• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 28th, 2023

help-circle

  • The Turing test is flawed, because while it is supposed to test for intelligence it really just tests for a convincing fake. Depending on how you set it up I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern LLM could pass it, at least some of the time. That doesn’t mean they are intelligent, they aren’t, but I don’t think the Turing test is good justification.

    For me the only justification you need is that they predict one word (or even letter!) at a time. ChatGPT doesn’t plan a whole sentence out in advance, it works token by token… The input to each prediction is just everything so far, up to the last word. When it starts writing “As…” it has no concept of the fact that it’s going to write “…an AI A language model” until it gets through those words.

    Frankly, given that fact it’s amazing that LLMs can be as powerful as they are. They don’t check anything, think about their answer, or even consider how to phrase a sentence. Everything they do comes from predicting the next token… An incredible piece of technology, despite it’s obvious flaws.




  • S24 ultra, I have one for a similar reason, although I also really like a lot of its other features. While you can certainly get good photos with other phones, it is among the best on the market.

    I was considering a £500-600 DSLR like I’ve had in the past, but ultimately I like to take photos when an opportunity arises, not just at the times I happen to have my expensive camera on me. If you take a lot of photos but you aren’t a professional, the best thing is a high end phone. Doubly so, because unless you’re very experienced at setting up the camera correctly for the conditions, your phone camera is almost certainly going to do a better job than you would on a manual camera.

    So, in the end, rather than getting a cheaper phone and a camera, I combined the two. I know Samsung suck in a lot of ways, but when it comes to actually using my phone, they’re excellent compared to other brands I’ve tried.












  • I really appreciate this like of argument, and I don’t exactly diaagree, but at the same time I think you are falling into the same trap as the “simple biology” anti-trans crowd do, and looking for any one thing that defines sex. Sex is a complex collection of features which tend to co-occur. Your primary and secondary sex characteristics are all a part of what defines your sex. I’m not an expert here - the things I’ve listed are fairly basic in terms of what can/can’t be changed.

    But there are many aspects that won’t change with transition - there is no treatment that will magically make me a cis woman, I will always be trans. I will always need to make new doctors aware that I am - because there are factors affecting some medications that mean I should be prescribed as a male for example.

    I think the important thing for us trans people is not to focus too much on the biology. The important part imo is that it shouldn’t matter what your biology is - your gender identity is what makes you a man/woman. I’m wary of brain structure/chemistry “justifications” of trans identities for similar reasons. I’m sure there is truth there, don’t get me wrong! But I worry about over-medicalising trans identities in general, or even a diagnostic criteria which not all trans people meet…



  • I didn’t mean to suggest that sex is easy to define, just that characteristics like chromosomes, gametes and the like cannot be changed by transitioning. There are obviously things we can change (hormonal makeup, appearance), but it doesn’t change the underlying biology that you are born with.

    Definitely agree that the whole concept of sex becomes shaky in some circumstances - but it remains a concept which has value in fields like pharmacology. There are outliers, but there are also a huge number of people for whom the basic male/female categories apply.