Rooftops, Brașov.
orange tile rooftops of Brașov, plus a view if Biserica Neagra (“the Black Church”) under blue, partly cloudy sky.
orange tile rooftops of Brașov, plus a view if Biserica Neagra (“the Black Church”) under blue, partly cloudy sky.
@CoolerPseudonym i don’t know! i should read (or better yet see) it!
@CoolerPseudonym it’s not logical though to presume he can’t fly.
@StefanThinks this triggered me.
@CoolerPseudonym i’m unna become the main character on Qsite today with this one:
Socrates. Is. Mortal.
@akhilrao i myself am a very small language model.
@WisdomExplained@mastodon.sdf.org i’m in detention.
claiming to prove or disprove things by recourse to (contestable and contested) definitions is not “science”. when you construct syllogisms out of a game of telephone, because the same word shades to different meanings in different contexts, those syllogisms need not “by logic” be true.
compare and contrast: orgiastic, orgasmic
i could be a big fan of virtuous reality.
@MadMadMadMadRN it’s a pretty bad equilibrium… aka a pickle.
@guncelawits (thanks!)
@dfeldman I was pretty ambiguous in the piece about that, but I think private sector prices are subject to the same forces, but private sector contracting projects can pit those forces against one another, when the contractors have similar market power. So it's harder to make claims as general. Agency issues — to what degree are the people doing the contracting exposed to contract outcomes (especially price) — may then largely decide the balance. 1/
@dfeldman Public sector agents tend to be very weakly exposed to contract outcomes. Sometimes their exposure may be more aligned with vendor than purchaser interest (when, for example, there's the possibility of a job or board seat with the vendor as a downstream career). But even without such blatant corruption, public sector agents (both civil servants and electeds) are unlikely to have their salary or tenures tightly coupled to contract outcomes. 2/
@dfeldman Even in splashy cases in the public eye like CA HSR, blame is just too shiftable. So public sector purchasers tend pretty reliably to be unable to counter vendor determination to maximize take. 3/
@dfeldman Private sector purchasers definitely face that same determination, and as individuals we experience the same rapaciousness when, eg, we interact with private-equity-owned medicine or housing providers for example. Their "efficiency" is in large part a willingness to squeeze customers in ways that local, customer-interacting business people still balk at, for ethical and customary reasons. As individuals, we face a cost disease from minimal market power and motivated counterparties. 4/
@dfeldman But in private sector contracts where the contractor has a high degree of market power relative to many vendors, and where agents have strong incentives aligned with economic performance of the project, the same forces might lead to efficient outcomes for the purchaser, matched sometimes by brutal outcomes for vendors. I think it's harder to make very general claims. /fin
@laprice @lobrien if we had the industrial revolution to do over again, we would definitely want to do it differently. we would want much earlier broad distribution of the new wealth than actually occurred. the labor gains and welfare state of the early postwar years should have been late 19C. but i don’t think we would want to just never do it. (maybe climate change means we should have never done it? i’d say that’s another should’ve-been-done-better instead.)
@LouisIngenthron i guess i feel like we attribute a capacity to experience and therefore experience emotion more to the LLMs than the art-bots. the image generators produce emotionally evocative things for sure, but i don’t find myself anthropomorphizing them, it’s easier to imagine a surprising but mere statistical blender to whose outputs i attribute emotion than it is when i am actually “talking” to the blender.
@darwinwoodka sometimes it really does feel like a cut-rate universe!
@blabberlicious @LouisIngenthron maybe we should just call it a collaboration. (or maybe we decide only humans can be authors, so like the director is the *autor* of a film no matter how many hundreds participate in its creation, we may choose always attribute the creation to the humans.)
@LouisIngenthron they certain have astonished us! during the industrial revolution, though, i wonder whether there weren’t analogous moments of just awe that machines could do these things that previously only humans — and it took so many humans! — could do.
@LouisIngenthron the emotion question is interesting. so far, the LLM producers have really tried to limit apparent expression of emotion. (ChatGPT has become very neutral over the months, obviously Microsoft’s “Sidney” was clipped post NYT interview.) but even when they are restricted to HR-speak, we are somewhat awestruck. and it will be interesting to see how we’ll react to apps? bots? services? that aren’t tied back from reproducing (producing?) emotion.