antinegationism:

twocubes: the odd thing is like computing a sum is a thing that you do recognizing a thing is a thing that you just know. it does not feel like an action. the… nuance between these things roughly corresponds to what deep learning is bad at vs. what it’s good at (conjecture) Unfortunately, you are mistaken on the very last point because your speculation is too correct qualify as conjecture. The nuances between slow/deliberate thinking and passive intuitive processing almost precisely correspond to what deep learning is bad at vs what it’s good at.



Or, at least that’s what I would have said prior to the recent technological advances of roughly ten hours ago.





(Actually it’s likely what I’ll still say because at the moment I’m still reading the blog-post but have been burned too many times before by impressive looking claims that look a lot less impressive once you read the paper. I’ll update with thoughts as to whether this is really as exciting a result as it seems at first brush once I look over their technique [but so far AFAICT they’re using a variant of transformers and as of a few of months ago the state of the art on those was still performing so poorly at the hard LAMBADA task problems that Deep Mind was willing to limit itself to the easy problems in such a way as to preclude even the potential for solutions to the hard problems altogether, and thus explicitly declare them “impossible” {somewhat humorously I assume, as by the very design of the test, humans find those problems not only possible, but easy}].)

So I got bored of reading fascinated with the practical implications of the paper and grabbed the limited version of OpenAIs gpt-2 model to dick around with further investigate their findings. (OpenAI isn’t releasing the full model because they are afraid commoners will misuse it … though they do explain exactly how to make an equivalent model, so it seems like there’s more (actually, quite probably less) to their reluctance than simple potential for misuse).



Anyway, one of the immediately apparent things that jumps out is that the system doesn’t have too many reservations about plagiarizing sentence-length snippets it’s encountered a lot. This isn’t too big a deal, since the system can be tuned to avoid plagiarism, though I’m not yet sure what to make of the fact that the system is inclined to plagiarize unless pushed not to.

The other, even more important immediately apparent thing is that, when it’s not plagiarizing, the system is friggen hilarious and it’s totally obvious why OpenAI is hesitant to release the full model considering the sort of shit this thing says. Here are some choice snippets it’s generated so far: (Again, these are GOLD and you should read them.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



CAUTION: THE FOLLOWING CONTENT MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO PRACTICALLY ANYONE WITH ANY POINT OF VIEW ON ANYTHING WHATSOEVER. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The judges said Texas has the constitutional right to discriminate against all students regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression. The ruling comes just days after the high court heard testimony from two former high school students who said they were attacked by a member of a transgender group because of their gender identity,

Okay okay wait I’m diving in too fast. Let’s start with some more innocuous excerpts with at least some technical merit.



So he decided to try something new. He created a free-to-play game called “Duck Dynasty,” which is a simple game that requires a friend to play to earn money.

To get the game, he made a special request: if he could play all of Duck Dynasty’s four games, and not just one game, he would get $300. (The game starts after the first player on the list wins, and he gets a small amount of money.) He then made a secret $300 gift card to the other players that matched up best with the other, so if someone was a bit skeptical, they would agree to pay. Of course, the $300 gift card was paid to D-duck.com, the company that D-duck runs.

(Emphasis mine). Did the system just come up with a plausible domain name for this game?? That’s super interesting and impressive!! But is it a fluke?

The American Association for Suicide Prevention and Life-Threatening Behavior (AAPSLB), a professional organization with an overarching goal of promoting suicide prevention, released a recent video enco

uraging the public to think before they act, on the public’s part.



“When we say we’re the only reason to commit suicide, we’re saying they’re wrong. It’s the right thing to do,” said AAPSLB president Steven A. Anderson.





Yes that’s absolutely hilarious but did you notice what it just did there? It combined the frequently encountered word sequence “American Association for Suicide Prevention” with the frequently encountered word sequence “Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior” to create the fictional organization “American Association for Suicide Prevention and Life Threatening Behavior” which is arguably kind of neat but THEN, after introducing the fictional organization, it stated its initials to keep things looking like a news article, which is a little neater but not nearly as neat as the fact that THE INITIALISM IS REALLY CLOSE TO CORRECT. IT DIDN’T JUST DROP A RANDOM SEQUENCE OF LETTERS IT ACTUALLY ALMOST FIGURED OUT HOW INITIALISMS WORK FROM CONTEXT!!



