A Good Monday Morning

 

Your Official Almost Semi-World Famous Big Ass Irredeemable Weekend Open Thread

 It's Time Once Again for Your Beloved Blog Editrix to Turn Things Over to You, The Reader.

So Don Your Blogging Thongs, and As Always, Keep All Weapons in Plain Sight

......and Use the Damn Coasters.

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This Week, Your Glorious Exercise in Free Speech is Brought to You By:

The Nash Motor Company

Middle Finger Symphony Theater

 ~ No Tuxedos Required ~

Brought To You By BLUESJUNKY: Middle Finger Symphony Chair of Music

You Agree???

This is gold!! 🙌 @TruthSeek01011 pic.twitter.com/dOSTITTiy6

— Suzy🇨🇦 (@Susiemagooziee) February 16, 2023

Agree with her for the most part.

Except the last part where she says they will stop and go away.

~ Thank You Larwyn's Linx@ Doug Ross Journal for the Linkage! ~

ChatGPT Is a Bullshit Generator

Been reading some of the interesting articles and comments about AI lately. And people seem to have been having fun with ChatGPT, testing out question and commands. Some have even tried to trick it into saying the forbidden "N" word with the help of a doomsday scenario.  

ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it's talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It's more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you'll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that's what it's designed to do.

Unsuspecting users who've been conditioned on Siri and Alexa assume that the smooth talking ChatGPT is somehow tapping into reliable sources of knowledge, but it can only draw on the (admittedly vast) proportion of the interwebs it ingested at training time, with even a bit of TDS for good measure.

It's a bonus for the parent corporation when journalists and academics respond by generating acres of breathless coverage, which works as PR even when expressing concerns about the end of human creativity.

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences. Of course, the makers of GPT learned by experience that an untended LLM will tend to spew islamophobia in addition to talking nonsense.

OpenAI is acquiring billions of dollars of investment on the back of the ChatGPT hype.  The point here is not only the pocketing of a pyramid-scale payoff but the reasons why institutions and governments are prepared to invest so much in these technologies. For these players, the seductive vision isn't real AI (whatever that is) but technologies that are good enough to replace human workers. 

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Crazy Is Fun....... For a While.

“No society can entirely do without intelligentsia, but they’re like gut bacteria – valuable, but they have to be constrained in number and kept in their place or disaster ensues.” – Glenn Reynolds

In many ways, this is the most brilliant analogy I can think of to describe the problem of modern Western Culture. Gut bacteria is critical for human survival. It allows us to digest nutrients that keep us healthy. Likewise, intelligentsia help digest fresh intellectual concepts that keep a culture growing and dynamic.

But if gut bacteria escapes the digestive system and is introduced into the body, peritonitis results. It grows wildly out of control, inflaming the body’s tissues, creating abdominal pain, digestive upset, and eventually confusion and fatigue. Left unchecked death results.

Since World War II, in large part due to appreciation of how technology helped the Allies win the war, America created a meritocracy based on intellectual achievement. No longer was admired the fastest runner, the champion marble shooter, or the strongest boxer. The work of the artisan, whether the mechanic, the cabinetmaker, or the baker, was looked down upon.

Instead, the best and brightest were held up as exemplars. The intelligentsia exploded in numbers and escaped their natural environment of academia to populate — and run — all of society.  It took a while, but societal peritonitis has resulted, expressed as Woke culture, transgenderism, and Scientism as a form of worship. It will eventually reduce us to a regressive, feudalist society.

In Churchill’s words, “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

I don't know what the ultimate solution is or how we are to achieve it. We must find some way to return and confine the intelligentsia to their proper place without destroying them. They are necessary, but – as the last 20 years or so have demonstrated — we cannot allow them to run unchecked or to rule us. Crazy is fun for a while, like during your college years. It is too unstable to tolerate very long.

A Good Monday Morning

What Better Way To Kick Off Super Bowl Sunday Than With Film of Joe Biden Scoring Touchdowns.

Believe it or not, Joe Biden was a star hero footballer in high school, and what better way is there to celebrate Super Bowl Sunday than watching game film of the then-future POTUS doing a Justin Jefferson all over the his opponents scoring touchdown after touchdown?

In fact, there’s a collection of Archmere Academy game films — narrated by then-quarterback Bill Peterman and chock full of charmingly low-tech production, really loud unlicensed music, and some fancy dance moves by Peterman at the end — that has been sitting on YouTube since 2010, the year that Peterman and his former teammates met to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their undefeated season. But the clip has gone largely unnoticed, and as of writing this, has been viewed by just over 8 thousand people.

[Mediaite] ~ Thank You WHATFINGER NEWS for the Linkage! ~