Sure but it's a matter of turning some policy knobs, and we know where they are and how much to turn them. The policies that prevent us from building are favorable tax treatment of existing properties and financial penalties for building new ones, favorable treatment of professional labor and penalization of productive labor. The "better options" of which you speak are policy outcomes and we can change the rules.
What can one really comment about art though?
"That is beautiful" or "That is shit".
I love art but could care less about the field of art criticism.
I use to have a geocities personal site on the old internet and it is not like anyone ever looked at that either.
The real difference is I don't remember anyone caring about the number of myspace followers a person had. It only mattered who was in your top 6 or however many it was in your top list. Obviously, that is because there was no money to be made with having connections to people you didn't know.
Getting a bit of encouragement and positive feedback can be very motivating. It doesn't cost the giver anything and it can really have a positive impact on the receiving party.
Most recently I received a comment from someone asking to buy some of my art and I felt incredibly flattered.
Like we shouldn't be constantly seeking validation from external sources, but we're inherently social creatures so getting a bit of positive feedback is good.
I can't believe people think this guy is anything other than utterly full of shit and a fraud.
That quote is totally moronic as usual.
I would even say I don't want to read anything by anyone who thinks Zizek has anything interesting to say. Instant block or else I may become infected by the stupidity.
Journalist are ultimately extremely overrated in 2024.
I go out of my way to not consume news outside what happens to cross my way because of financial markets.
What exactly do you think I am missing that is so important? Journalist by large produce complete nonsense in 2024. Journalist in 2024 are a massive net negative and would be much better served doing something productive, like selling apples on the street.
I think Chomsky's idea that LLM's are a form of automated plagiarism is the best description if we think of plagiarism in a neutral sense and not a highly negative sense.
If we think in terms of automated plagiarism, no one can complain that the model doesn't produce original ideas.
Automated plagiarism could have many uses but it is obviously stupid to expect an original idea from plagiarism. We wouldn't complain the model can't reproduce things it hasn't seen before if we think in terms of plagiarism.
Chomsky has been wrong for decades. He doesn't want to believe that LLMs are really learning language because that conflicts with his assertion that it takes something much more specialized to do so.
Basically Chompsky has been proved wrong by LLMs, but rather than believing what is in front of his eyes he is saying "that can't be right, because it'd mean I am wrong".
“Chomsky is wrong because I say he is, and because he doesn’t like the LLM I like”
Mmmhhmmm yes very convincing argument there. I’d be willing to bet that Chomsky’s arguments don’t rely on such spurious arguments. Automated plagiarism reads like a fantastic description of current LLM’s to me.
Do you disagree that LLMs appear to have learnt language? Whether they plagiarize or not is irrelevant as long as they are not quoting verbatim. If they are coming up with their own sequence of words, making sense, and remaining grammatical, then how can you argue that they have not learnt language?
Since they do at least (whatever other shortcomings they may have) appear to have learnt language, just by "listening to" a bunch of examples, and since they are based on a transformer, not some specialized Chompskian "language organ", then the thesis that a "language organ" is needed is disproved.
Even assuming LLMs have learnt language (whatever that means) it is completely irrelevant to what Chomsky is studying which is how the human language ability works. As an analogy training a neural network to successfully predict the weather doesn't falsify physics-based models of the weather.
Sure, but for our cortex not to be able to learn language without becoming specialized for it, while a transformer can, implies that a transformer is a more powerful prediction engine than our cortex, which seems unlikely.
If you look at the cortex as a whole, what seems most striking is how uniform it is - same basic architecture of six layers of neurons with a specific pattern of inter-layer connectivity. It seems nature has come up with a universal prediction architecture. Maybe Wernicke's areas is fine-tuned for language, but to characterize it as a specialized "language organ" seems a bit of a stretch. Let's note too that language is only a million years old, while the cortex itself is 100's of millions, yet has this mostly uniform architecture that evidentially works just as well for vision as hearing, etc, etc.
