#it’s not a perfect analogy

[lumsel]

chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something -- pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and-- silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine -- shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

[notsoskinnyyet]

[boydykedevo]

Yknow?

[jennicatzies]

Death Metaphor

[partybarty]

if you have seen me giggle unprompted this week it's because i randomly remembered this tweet

[alexthepapaking83]

My breakfast:

Anyways I’m On my way! To school

Best Ana ever😇

[hes-as-stubborn-as-ever]

Logan and Virgil have a big fight or disagreement that leaves Logan feeling very upset, later Virgil appears at his door with some tea and a new puzzle as a way to apologise and Logan folds immediately

[goreymepls]

• Vou começar essa segunda! *ੈ✩‧₊˚

eu q fiz gostaram?? :>

[cherrywvez]

𝓲 𝓫𝓪𝓼𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓷𝓸𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝔂 𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓶𝓪𝓬𝓱 𝓲𝓼 𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓵𝓵 𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓯𝓲𝓷𝓮 🪽🏹

[littl3sblog]

"Oh when your skinny you'll wear smaller clothes right?"

BITCH NO ‼️ I wanna wear the baggiest shit ever known to a man, literally have my pants dragging on the floor and my band t-shirt hanging from my body and my studded bracelets barely holding onto my wrists, and then you can just see my slim arms and my collarbones showing and I wanna feel small in these like?????

Also don't be fooled by the pink theme of my account I actually listen to metal and other alt music quite a lot soooo 🧍‍♂️

[scificrows]

The feed ID doesn’t need to say anything other than what everyone else’s says, just name, gender, and…” She trailed off. She was looking at me and I was looking at her. - Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot art I used is the official cover art from the French edition of ASR)

[amaliatheartist]

Oh, this bitter peace in my mind

[batfambrainrotbeloved]

Do you know the story of Horton Hears a Who? (one of my favs)

Thus begins A story of an elephant who finds a little pink flower, and on that flower is an almost microscopic piece of dust. In that dust lives an entire civilization of- The Who's.

No one else but Horton can hear them, and no one believes they are there. How could they when theres no proof? They cant see them, cant hear them, why even entertain such a thing.

It comes to the point where the villain captures horton and tries to destroy the flower to prove a point. Desperate to prove they exist, have their voices heard, the who's make all the noise they can- chanting in harmony "We are here".

They play their instruments, cry their names, and yet it's not nearly enough. Horton hears them, but despite his pleas- without proof? He cannot save them.

It's only by one kid, the final voice who has yet to call out. A scared kid whose fighting to save everyone even though it's far beyond his control. But he fights anyways. He crawls to the top of the pole, horn in hand and yells as loud as he can.

His voice is enough, with the shout funneling through his trumpet it rockets to the sky. The last voice just enough to break the sound barrier as the entire symphony of noise is finally heard.

The people, who were convinced they didn't exist, finally stepped in and stopped the destruction before it was too late.

A vote not cast is a voice not heard, Don't Silence yourself.

[butxxrfly]

czesc

dostalam znowu bana xd ja sie zalamie, jest mi fr giga przykro

reblog pls

MOJE JEDYNE DOWODY ZE TO JA XDDD

[queerlyvictorian]

I don’t know how often Brennan brings up this analogy, since despite the amount of Lee Mulligan content I feel I’ve consumed, I’ve only recently dived into Dimension 20, but in Episode 4 of Adventuring Party for A Crown of Candy at 01:04:12, Brennan mentions a thing he learned about chess recently and related it to DMing and I was like, “Wait, I’ve heard him say this, and recently.” It’s the exact analogy he threw out as a taunt in the most recent Fireside Chat for Episode 22 of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One on the Worlds Beyond Number Patreon, about how so much of his “planning” as a DM is just developing enough material to move aspects of the narrative into the good positions to be used later-

These two talkbacks are nearly four years apart in their release date, and I coincidentally listened to them less than four days apart from each other. It just goes to show, I think, how deeply Brennan thinks about DMing and his philosophy towards the art form and practice of it. He pulled the same reference out of his brain years after he learned it, and expressed it in a totally different tone and context. He really is so good at this game.

The understatement of the century, I know, but I just think it’s neat.

[ghelgheli]

academic cheating is the meritocratic analogue of shoplifting. if you understand the relationship between the shoplifter, the store workers, management/police, and the others at the store, you're a long way toward understanding the relationship between the "academically dishonest", the instructor, the university administration, and fellow students.