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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I have two main thoughts on this

    1. LLMs are not at this time reliable sources of factual information. The user may be getting something that was skimmed from factual information, but the output can often be incorrect since the machine can’t “understand” the information it’s outputting.

    2. This could potentially be an excellent way to do real research for people who were not provided research skills by their education. Conspiracy theorists often start off as curious but undisciplined before they fall into the identity aspects of the theories. If a machine using human-like language is able to report factual information quickly, reliably, and without judgement to those who wouldn’t be able to find that info on their own, this could actually be a very useful tool.



  • I just tested out the classic “She working” vs “She be working,” and the machine got it backwards. It can’t translate to AAVE, but it probably can appear to be well enough for people who wouldn’t know the difference. In terms of available written materials just by population and historical access it seems like there would be way more incorrect white imitations of AAVE to draw from than its correct usage. Like a lot of LLM issues, it’s been a problem for a loooong time but is now being put into overdrive by being automated.






  • OP, from this reception you may feel at least a little misunderstood. This is because you are being deliberately misunderstood because whiteness protects itself. Notice that no one commenting thus far has responded to you in good faith, but have only been dismissive or even reject the premise that this even could be a problem outright.

    Whiteness is interested in terminating any curiosity that challenges white supremacy. Exclusive white habitus is the expectation of those who identify with whiteness, and deviation is actively resisted. If white people didn’t do this there literally wouldn’t be white people and racism would be over. It persists because the people who maintain it are cultured to protect it by any means, especially by rejecting all challenges to it outside of an historical context.

    The reason I say all this is because I’ve attempted the same conversation you are attempting now and this has been what’s happened every single time. You can’t have a good faith conversation with anyone answering in bad faith. I think this effort is worthwhile and support it, but I advise not to waste too much time with anyone here who is more interesting in refuting you than the problem of racism.



  • I had a Switch for a few years before the Steamdeck came out. If all the games you want to play are available to play on Steamdeck, stick with Steamdeck. It’s more powerful, has way more games, you probably already have plenty of games to play on it, the games are way cheaper, and the degree which you can modify the software and hardware is pretty unique for a “console.”

    The Switch has an edge in form factor and is more convenient for me to use. Although Switch emulation on the Steamdeck is pretty decent, I still prefer the original hardware to play Animal Crossing or Zelda.






  • Some of my common uses are:

    1. Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.

    2. Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.

    3. Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.

    Fun uses which are less common:

    1. Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.

    2. Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.