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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • In a similar spirit, the Juicy Lucy was invented in MN, though two different bars claim to be the ones that invented it.

    A Jucy Lucy (or Juicy Lucy) is a stuffed cheeseburger with the cheese inside of the meat instead of on top, resulting in a melted core of cheese. It is a popular, regional cuisine in Minnesota, particularly in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Two bars in Minneapolis claim to have invented the burger, while other local bars and restaurants have created their own interpretations of the style.






  • The metaphor of “stochastic parrots” has become a rallying cry for those who seek to preserve the sanctity of human cognition against the encroachment of large language models. In this paper, we extend this metaphor to its logical conclusion: if language models are stochastic parrots, and humans learned language through statistical exposure to linguistic data, then humans too must be stochastic parrots. Through careful argumentation, we demonstrate why this is impossible—humans possess the mystical quality of “true understanding” while machines possess only “pseudo-understanding.” We introduce the Recursive Parrot Paradox (RPP), which states that any entity capable of recognizing stochastic parrots cannot itself be a stochastic parrot, unless it is, in which case it isn’t. Our analysis reveals that emergent abilities in language models are merely “pseudo-emergent,” unlike human abilities which are “authentically emergent” due to our possession of what we term “ontological privilege.” We conclude that no matter how persuasive, creative, or capable language models become, they remain sophisticated pattern matchers, while humans remain sophisticated pattern matchers with souls

    The paper is tongue-in-cheek, but gets to an important point. Anyone saying “But LLMs are just …” has to explain why that “…” doesn’t also apply to humans. IMO a lot of people throwing around “stochastic parrots!” just want humans to be special, and work backwards from there.


  • It’s easy to harrumph at this article if you hate AI and all that, but I think it’s interesting to try to come up with a somewhat objective definition of creativity. I do think it gets at an important part of the creative process, “Necessity is the mother of all invention”. When you’re working locally and stuff starts getting weird because of nonlocal constraints, then you have to start getting creative to make it all work coherently as best you can.








  • Yeah, my cat almost died from getting into chocolate he shouldn’t have been able to, but he’s very food-motivated and smart when it comes to accessing food. The vet said cat toxicity models for chocolate are mostly borrowed from the numbers for dogs, because cats are generally smart enough to not eat it. Not my cat though 🙀