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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • The declining birth rate isn’t going to hurt anyone alive today.

    Having a top heavy age demographic means less tax revenue will be split between more required services. There will also be fewer labourers with more labour requirements. The only ones it won’t hurt are the billionaires.

    It’s probably a good thing in the long run that human population is stabilising, but it’s going to be problematic until we get to that stable state.











  • I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert, and I don’t like to speak authoritatively on things that I’m not an expert in, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. Also I’ve had a drink or two, so that’s not helping, but here we go anyways.

    In the article, the author quips on a tweet where they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how LLMs work:

    I tabbed over to another tab, and the top post on my Bluesky feed was something along these lines:

    ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information. You cannot use it as a search engine. LLMs only generate statistically likely sentences.

    The thing is… ChatGPT was over there, in the other tab, searching the web. And the answer I got was pretty good.

    The tweet is correct. The LLM has a snapshot understanding of the internet based on its training data. It’s not what we would generally consider a true index based search.

    Training LLMs is a costly and time consuming process, so it’s fundamentally impossible to regenerate an LLM in the same order of magnitude of time it takes to make a simple index.

    The author fails to address any of these issues, which suggests to me that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

    I suppose I could conceded that an LLM can fulfill a similar role that a search engine traditionally has, but it’d kinda be like saying that a toaster is an oven. They’re both confined boxes which heat food, but good luck if you try to bake 2 pies at once in a toaster.