HelloThere

Tl;dr women are humans, talk to them as humans, and maybe they’ll be up for making another human with you.

This comparison is ridiculous as they are completely different. This isn’t about talking to other humans, it’s about trying to establish a romantic relationship. It isn’t a tautology that to date someone you had to speak to them.

Having spoken to someone a little bit before asking them out for a date is very standard behaviour in every environment outside of locations where people are there specifically to find a romantic relationship (be that just sex, or more), like a bar, tinder, speed dating, etc.

It’s like, don’t just approach a woman in the office that you’ve never spoken to, and ask her out. It’s very unlikely (but granted, not impossible) that she wants to go from total strangers, to starting a relationship with romantic intentions, with someone she also has never spoken to.

But, if you’re making a coffee and she’s there too, be friendly and talk to her. Ask socially normal and typical questions like if she had a good weekend, and if so what did she get up to. If she’s receptive, keep talking to her. Once this has happened a few times, and she’s engaging with you - rather than just being polite and trying to get away ASAP - then ask her out. This doesn’t have to take a long time, it could be as quick as a couple of days, if you’re getting good responses from her.

It would be nice for someone else to take the spotlight in the clown show.

Sincerely, the UK.

Same goes for shellfish - unrefridgeated it can go nasty quickly, and if you live in a hot environment that’s gonna be even faster.

Hey friend. Remember, I did say when we last spoke that you can reach out it you fancy a chat, before you told me to go fuck myself.

Offer still stands.

Sup?

Enjoy your King, fellow subjects.

Again, Mintpress News support the state-capitalist authoritarian regimes of Russia and China, whilst claiming to be left wing.

They frequently parrot state propaganda, including lies about Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, and assorted George Soros nonsense.

Their funding is not transparent, and like Grey Zone frequently publish stories from contributors who appear on RT and Sputnik, such as Vanessa Beeley.

The Gray Zone are literal Putin apologists and are just parroting state propaganda against Bellingcat.

Bellingcat are also transparent about their funding, here

https://www.bellingcat.com/about/funding-and-how-to-support-bellingcat/

While The Grey Zone claim they take no funding from nation states, the editor Max Blumenthal frequently appears on Sputnik and RT.

Yet again an example of nutjobs projecting on to others what they are actually doing themselves.

How anyone in 2024 can claim to be left wing and apologise for state-capitalist authoritarians is beyond me.

Martyrs (assuming you mean the original) I found fascinating. While it may not be particularly deep, at least there was a point to it, even if that point is all encompassing nihilism.

For me, that is the point in horror as a genre, to confront you with philosophy. Zombie movies aren’t really about zombies, etc…

IMHO, A Serbian Film and Human Centipede 2 have some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen. Realizing that they are made for shock value kind of make them laughable though.

…which is why I agree with you completely here, they are just gore for the sake of gore. The best bit about HC2 is how HC exists as a film within it, which opens the possibility that it’s also a part of St Elsewhere.

Fun story, Salo was required reading (I guess watching?) for a few friends of mine at uni on different courses. I guess the lecturers were having fun messing with freshers. I already had a copy (ahoy) and was known as “the guy that watches weird films” so I ended up being a watch buddy for various people who really, really, didn’t like gore. I ended up dating one of them for a bit, which was always a fun “how did you meet?” story.

Begotten is so weird, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to pay attention all the way through.

My take on this is that it’s a predominately “rich person problem”.

Like pretty much all hobbies kayaking can absolutely be done cheaply, with some sensible ways of saving money and some rather dangerous ways.

Because the best kit is expensive, and status kit is even more expensive, rich people presume that because Awesome Person X uses Y, and they can afford to buy Y, they should also use Y.

What they forget is they are not APX, they are a newbie who cannot even get in the kayak without capsizing, and is now resorting to dragging their 3k carbonfibreglass composite beauty over gravel and rocks. We all start here, but most of us are in scratched up plastic boats where 1 more scratch doesn’t matter.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with throwing yourself fully in to something, especially if you enjoy it.

A different example would be cooking. Most people starting out will benefit from using Teflon-coated pans to stop food sticking and burning. But highly skilled cooks do not use Teflon, and will have pans with very different attributes (thicker or thinner bottoms, stainless steel, copper, ceramic, etc) and choose the best pan for the task. The newbie doesn’t know how to get the benefits, and ultimately performs worse.

I guess what I’m describing are hobbies where your interaction with that activity is through the equipment. In these you have to learn two things simultaneously, how to do the thing, and how to do the thing using this particular thing.

High-level equipment requires you to already be able to do the thing. Entry-level equipment helps you learn how to do the thing.

To be clear, I’m not taking price here.

Lastly, I also have adhd, and really wanted to buy a kayak after my first session too, but knowing that impulse is due to my ND I’m able to stop myself (having learnt the hard way a good few times). I appreciate not everyone can do this. Fwiw, I don’t think this is the only cause of this behaviour.

“All the gear, no idea”.

This applies to pretty much every hobby or interest I’ve had. It describes people who start a new thing, and immediately go out and buy “the best” equipment, which they do not have the aptitude to use.

For example, a few years ago I started kayaking, and joined a local club which has kit hire available for most kit, especially the expensive bits (kayaks, paddles, helmets, paddles). Kit hire is insanely cheap, literally £1 an item per day, so you’d need to hire a kayak hundreds or thousands of times for it to be cheaper to buy your own boat. Hiring also allows you to play around with loads of different makes, models, and shapes of boat to find what works for you.

