I think it’s a touch more nuanced than that but yes the plot does follow Hari Seldon’s creation of a school of thought and study called psychohistory.

The main plot is that humanity would be plunged into 30,000 years of dark ages full of bad shit but Seldon believes following his plan it can be shortened to only 1,000 years of real bad times for the schmucks born then.

Like you said, one of the themes the books talk about is the paradox of knowing the future and if you can or can’t change it. If you know the future and do something to change it to be different from what you predicted - does that mean you did or did not actually know the future?

The books are awesome. The concept of being able to (more or less) predict the future and trying to shepherd humanity through various crises that will alter the timeline and trying to rescue us from our own nature is a fun one.

The nature of the story doesn’t lend itself well to adaptation in a visual medium but the show is decent (it does deviate some from the books and mess around with the timeline some to make it work better for TV). Can’t speak to the movie.

The Foundation Trilogy also was published 1951-1953 and you see a lot of ideas that became mainstay scifi tropes in their early form. For example, it’s easy to see the influence Foundation had on Dune.

How code is written directly impacts how well it runs and if it can even do what you want. Like if it’s written shitty it might work for 95% of the time and things you need it to but 5% you hit some random edge case and it explodes because it wasn’t properly tested and developed.

Yes, good eye!

Damn, I need to stop robomorphizing the software!

Dude, just voting for the lesser evil is good.

Like what do people want, the worse option just because fuck it? Makes no goddamn sense. Yes we all are voting for the lesser evil, that’s how politics works. It’s all varying degrees of evil and lots of shades of gray.

To be fair, there is some black and white in it. It’s pretty easy to say rounding up people based on how they look and putting them in concentration camps is BAD but apparently some people in our society are blind to that reality or (realistically) they’re bad people in their souls too.

I can’t imagine ever working for or wanting to work for ICE. These people are broken individuals who have embraced bullying and hate as their core identity. Fuck all of them.

Right I appreciate your insight. I’m not heavy in coding myself, I brush up against code and use it for some automation and assistance but I’ve also seen it write literal nonsense for code.

That rub is so real. I asked the thing to write some code for me for a Sailpoint workflow and I wasn’t familiar with the syntax so figured it’d be a good place to use AI. That thing hallucinated extremely convincing code except it just wholesale made up how it worked and of course it looks fine to my eyes but then go to run it and error -> work to fix that error and then -> error, etc etc.

After chasing my tail for an hour or two I finally stopped and went to pull up some official documentation and that’s when I figured out the AI was just hallucinating like a motherfucker. So I went back and did it the “old fashioned” way, but at least the AI did give me an idea of what I had to do.

Anyways, I could see someone who isn’t me just running around in circles for days because they believe the LLMs we call AI are giving them actual answers.

I blame some of it on how AI got mixed into web search. Traditionally, the resource from the web would at least be written by a human and usually relevant. Generally semi trustworthy and not made up. Now people see search results with AI summary/answer at the top and that is not vetted, could be a straight up hallucination*, or even just a total misinterpretation of your search phrase so totally irrelevant.

*I wish this term was different because it has an implication that the AI can and cannot hallucinate when the truth is the AI is always hallucinating. Put another way, to the LLM there is no such concept as truth. It annoys me that people seem to believe that the AI “knows” stuff. It does not. Stop anthropomorphizing the fancy robot.

I see some human patterns in there.

I took your post and gave it along with the prompt “you’re a Lemmy user, reply to this post saying the goal of LLM is to mimic human speech”

Guess which two were written by Gemini and which was written by my brain:

A) That’s the thing, though—LLMs are literally trained to mimic human writing patterns and quirks. Seeing “human patterns” in text doesn’t really rule out LLM generation anymore; it just means the model (or the prompting) was good at recreating how people actually talk and write.

B) The core purpose of an LLM is literally to mimic human text patterns, so seeing “human patterns” in a piece doesn’t mean it wasn’t generated or heavily written by AI. That’s just the tool doing its job.

C) Considering LLM are literally made to model human language; you’re going to see plenty of human patterns in LLM output. Hell that’s their selling point - you can’t tell it wasn’t made by a person!

33% chance you’ll guess right and maybe you still do know for real, and that’s great! You’re right that there is some “Je ne sai quoi” in the way humans speak but these LLM have gotten scary good at sounding like people. Especially if you don’t already know the “voice” of whoever wrote what you’re reading. Like certain grammatical tells of sorts.

Edit: I just realized this is even harder because my Gemini has a bunch of my writing to use for training data and defaults to trying to mimic my tone and style.

who cares how clean it is like this is what I don’t get about programmers they’re so obsessed with cleanness and it doesn’t matter

It matters to the compiler so the code actually will run and not break. It matters to whoever has to fix or update it when things change. It matters to the hardware it runs on and how much memory that hardware has.

It very much matters.

Ok but actual practical real world use case exists for this? So we know that in theory an imaginary thing that doesn’t exist could create a singularity event?

Honestly seems like it’s not useful but I’m not a mathematician so I don’t really know.

Honestly the Nazis were not this Uber competent group. Tons of in-fighting, poor strategic and logistical choices, and they did not run the government nor country in this rigid orderly way that is and was projected by their propaganda.

I would say they had a very good propaganda campaign that’s still ongoing and paying dividends. Once you look under the surface some and start learning more about how the country was governed it becomes clear there was plenty of room for improvement.

I mean, think about it this way, they chose to commit an industrial genocide on a hellacious scale wasting men, material and destroying the soul of a nation. How much more manpower would they have had if they didn’t commit these crimes against humanity and instead had drafted these folks.

Like I know it’s not a great comparison or awesome though experiment and lacking any nuance but I think it makes a point.

I’ve seen AI rewrite entire code bases overnight that would have taken a team of humans over a year.

And was the code better, cleaner and more readable? Moreover did it actually still do what it was supposed to and not introduce further unknowns?

I get that it’s basically just a prediction engine but thinking of it like that is unhelpful in my opinion.

Unhelpful in the sense that it is what it actually is or unhelpful in the sense that it makes you question the fake narrative we’re getting shoveled to us by tech bros and traditional mass media?

Like that’s just what it is. All I want is folks to be honest about the limitations of this tech and what is underpinning it. It’s still very impressive but at the end of the day there will always be an inherent problem with LLM in that they are non deterministic - you can give the same AI the exact same prompt 10 times and you’ll get 10 different replies.

There is no way to get around that. You can’t have a perfectly predictable output and even 1% of the time error is not good enough for widespread adoption when a mistake could mean someone dies or is horribly injured or loses a ton of money etc etc

Damn I try to keep my mouth shut but if someone screamed that near me I’d be interjecting. Like goddamnit the AI does not know anything.

It’s a machine modeling human speech. It’s all a hallucination and sometimes that hallucination is straight up lies and sometimes, hopefully most of the time, it aligns with actual reality.

I fucking loathe that people won’t take 15 minutes to just read a basic primer on what an LLM is. It’s a fancy autocorrect, and yeah it’s way more complex than that but at the end of a day it’s made to model realistic human language output - and that’s it. It doesn’t have any actual knowledge, it doesn’t have any way to know if what it says is true or not, and it certainly doesn’t know if what it says is insane.

I’ll mark your words with a big giant red X because it’s some doomerist bullshit.

Totally depends on the store you’re shopping at, foremost. Then secondarily what products you’re buying.

Where I live, self checkout is usually faster but I’ll still go through a regular line periodically. Frankly though I’m just picking up groceries most of the time at this point. It’s easy and if the people grabbing you things have a touch of empathy you get fine looking produce and meats too.

Anyways, you’re right it is definitely heavily dependent on where you live. Hell some places, especially in upper middle class areas, have a lot of the detection shit turned off (like you can actively put wrong weight stuff in or bypass the scans entirely - there’s a chance you may still get flagged but it’ll let you finish the order up before someone comes to put a code in to override it).

I guess if you’re going to commit petty theft I’d suggest you buy a decent outfit from a second hand store and go to a nicer grocery store self checkout.

The US is not our current president, who should have literally been sentenced to death for sedition, that is saying this insane shit.

A lot of us, most of us actually, are not keen on this orange faced fucker nor the bullshit his administration has been doing. I truly believe the reason we haven’t seen more violence in the streets is that we still have hope these elections in November will bring things back to a semblance of normality, hopefully that’s true.

I fear it is not.

Because we fought a civil war over that sort of thing? States can’t just secede just because they feel like it. No president is going to also roll over and let that happen on their watch - many lives were lost to preserve the union and the only way that’s going to change is if many more lives get lost.

Fuck those people, like literally think a big ass bomb dropped on CPAC would significantly improve the world but also … How do we know this is even real? A single still image with a thing on tv in the background could very well be easily faked.

What’s the podcast?

Human history and existence is one big ball of “just keep going” doused in a heap of “this is awful but imma make some babies because horny” so it just keeps going.

It’s pretty messed up but here we are. Going. Because what’s the alternative?