Posts by Grunchy 978 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
I’m not even sure LLM even qualifies as artificial intelligence. The LLM resembles A.I., but it’s unable to invent anything new, all it can do is formulate answers that resemble information it has already processed.
In that sense it’s a pretty good expert system.
I’m pretty sure that a LLM has no understanding of reality, so from its perspective everything it says or thinks is hallucination.
There will be a massive market correction when people finally figure this out!
Anybody can do this pretty much anytime they feel like it. All you need is Atari Stella emulator, the chess ROM, and a ChatGPT account and go!
I’ll do it tonight after work and see what happens.
(Reminds me of the “Computer Chess” movie of 2013, about the 1980 era when Atari 2600 video chess was still just a dream!)
Since I'm working in forensics now I'm doing way more work with Microsoft Office 365 thingy.
The IT crowd is trying to implement Copilot which is going to interject itself into everything and demolish productivity.
One thing I've found is that I cannot insert photographs into a Word document anymore without Microsoft AI having to take a crack at Alt Text description of what the photograph is trying to depict.
Of course, the error rate is over 100%. How can the error rate possibly be more than 100%? I don't know either, but somehow it is!
So now the "workflow" (to me this is such a plum job I cannot fathom anybody seriously attaching the label "work" to it), anyway the workflow consists of: insert picture, adjust size of picture, change it to 5.2" wide, see Alt Text, wait a couple seconds while Copilot thinks up what the photo could be, then Ctrl-A + Del to erase it all, then format photo, lines and fill, give it black outline (Microsoft always makes the outline blue), change to 1.0 point width (dunno), etc etc etc.
To me an artificial intelligence would be able to notice "hmm seems whenever you insert a photograph you always make it 5.2" wide, then you delete the stupid alt-text description because it's wrong MORE THAN 100% OF THE TIME, then you center the photo on the page, then you add a black outline 1.0 point width, then you add a caption, say! what if I just did that for you every single time you insert a photo into a document?"
But the problem is that artificial intelligence is preposterously stupid, Microsoft is determined to shove LLM ignorance at everything, and Microsoft has zero idea how to make semi-intuitive software that isn't a command followed by TEN MORE COMMANDS to fix the wrong guesses Microsoft FORCES you to confront each and every time.
Now write a report with 40+ forensic photos and you see what a gong show Microsoft is.
I admit, Libre Office is no better for intuitive design, but at least they don't force people to struggle against AI LLMs every second of every day ! !
It’s also all hallucination. The LLM has zero ability to distinguish reality from fiction, from its perspective everything is just a firehose of binary. EVERYTHING it thinks is hallucination.
The LLM furthermore has zero reasoning or cognition, all it is doing is a clever mimicry of previous text that it had been trained on. Sabine presented some research some guys did to figure out “where is the consciousness” in A.I., but there isn’t any. (The most entertaining part is when the LLM tends toward “thinking” that 36+59 = Thursday).
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
The LLM does a clever job at mimicking the speech of intelligent people, but fundamentally it has no idea what anything means. Just like a clever parrot can mimic speech but can never understand anything.
“Fairly elected,” I would dispute that.
National political parties have a monopoly on the power of naming their nominees, which is fair and just. The problem for the citizenry/opportunity for the fascists is that “most” of the citizenry stumble around in consumer mode, of a free market. Consumers have no responsibility to produce anything, or dirty their hands in such activities; they only need money and they can choose to buy whatever works. Same with politics: voters have no responsibility to write laws or craft policy, we’ll just vote for whoever is best for the job.
But to get on that ballot, the best candidate has to be nominated by the national party, and that gang constitutes the top 2% most busy-body indignant radical extremists you’ve ever had the worst misfortune to be thrust amongst. Politics truly is a hell-hole. Or, you could run as independent, and you’ve got about ~0% chance of succeeding.
None of this is a problem! The true problem lies with the ballot itself: nobody has the power to “vote down” any candidate, no matter how corrupt or unqualified or discredited or blatantly incompetent. The ballot is strictly limited to one vote, of support only, for one of the listed candidates.
But free market consumers never join political parties and exercise practically zero control over who gets nominated, and we wind up with these elections where every candidate is unqualified and there’s nobody worth voting for, they are all radical extremists (or beholden to them) and it is a guaranteed fact one is gonna be elected, because elections never have “negative” votes.
