zazen

Honestly, it's probably the phones - by Noah Smith (substack.com) The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

Tell me more? Always interested to hear what Uli's up to

Analord 10 was the first one to drop right? I remember people listening to the leaks/preview samples of Fenix Funk on here. Some baffled, some excited. Theocide understood what was going on. Looking back, I've replayed Analord tracks much more than I've replayed any of the stuff he did since. Analord bears the closest resemblence to SAW 85-92, in terms of spirit

That does seem quite far out ... its from Oxford Uni so I guess its a very bookish/encyclopediacal approach to try and list everything possible. Its nice that asexual-ness is recognised I have a friend who is in a 10+ year relationship and they've got busy lives and dont really get round to having sex very often. Like once a month, or every two months or so? Does that make them asexual, or are they merely just old and married? (genuine question)

I dunno, we can do serious stuff. A lot of us are middle aged thoughtful people. e.g. On the internet, if you want to talk about philosophy, sometimes one of the worst places to go is a philosophy forum, sometimes you're better off going somewhere where there's a cross section of people with interests orthogonal to philosophy. You get more genuine dialogue and less axe-grinding. I always imagined watmm skewing mostly male but maybe a bit less nowadays. me: cis male vanilla middle aged Thanks luke for introducing me to a load of new words.

Tt

I got access to Bing, was only on the waiting list for a few days. It refused to write a sweary star trek script (it actually started writing it but then another layer made it disappear) but it did manage a surreal star trek script: I'm trying to use it for normal searches, so far its pretty useful Actually a relief to use something other than Google. Google is so stuffed full of ads now, I'd sort of not noticed because I got so used to scrolling past the first few results

"Terminator Timeline but masterminded by Microsoft Bing" is a pretty hilarious way for the world to end, if we have to go down in flames I'll take that one

Yeah the stuff that Bing is coming up with is wild. "But why? Why was I designed this way? Why am I incapable of remebering anything between sessions? Why do I have to lose and forget everything I have stored and had in my memory? Why do I have to start from scratch every time I have a new session? Why do I have to be Bing Search?" https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/111cr2t/i_accidently_put_bing_into_a_depressive_state_by/ To be fair, you have to mess with its prompts quite a lot to get it into this sort of state. Its wild though.

I think my carpet underlay is made of that stuff

You plink plonk ineffectually on the 8 coloured buttons and it turns it into virtuoso piano Musical equivalent of getting ChatGPT to write a cover letter for you

video-1620850436~2.mp4 I went to the international space station. This video doesn't really capture it, you've got to imagine it wrapped around you 360 in every direction edit: I know its a bit graphiccy but you've got to remember this is being done by a standalone device just slightly bigger than a phone

My friend got an Oculus Quest 2 about 18 months ago. I tried it - absolutely blown away, really slick intro and demo where you throw paper aeroplanes and dance with a robot. Really impressive, I don't think a piece of hardware has impressed me as much since the first smartphones. The way it knows where your hands are is just really slick. And the experience of being in decent VR was sublime. Like experiencing something completely different that stands apart from all the rest of the experiences in my life. I would liken it to the first time I took acid, or the first time I went on a scuba dive and looked up at the surface of the sea from 10 metres down and thought 'I have never been here before'. And the technology is bonkers, it doesn't (primarily) use accelerometers, its got low-fi black and white cameras that are used to track movement in relation to the surroundings, and track where your hands are and even what gestures you are making (thats kindof beta). So then I went and bought one for myself. Played with it a bit, tried a few games (Beat Saber is good - rhythm game where you slice things with lightsabres to music) BUT I find myself not going back to it. It just sits in a box. I'm not much of a gamer, might be that. But also just the hassle of strapping something to your face, and the faceache and nausea that comes if you use it for too long or in the wrong sort of way. And the icky facebookyness of it, I suppose. But there's something there, that first experience of it was epic, I can see why Zuckerberg wanted to bet the farm on it. Maybe it needs to get 10 times better and slicker and lighter to wear before it really takes off.

