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[–] [S] 220 points 1 year ago (34 children)

Next step how many r in Lollapalooza

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  • [–] 100 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

    Obligatory 'lore dump' on the word lollapalooza:

    That word was a common slang term in the 1930s/40s American lingo that meant... essentially a very raucous, lively party.

    Note/Rant on the meaning of this term

    The current merriam webster and dictionary.com definitions of this term meaning 'an outstanding or exceptional or extreme thing' are wrong, they are too broad.

    While historical usage varied, it almost always appeared as a noun describing a gathering of many people, one that was so lively or spectacular that you would be exhausted after attending it.

    When it did not appear as a noun describing a lively, possibly also 'star-studded' or extravagant, party, it appeared as a term for some kind of action that would cause you to be bamboozled, discombobulated... similar to 'that was a real humdinger of a blahblah' or 'that blahblah was a real doozy'... which ties into the effects of having been through the 'raucous party' meaning of lolapalooza.

    So... in WW2, in the Pacific theatre... many US Marines were often engaged in brutal, jungle combat, often at night, and they adopted a system of basically verbal identification challenge checks if they noticed someone creeping up on their foxholes at night.

    An example of this system used in the European theatre, I believe by the 101st and 82nd airborne, was the challenge 'Thunder!' to which the correct response was 'Flash!'.

    In the Pacific theatre... the Marines adopted a challenge / response system... where the correct response was 'Lolapalooza'...

    Because native born Japanese speakers are taught a phoneme that is roughly in between and 'r' and an 'l' ... and they very often struggle to say 'Lolapalooza' without a very noticable accent, unless they've also spent a good deal of time learning spoken English (or some other language with distinct 'l' and 'r' phonemes), which very few Japanese did in the 1940s.

    ::: spoiler racist and nsfw historical example of / evidence for this

    https://www.ep.tc/howtospotajap/howto06.html

    :::

    Now, some people will say this is a total myth, others will say it is not.

    My Grandpa who served in the Pacific Theatre during WW2 told me it did happen, though he was Navy and not a Marine... but the other stories about this I've always heard that say it did happen, they all say it happened with the Marines.

    My Grandpa is also another source for what 'lolapalooza' actually means.

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    [–] 159 points 1 year ago (17 children)
  • [–] [S] 47 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It is going to be funny those implementation of LLM in accounting software

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  • [–] 134 points 1 year ago (101 children)

    It's funny how people always quickly point out that an LLM wasn't made for this, and then continue to shill it for use cases it wasn't made for either (The "intelligence" part of AI, for starters)

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago* (64 children)

    LLM wasn’t made for this

    There's a thought experiment that challenges the concept of cognition, called The Chinese Room. What it essentially postulates is a conversation between two people, one of whom is speaking Chinese and getting responses in Chinese. And the first speaker wonders "Does my conversation partner really understand what I'm saying or am I just getting elaborate stock answers from a big library of pre-defined replies?"

    The LLM is literally a Chinese Room. And one way we can know this is through these interactions. The machine isn't analyzing the fundamental meaning of what I'm saying, it is simply mapping the words I've input onto a big catalog of responses and giving me a standard output. In this case, the problem the machine is running into is a legacy meme about people miscounting the number of "r"s in the word Strawberry. So "2" is the stock response it knows via the meme reference, even though a much simpler and dumber machine that was designed to handle this basic input question could have come up with the answer faster and more accurately.

    When you hear people complain about how the LLM "wasn't made for this", what they're really complaining about is their own shitty methodology. They build a glorified card catalog. A device that can only take inputs, feed them through a massive library of responses, and sift out the highest probability answer without actually knowing what the inputs or outputs signify cognitively.

    Even if you want to argue that having a natural language search engine is useful (damn, wish we had a tool that did exactly this back in August of 1996, amirite?), the implementation of the current iteration of these tools is dogshit because the developers did a dogshit job of sanitizing and rationalizing their library of data. Also, incidentally, why Deepseek was running laps around OpenAI and Gemini as of last year.

    Imagine asking a librarian "What was happening in Los Angeles in the Summer of 1989?" and that person fetching you back a stack of history textbooks, a stack of Sci-Fi screenplays, a stack of regional newspapers, and a stack of Iron-Man comic books all given equal weight? Imagine hearing the plot of the Terminator and Escape from LA intercut with local elections and the Loma Prieta earthquake.

    That's modern LLMs in a nutshell.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (27 children)

    You've missed something about the Chinese Room. The solution to the Chinese Room riddle is that it is not the person in the room but rather the room itself that is communicating with you. The fact that there's a person there is irrelevant, and they could be replaced with a speaker or computer terminal.

    Put differently, it's not an indictment of LLMs that they are merely Chinese Rooms, but rather one should be impressed that the Chinese Room is so capable despite being a completely deterministic machine.

    If one day we discover that the human brain works on much simpler principles than we once thought, would that make humans any less valuable? It should be deeply troubling to us that LLMs can do so much while the mathematics behind them are so simple. Arguments that because LLMs are just scaled-up autocomplete they surely can't be very good at anything are not comforting to me at all.

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    [–] 59 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It's all about weamwork 🤝

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  • [+] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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    [–] 34 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    Now ask how many asses there are in assassinations

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (10 children)
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    [–] 30 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I really like checking these myself to make sure it’s true. I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED!

    (Total Rs is 8. But the LOGIC ChatGPT pulls out is ……. remarkable!)

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    "Let me know if you'd like help counting letters in any other fun words!"

    Oh well, these newish calls for engagement sure take on ridiculous extents sometimes.

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    [+] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
    [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    We are fecking doomed!

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I asked it how many Ts are in names of presidents since 2000. It said 4 and stated that "Obama" contains 1 T.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    We gotta raise the bar, so they keep struggling to make it “better”

    My attempt

    0000000000000000
    0000011111000000
    0000111111111000
    0000111111100000
    0001111111111000
    0001111111111100
    0001111111111000
    0000011111110000
    0000111111000000
    0001111111100000
    0001111111100000
    0001111111100000
    0001111111100000
    0000111111000000
    0000011110000000
    0000011110000000
    

    Btw, I refuse to give my money to AI bros, so I don’t have the “latest and greatest”

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Tested on ChatGPT o4-mini-high

    It sent me this

    0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
    0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
    0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
    1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
    0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
    1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
    

    I asked it to remove the spaces

    
    0001111100000000
    0011111111000000
    0011111110000000
    0111111111100000
    0111111111110000
    0011111111100000
    0001111111000000
    0011111100000000
    0111111111100000
    1111111111110000
    1111111111110000
    1111111111110000
    1111111111110000
    0011100111000000
    0111000011100000
    1111000011110000
    

    I guess I just murdered a bunch of trees and killed a random dude with the water it used, but it looks good

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  • [+] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (9 children)
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