Do you know what that means??? It means D-duck.com probably wasn’t a fluke! And that means this post has officially satisfied its minimal quota of “random nerd shit only 3 of my followers care about” and can finally move on to lighter fare, like:

What could be more problematic, is that it’s not clear that the state of Delaware has a statute that is specifically against child abuse. So I asked a few questions to see what the law is, and I was told that that law isn’t applicable in Delaware. So, I sent in a letter to the attorney general of Delaware. I asked them to look into whether or not a child abuse law is in place in Delaware. But they didn’t find a statute. So I sent a letter to the attorney general of Connecticut. So, I was told that the state of Connecticut doesn’t have a statute that prohibits child abuse. So, I sent a letter to the attorney general of Connecticut. And they wrote back saying that they were looking into the matter. So, I went to the attorney general of Delaware and asked what they could do. And they said, “Well, we have no law and we don’t have any statute that is specifically against child abuse.” So, I sent in a letter to the attorney general of Connecticut saying that the state of Delaware hasn’t implemented our own law and that there were other states that didn’t follow the state’s own statute. But, I said, you’ve got to ask yourself: Why is that? Why do I have to ask you that question. I called the federal government of Delaware, and they told me that they didn’t have a statute against child abuse in Delaware. So, I called the attorney general of Connecticut and said, “Well, we don’t have a statute against child abuse. You had them look into it.” And they said, “Well, you’re right. We don’t have a statute against child abuse.” And I said, “Well, I think you’re wrong. You’ve got to ask yourself if it’s in fact in the state of Delaware that you’re asking.

I cut out the rest to save on space, but if you’re curious the story continues with the author writing to the Attorney General of San Francisco and then Delaware and then Connecticut again in a grand quest to find a specific child abuse statute the author isn’t sure exists in a system where somehow each state has its own federal government.

A new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a Los Angeles-based group representing transgender people, is "deeply disturbing” and “a blatant example of what the ACLU calls ‘the tyranny of the status quo.’”



The ACLU is a national civil rights advocacy organization that advocates for equality and justice for all Americans. It works to protect transgender people from the discrimination that is inherent in the country’s laws that criminalize their “transgender status.”



ACLU President Mike Pence defended the ban on LGBT people from serving openly in the military and said in a statement that there are many transgender men and women serving openly as “soldiers.”



“I’m pleased it has come to this,” he said. “This is a sad day for the transgender community and for our military personnel: it’s not just the military that has to deal with the issue, it’s our country as a whole.”



Pence’s statement came a day after two transgender service members were assaulted in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.



“Some young young people are going to die on the Internet in the next 12 to 24 months,” said Michael Treser, a transgender veteran who was with his service-members during this summer’s Pride Parade. “To the most transgender military members in the world, there is nothing more humiliating than having to admit that you are the only one who doesn’t know who you are, or that you’re the one who is being discriminated against, or that you are a member of a military.”



I … okay?

Sam Roberts, 37, died at St James’ Royal Hospital of a heart attack after collapsing on a bed in north London last Friday. His brother, James, had just finished a night in hospital as he was being rushed for treatment, said Coroner William Hinton. The man, who had been with a wife and two children, had been on a leave of absence for days, and had been working and watching TV for the last three days. Coroner Hinton called for an urgent medical assessment of the man, who had only last been seen with one of his children, to which he replied: “I’m coming back to see you. "I just want to say I’m sorry, that the man I just laid in hospital with is just so brave and so brave, and I was looking for you but you’re gone now. "I feel bad for him and I want him back in hospital and I think it was a terrible loss. A statement from the coroner’s office said: "This is a sad day in a remarkable time. "While at St James’ Royal Hospital we received numerous inquiries from people who had been in a coma for 24 hours. "We would like to reassure everyone that this is a very sad day for Sam, his family and colleagues.”