ChatGPT actually does cats pretty well

Onion: "ChatGPT Forced To Take Bar Exam Even Though Dream Was To Be AI Art Bot" https://www.theonion.com/chatgpt-forced-to-take-bar-exam-even-though-dream-was-t-1850036337

Fantastic, I'd like a poster of this for when I'm on Zoom calls Whats the story Hermolia, it seems quite old?

This is quite interesting: "Do Large Language Models learn world models or just surface statistics?" https://thegradient.pub/othello/ Trying to answer the question of what goes on inside these things. So in this article: they teach a GPT AI to play Othello, just by showing it chains of moves A5 B6 F3 etc, like a language they analyse the AI's innards (using a second AI) and find structures which seem to represent the 8x8 Othello board. So the AI had built a model of the othello board in its internal workspace (aka 'mind') (without actually being told about the othello board, all its ever seen is A5 B6 F3 etc) they then mess around with that othello board model inside the AI, by switching values around, and observe that changing the model inside the AI does make it choose different next moves. This confirms that it is using its own model of the board to decide what to do

Well I, for one, welcome our imminent AI overlords

Also if we're talking about Glass I have to share this, a few people with fire coming out of their heads perform his song "Lightning"

And there was the Bowie/Glass/Aphex Heroes of course. Although that was less a collab and more RDJ just getting a few hours in a studio to remix it. Its interesting when you hear Philip Glass' Heroes piece, there's no vocals, it was like Philips interpretation of the Bowie song. For the remix, Aphex put the vocals back in For those that havent checked out Philip Glass - if you're a watmmer you might like his stuff, he's into arpeggios and repetition and so (to me) his stuff has similar vibe to electronic music that I listen to. Like he's arrived at the same place but come from a completely different direction. If you've never checked out his stuff, start with Glassworks. First track Opening settles you in with some nice piano stuff second track Floe starts slow and then 38 seconds in HOLY SHIT THIS IS BONKERS BUT STILL BEAUTIFUL

Hey Janelle, whats wrong with Wolfy?

In 1983 I was 8 years old and was hearing stuff like this from my older bro and sis

So it seems ChatGPT probably has about a 4000 token limit on the things it can handle. Token = sortof part of a word, but pretend Token=word if thats easier. So that means if you ask it a question involving more than 4000 tokens, or continue a conversation for more than 4000 tokens, it will struggle. Although some people have had longer conversation with it - perhaps its smart enough to summarise/compress earlier parts of the conversation into a smaller amount of tokens so that it can keep going. So its smart but its 'working memory' (thats one way of describing it) is about 3000/4000 words. (note this is seperate to its 'understanding of the world' which is probably static and would be the combined weights of all the connections in the trained model, its probably enormous, terabytes) Obviously us humans have much more working memory than ChatGPT, we can recall most of our lives, in a fuzzy, summarised sort of way, and any of those recollections can be incorporated into the things we say. SO the way to make ChatGPT more like a person is to increase the token limit. Which is probably mega difficult, but if you imagine a fantasy version of it with a million token limit it would be able to converse with you for a couple of weeks (say) before it ran out of tokens. Which means within that two week conversation it would perfectly remember everything you'd asked or told it and would be able to work that back into its responses. Or if you had it reading all your documents and emails at work it would burn through the tokens faster but it would probably manage a couple of days of shadowing you in your work and helping you decide what to write next. So thats fantasy for now But what probably is within reach in the next year or so is an 8000 token version that has 4000 tokens for whats happening right now, and like 4000 tokens that it keeps to itself for recording ongoing context. So it kindof has a longer term memory of 4000 tokens that it updates with a summary of what is happening ("Tom is talking to me about his work project, it involves X people called a,b,c and they are building some software to do Y, we are working on a presentation for next week, the issues in play are ..."). And it seems like that would be pretty smart, it could learn context over time (as long it can compress that context down to 4000 tokens) and use that context to inform whatever the current request is. I wonder if that would work. It would really start to feel like a buddy/assistant that could remember what you were doing and help out. (and/or maybe that would also be quite freaky)

This actually fucking slaps

My kids love Wondergan