When new people join the club they have two intro sessions, in which, in a purposefully stable boat, best case scenario, they do a mile on calm, slowly moving, water, some figure 8s, and don’t capsize.

Context for people who have never kayaked before, at this stage literally no one can paddle in a straight line. Hell, most people end up spinning around 180 degrees after 3-5 stokes as their dominate side overpowers. Trying to turn the kayak is scary because you have to lean over (like a bike) but you don’t want to go for a swim in the river, so you don’t lean far enough, which makes the kayak feel less stable. Overall for most people starting out it’s an enjoyable time, but with a lot of nervousness and trepidation.

The club provide a list of kit recommendations for people starting out, all of which is related to clothing to keep you dry-ish, and costs max £100. Both the club officials, and the members, continuously tell people to not go out and buy loads of stuff immediately and how the majority of members hire the boats.

But every year one or two of the newbies decide they absolutely love it and next week come back having spent a few grand on their own kayak, paddle, and high-spec clothing (dry suits, etc), and proceed to spend the next 2 months absolutely hating their lives because they don’t have the skill to paddle the kayak they’ve bought, continually capsize because it’s “so unstable”, and ultimately quit through frustration.

The record for this is when someone bought three boats - whitewater / river, sea, and playboat - each of which require different skills, some of which are mutually exclusive (in a river kayak you lean left to turn left, in a sea kayak you lean right to turn left). To their credit, they’ve stuck at it, and were either very lucky in buying boats which fit their style, or are just sticking with them and learning how to paddle them through sheer insistence. Either way, fair play.

Oh absolutely, my main point is that the people doing the work are more important than the people who don’t.

The implication being that removing the "no control, all the work, vs “total control, none of the work” paradigm it would reduce the amount of unethical behaviour that is coerced from workers. It won’t get to 0, and I agree that there still needs to be extensive regulation, but it would be an improvement.

Workers above Owners.

That you like IRC bots.

My question is simple.

Given humans have not already achieved this clarity of communication, when we are social animals, have been utterly dependant on each other for the entire existence of our species, the importance of communication was literally a matter of life and death, and for the vast majority of that time we only communicated through speech (written word dates to approx 4k BCE)…then why would an LLM, or any human-machine interface for that matter achieve this as a side effect of usage?

I fully accept that people, everyone, can be trained in precise speech, but we aren’t talking about purposeful training here.

You’re putting the cart very much before the horse here.

For what you describe to happen requires global ubiquity. For ubiquity to happen, it must be something with sufficient utility that people from all walks of time, and in all contexts (ie not just professional) gain value from it.

For that to happen, given the interface is natural language, the LLM must work across languages to a very high level, which works against the idea that human language will adapt to it. To work across language to that level it must adapt to humans, not the other way around.

This is different to other technology which has come before - like post, or email - where a technical restriction in particular format/structure (eg postal or email address) was secondary to the main content (the message).

For LLMs to affect language you’re basically talking about human-to-human communication adopting “prompt engineering” characteristics. I just don’t see this happening on the scale you describe, human-to-human communication is wooly, imperfect, with large non-verbal elements, and while most people make do most of the time, we all broadly speaking suck at making points with perfect clarity and no misunderstanding.

For any LLM to be successful, it must be able to handle that, and being able to handle that dramactically reduces the likelihood of affecting change, because if change is required it won’t be successful.

It’s basically a tautology, is why it’s such a difficult thing, and why our current generation of models are supported mainly through hype and fomo.

Lastly, the closest example to a highly structured prompt that currently exists are programming languages. These are used by millions of people every day, and still developers do not talk to each other via their prefered language’s syntax of choice.

Regardless of whether or not something replaces LLMs in the future, the data and processing that’s gone into that data, will likely be used along with the lessons were learning now. I think they’re a solid investment from any angle.

I’m a big proponent of research for the sake of research, so I agree that lessons will be learnt.

But to go back to Ops original question, how will LLMs affect spoken language, they won’t.

Do you actually believe this?

Yes. I’m also very happy to be proven wrong in the years to come.

If you ask an LLM a question, and it gives you a response that indicates it has understood your question correctly, and you are able to understand its response that far, then the LLM has done it’s job, regardless of if the answer is correct

I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but you cannot detach understanding / comprehension from the accuracy of the reply, given how LLMs work.

An LLM, through its training data, establishes what an answer looks like based on similarity to what it’s been taught.

I’m simplifying here, but it’s like an actor in a medical drama. The actor is given a script that they repeat, that doesn’t mean they are a doctor. After a while the actor may be able to point out an inconsistency in the script because they remember that last time a character had X they needed Y. That doesn’t mean they are right, or wrong, nor does it make them a doctor, but they sound like they are.

This is the fundamental problem with LLMs. They don’t understand, and in generating replies they just repeat. It’s a step forward on what came before, that’s definitely true, but repetition is a dead end because it doesn’t hold up to application or interrogation.

The human-machine interface part, of being able to process natural language requests and then handing off those requests to other systems, operating in different ways, is the most likely evolution of LLMs. But generating the output themselves is where it will fail.

Seeing as I’m very much a tech bro, no, hah.