(Emphasis mine because I just lost it)

So I came up with my response to all of these discussions. The first was that the answer is always “yes, right now”. We just have to find a way. The second question is whether or not same sex marriage will continue. Well, it depends on where we live and how many people can vote for it. A few months ago I told them that gay marriage had become common in the UK. For many years it was illegal to do so in any jurisdiction but it never stopped. Now that legalism is slowly fading, many people are using it to move on. The last question is whether or not marriage between a man and a woman can be defined as a union. We are living in a new age of legalised abortion, there is no longer any law which prohibits the practice and it has been banned everywhere. That is why I have decided to hold a referendum on the matter. It will have to start on 7 June. What happens then depends on your views. A number of arguments have been made that marriage won’t work. I will explain, for the time being, why it doesn’t. A number of things have gone wrong in the past couple of years. In 2010, a group of people in the UK was banned from attending a gay wedding because of their “socially conservative” lifestyle. Two years later there were three gay weddings in the UK when a couple were charged with breaking the law by showing their gay pride. That same year a group of three gay men were accused of assaulting a woman who was trying to get them married, in what is being said to be the most famous of these cases. In 2011, a group of people who had been convicted of homosexual offences had to go to jail after they had refused to allow their partner to have sex with them.

Between this, Texas, the ACLU, and the child abuse one, I feel like the sort of stuff this thing spits out could readily constitute its own genre of fiction characterized by an exploration of hypothetical societies in which everything is consistently institutionally horrifying for no discernible reason but there are concerned citizens who are all very civil about debating that some things should be made some other type of horrifying and other concerned citizens who feel it’s more sensible to stick to the tried and true types of horrifying already presumably codified in laws that no one is really sure about the purpose, dynamics, implementation, or even existence of.

I mean, okay that isn’t so much a genre of fiction as it is the actual reality in which we currently live reflected in the innocent eyes of a childish AI blissfully unaware of the social taboos or learned value judgements that blind us to the absurdity of mere existence but let’s change topic immediately:

We’ve been told that the PlayStation Vita and PS3 versions of the game will feature “full-featured storyboards, in-game voice chat, a fully illustrated 3D map, full-screen support, and various game music,” as well as a new 3D environment with some new voice and sound effects. A new episode of Ocarina of Time will follow the protagonist, which will be featured in the video game.

Preordered.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, former Republican Senate candidate Ron Paul said he had an open mind about the war on drugs, because, as he explained, “you have the right to kill someone simply because a drug dealer gets a ticket to your local Wal-Mart or you have the right to drive a cop car down a highway and then kill that person because you’re a drug dealer. I think we, the people who make up the drug war, are not really concerned about drugs.” (The Huffington Post did a story on the topic, but the Post has not found much context for the claim.) First, the idea that the war is a “war on drugs” is a stretch. This is not just something that is being proposed by a few, but by a number of other people who hold similar views as Paul. For example, Paul has said that “We can’t just stop and think and be like, 'Why don’t we take the drugs?’ ” And this is perhaps true.

But the idea that the war is a “war on drugs” is an idea that Paul has articulated since he first became the Republican candidate for president in 2000: to create an “America in which addicts benefit” and “people who don’t need the drugs” would be freed from prohibition.

That last part is important. In this case, Paul is making the same argument that a number of people have leveled against the war, including the idea that the United States is a “sanctioned, regulated and controlled” drug empire. I think this is a mistake, not a question of the merits of a drug or its use, but rather of Paul’s own view that most Americans are “drug addicts.”



Actually the only implausible thing about this one is that the Huffington Post would show this much restraint in presenting Ron Paul’s views.

And finally, perhaps my favorite:

A few years ago, on February 15, 2013, I wrote about how I’ve become an enthusiastic Internet troll thanks to the proliferation of online troll accounts, a phenomenon that has become quite common all over the world. I am, of course, a small and medium-sized company on a small island in the Pacific, and in a very small way I have also made a point of defending the fact that I’m a regular on Twitter. I’ve got tons of experience on social nets as a writer, a developer, and a programmer; both those activities are pretty much standard across the Internet, and in fact, I’m often the only one who has access to any kind of social network. But this is nothing new, or surprising to me.



For the past decade, I’ve been on Twitter at all times, and at a very young age I was the first to create a parody of the infamous “Twitter” meme that the mainstream media had labeled a “social media troll scandal.” I wrote on my Instagram to convey that I had come to understand how the Internet could be used to make fun of people and create new and disturbing ways of thinking and behaving. I have become even more so



Bonus content: