Bennett’s Five Links #068
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Bennett’s Five Links #068
Super Intelligent Dogs; Irish Consultants
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Irish ..
Did you know, that in the movie the Shawshank Redemption, when Morgan Freeman’s character is asked “why do they call you Red?” and he responds with “maybe it’s because I’m Irish”.
It’s because the character in the novel was a red haired Irish man. They cast Freeman for the part but added the line as a joke.
Well how about that.
Why Morgan Feeman’s Character is called Red
(via r/todayilearned)
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A long read on getting read ..
This was a wonderful read by Henrik Karlsson. It’s a bit long, but I enjoyed his writing style and so I didn’t mind.
He talks about how writing on the internet has helped him to find his tribe and embrace who he truly wants to be.
It’s worth your time if you can spare some.
Some snips -
I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We don’t know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it. The first generation of explorers have noted that by making certain finger motions you can make the aliens show you images of cats and clothes, or tell you all the ways the world is falling apart.
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Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query.
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It will seem like I am mainly talking about how to use writing to forge meaningful relationships. I think doing that is beautiful and important. But lurking behind it is a larger idea. Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development.
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On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling.
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Seven perpendicular red lines with green ink ..
This is an old sketch now, it still makes me laugh.
.. and then question my life choices.
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The artificially intelligent dog produced my homework ..
I whole-heartedly endorse Ben Thompson’s take on how AI will integrate into our lives.
In the same way ‘this new Wikipedia thing’ was demonised during my time at university, I suspect our society will learn to accept and even embrace all the amazing things that are coming out of large language models.
Some snips -
The obvious analogy to what ChatGPT means for homework is the calculator: instead of doing tedious math calculations students could simply punch in the relevant numbers and get the right answer, every time; teachers adjusted by making students show their work.
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That there, though, also shows why AI-generated text is something completely different; calculators are deterministic devices: if you calculate 4,839 + 3,948 - 45 you get 8,742, every time. That’s also why it is a sufficient remedy for teachers to requires students show their work: there is one path to the right answer and demonstrating the ability to walk down that path is more important than getting the final result.
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AI output, on the other hand, is probabilistic: ChatGPT doesn’t have any internal record of right and wrong, but rather a statistical model about what bits of language go together under different contexts.
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Here’s an example of what homework might look like under this new paradigm. Imagine that a school acquires an AI software suite that students are expected to use for their answers about Hobbes or anything else; every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system. Moreover, instead of futilely demanding that students write essays themselves, teachers insist on AI. Here’s the thing, though: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator.
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Come on, Deli Originals, make a decision ..
(via r/Perth)
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Bennett