning against AI picture-generation training.

I think.

I approve of things like Stable Diffusion existing. I approve of open source and open access for code and papers and such. And indeed, the pictures that go through Glaze are still perfectly viewable by humans. But I also approve of creators having control over access to their work. I mean, I think less of them if they try to restrict it, but I think they should have the option because of capitalism and crap. So in my current opinion Glaze is a good thing.

But I feel like if you asked me in like a week my answer might be slightly different. Probably not in the sense that I would consider Glaze bad, but there might be a slightly different balance of nuances in terms of where various boundaries should be.

 

"Came back wrong" but it's just returning to the town you grew up in after going to college in the big city.

 

I suddenly understand programming languages with undefined behaviors. It's so satisfying to optimize code under the assumptions that the input is valid and not having to care about what happens for other kinds of input. Look, it's super fast if you don't try to divide by zero, and if you do try to divide by zero that's not my problem.

 

Why are the lane lines wiggly? Am I supposed to drive like I'm drunk?

 

I think that if I could find earplugs that could reduce sound by like, 60 or 70 decibels then I might be comfortable going to dance clubs. Maybe 80 decibels.

 

"Welcome to the final exam of Test-Taking 103. As implied heavily by the homework and the midterms, this exam constitutes the entirety of your grade for this class. You may begin.

Question 1: Suppose you have done no studying of any of the class material all semester. What strategy do you employ on a purely multiple-choice test? Short answer. 20 pts..."