The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway
The checker does make all the difference, but he doesn’t need to be able to write it by himself. It could be even a brainless process, such as natural selection.
I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).
I know. It’s just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn’t help but share my brainfart here.
Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.
If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.
I have a way to make it work.
Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.
Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.
And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.
Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.
It would take even longer, right? Well… not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.
But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.
Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.
I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.
Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.
And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.
Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.
And we need more of them!
Just for reference: in my State (somewhere in Latin America), since 2007, we have a law that TL;DRs to “if you offer a service through a certain mean, you must offer the cancellation method through the same mean; plus by phone, or internet, or snail mail”.
It works like a charm because, contrariwise to what Michael Powell is claiming, customers aren’t such disgustingly stupid trash that will “accidentally” hit the cancel button, nor they deserve to be punished by making cancellation a fucking pain in the arse. (There’s probably similar laws elsewhere.)
You’re right. And IMO they should be legally banned from doing so - because the people who signed up for this crap agreed with 23 and Me’s ToS, not with someone else’s.
But, well… as you said, capitalism going to capitalism. The “right thing to do” is often out of the table of options.
I have a relative who considered doing this test. I’m glad that the family talked him out of it. (Surprisingly enough, not just me.)
Anyway, my [hopefully not “hot”] take: for most part the data should be destroyed, as it involves private matters. If there’s data that cannot be reasonably associated with an individual or well-defined group of individuals, perhaps it could be released into the public domain, but I’m not sure on that.
That’s a better way, I agree.
The fun part isn’t even what Apple said - that the emperor is naked - but why it’s doing it. It’s nice bullet against all four of its GAFAM competitors.
It’ll likely turn out that the more dispassionate people in the middle, who are neither strongly for nor against it, will be the ones who had the most accurate view on it.
I believe that some of the people in the middle will have more accurate views on the subject, indeed. However, note that there are multiple ways to be in the “middle ground”, and some are sillier than the extremes.
For example, consider the following views:
Both positions are middle grounds - and yet they can’t be accurate at the same time.
Here’s a simple test showing lack of logic skills of LLM-based chatbots.
I’ll exemplify it with ChatGPT-4o (as provided by DDG) and Katy Perry (parents: Mary Christine and Maurice Hudson).
Note that step #3 is not optional. You must start a new chat; plenty bots are able to retrieve tokens from their previous output within the same chat, and that would stain the test.
Failure to consistently output correct information shows that those bots are unable to perform simple logic operations like “if A is the parent of B, then B is the child of A”.
I’ll also pre-emptively address some ad hoc idiocy that I’ve seen sealions lacking basic reading comprehension (i.e. the sort of people who claims that those systems are able to reason) using against this test:
I still fail to see how people expect LLMs to reason. It’s like expecting a slice of pizza to reason. That’s just not what it does.
This text provides a rather good analogy between people who think that LLMs reason and people who believe in mentalists.
As I mentioned in another thread, about the same topic:
First Zendesk dismissed the report. Then as hackermondev (the hunter) contacted Zendesk’s customers, the issue “magically” becomes relevant again, so they reopen the report and boss the hunter around to not disclose it with the affected parties.
Hackermondev did the morally right thing - from his PoV it was clear that Zendesk wasn’t giving a flying fuck, so he contacted the affected parties.
All this “ackshyually it falls outside the scope of the hunt” boils down to a “not our problem lol”. When you know that your services/goods have a flaw caused by a third party not doing the right thing (mail servers not dropping spoofed mails), and you can reasonably solve the flaw through your craft, not doing so is irresponsible. Doubly true if it the flaw is related to security, as in this case.
I’m glad that Zendesk likely lost way more than the 2k that they would’ve paid hackermondev for the hunt. And also that hackermondev got many times over that value from the affected companies.
It needs to work and be reliable
True that. And it needs to offer a better service than Google; “our services are federated so please use them!” is not enough to encourage the shift, I think.
The video can be summarised into three main points:
I’ll focus on #2. Federated search might alleviate the problem.
It’s counter-productive to optimise a page for multiple search engines, running different algorithms; it might perform better on [let’s say] Google, but worse on [let’s say] Bing, or vice versa, since they run different algos that prioritise different things. As such, almost all SEO is made for Google results.
And, in an environment where no search engine dominates the market, and the search engines use different algos, SEO goes away.
The problem with that is people don’t want to use multiple search engines - they want to use one, that they believe to bring the best results on. (That’s why we have a problem called Google on first place.) If only there was some way for those search engines to coexist, and to benefit from each other… well, that’s basically federation, right?
How I see it working:
I believe that this system would make SEO really hard to do; in practice you’d be better focusing on good content. It would also lead to a situation where different search engines want to specialise, but still keep each other alive - as they benefit from their peers.
It’s in Italian. I should’ve changed it before the screenshot, but it takes effort to do so, and I’m lazy.
My computer settings are all in Italian, to avoid getting rusty with the language. Sabe como é - não usa, enferruja.
He’s a jumento / donkey and a piece of shit on moral and ethical grounds; he doesn’t give a flying fuck about the population, and seems to have a burning hate against marginalised groups. However, he isn’t too prone to shoot his own feet.
This is relevant in this case because social media is essential for what he’s doing: gathering support for his meat puppet’s potential election, while playing the victim of an anti-democratic government. “Poor me, I was unjustly prevented from being a candidate! The powers to be don’t want me to! Vote on $person by the way.” As such his interests align really well with Musk.
For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:
“What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”
Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.