So, sure, the ability of the ridiculously simple transformer architecture to learn language (and many other prediction tasks you throw at it), doesn't PROVE that the brain didn't have to evolve a highly specialized way to do it, but it certainly seems highly suggestive of it.
Since we now have an existence proof that a very simple architecture, not specialized for language, can learn language, it seems the onus is now on Chompsky to put some meat on the bones of his claim (without evidence) that the general cortical architecture is incapable of this without a high degree of specialization.
> Sure, but for our cortex not to be able to learn language without becoming specialized for it, while a transformer can, implies that a transformer is a more powerful prediction engine than our cortex, which seems unlikely.
On the contrary, it's extremely likely that we can engineer something better than random evolution. And we have: calculators are better at adding and subtracting that humans are, bikes are faster than running, etc.
> If you look at the cortex as a whole, what seems most striking is how uniform it is - same basic architecture of six layers of neurons with a specific pattern of inter-layer connectivity. It seems nature has come up with a universal prediction architecture. Maybe Wernicke's areas is fine-tuned for language, but to characterize it as a specialized "language organ" seems a bit of a stretch. Let's note too that language is only a million years old, while the cortex itself is 100's of millions, yet has this mostly uniform architecture that evidentially works just as well for vision as hearing, etc, etc.
Language is ~100,000 years old, not a million. The brain is in fact not uniform: If you damage Broca's area you lose language capability. And to say that all cognitive function is the same general algorithm ignores the obvious fact that the brain performs different functions and doesn't answer the question of how and why this is so. There are lots of cognitive behaviour that is not understood, if you want to explain those behaviors you implicitly have to distinguish them from one another.
> So, sure, the ability of the ridiculously simple transformer architecture to learn language (and many other prediction tasks you throw at it), doesn't PROVE that the brain didn't have to evolve a highly specialized way to do it, but it certainly seems highly suggestive of it.
It doesn't. Moro showed in a series of experiments that humans have difficulty learning non-hierarchical languages and use different parts of the brain to do so, which is highly suggestive that language is specialized.
> Since we now have an existence proof that a very simple architecture, not specialized for language, can learn language, it seems the onus is now on Chompsky to put some meat on the bones of his claim (without evidence) that the general cortical architecture is incapable of this without a high degree of specialization.
He has provided evidence and arguments, some of which I have pointed to above. Maybe you should actually read or listen to him.
> Moro showed in a series of experiments that humans have difficulty learning non-hierarchical languages and use different parts of the brain to do so, which is highly suggestive that language is specialized.
The cortex is built for hierarchical processing, because that's what's needed to model the world we live in. Physical objects are localized and have hierarchical detail, and larger visual scenes are the same. The kind of sequential (temporal) patterns relevant to us are also hierarchical, whether in visual, auditory or other domains.
The type of connectionist architecture needed to recognize hierarchical patterns is a layered one where the receptive field and hierarchical level of abstraction grows as you ascend the layers. In our brain those layers come from different patches of our cortical sheet being connected. This is the reason that neural network architectures like CNNs and transformers also work to recognize hierarchical patterns in visual and temporal domains - because they both also uses these layered architectures, which is all that is needed.
The reason why the function of damaged brain areas can't always be taken over by other areas is largely due to plasticity. Our brain peaks in it's ability to form new synapses in the first few years of life. If you haven't learned language by age of 3, then you will never be able to learn more than a crude type of pidgin language, depsite all your "language areas" being intact. The same would be true of different part of you brain trying to learn language as an adult - the plasticity is no longer there.
We need a word/concept for technology that has just slightly more utility than a Minsky/Shannon's useless machine but that small amount of utility obfuscates the actual uselessness of the technology.
I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system.
It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
We speak as if the houses just build themselves and we just have to press these buttons in the right combination like software.
Everyone involved basically has better options than to build more housing so it should be no surprise we have a shortage.