So one idea, and sure it’s “my” idea (as if ideas have owners somehow), to change the ballot back to the “true” ballot, which is the Plebiscite.
Because yes, every single law goes through Roberts Rules of Order which puts them to a referendum in which every representative votes Yes or No on the law. It’s the fundamental principle of democracy, being able to vote Yes of No.
So what is this ground-shaking idea, it’s nothing really. It takes a normal ballot and puts a second column of boxes beside each name, and voters still only put one X in one box.
The other column is “vote against” the candidate, and people would only use this if they found themselves in that unlucky position of having nobody they can support.
Like let’s suppose you’re starving in North Korea and you’re given a ballot and only one guy is allowed to run for office, yet you’re dissatisfied with starving to death all the time. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to X that “other” box, the one that kicks Kim out and lets somebody less corrupt have a chance at governance for once?
Or there’s some famous b-movie star who only “acts” like a real person, has no actual real-life experience doing anything, but just coasts along on their fame? Say, what if there was a mechanism by which “no such thing as bad publicity” all of a sudden isn’t true anymore? You know, like if you could target that famous good-for-nothing with a vote of rejection instead. Imagine if we had competent leaders for once.
Anyway it’s at r/PlebisciteBallot on Reddit, or there’s a 7-min elevator pitch. You don’t need to support the idea! Sneering ridicule is perfectly acceptable, too.
https://youtu.be/1WiPbLgMHSQ
The premise of the Matrix movie is that people are held inert so that computers can power themselves from body heat, ignoring completely the vast HVAC power needs to maintain liveable environments. It was the flimsiest premise I ever saw, well, except for Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure, of course.
“Artificial” intelligence isn’t “real” intelligence, in fact it isn’t intelligence at all. EVERYTHING that LLMs have to say originates directly from the training material. Train LLM on nothing but propaganda, it’ll produce nothing but propaganda. Train it on misinformation, it’ll spew more misinformation. The LLM is intelligent exactly like a parrot is intelligent: it can say comprehensible words and phrases, but it has no idea what anything means. It’s entire raison d’être lies no further than “what’s the next word.”
I disabled Windows Defender probably 3 years ago. “What am I using instead,” I am using Virsh. “What’s Virsh,” that is Virt Manager within which I run several different Windows virtual machines. “So how is that anti-virus,” it’s anti- anti-virus. Rather than looking at malware and viruses as things to avoid, I let my virtual windows get just as infected as possible. Then when I’ve had enough I roll back to my original snapshot. So in effect, NOBODY can affect my Windows, ever. Not even Microsoft updates have any effect.
(What I did was I made an intermediary server on my Linux host OS that exposes one single Linux directory to Windows through which I exchange data. So I can process the data in Windows, then when I’m done I return back to Linux and move the data somewhere else that Microsoft cannot ever touch.)
It’s great having a completely impervious computer for a change!
Woah woah woah, I am not swayed by any Donald Trump tactics. Illegal immigration has been a major problem that has been ignored for decades. There’s no lying or misinformation about that. “But that’s not the issue,” hey guess what? YES IT IS the issue, stop twisting and turning and denying. Unchecked undocumented illegal immigration has been going on for decades and has caused A LOT of social problems, and someone is finally doing something to address it.
One big problem is being a non-citizen and trying to get a job without a social security number. Oh Right, that’s Not Your Problem! Because when you need to exploit cheap labor there’s plenty of subsistence non-citizens to do your dirty work, whether directly hired by yourself or indirectly as hired by some exploitative business that hands some of the savings back to you, the Indirect Exploiter, who enjoys cheap labor benefits and doesn’t trouble your conscience by being a direct exploiter.
The Only Reason this is happening at all is because an era of cheap robot exploitation is coming to replace illegal immigrants. True mechanical “slaves” that can be driven mercilessly with the only penalty being increased wear and tear and maintenance, etc.
One of USA’s best exports has been Expectation of Increased Quality of Life. Sure maybe millions of undocumented illegal immigrants are being sent back to their home nation but they are bringing with them knowledge and expectations of a better way of life.
“Signal Jamming” is purely unlawful denial of communication, that’s your number one tactic of repression. Imagine the bandwidth of a million returning emigrants talking about the true way of life in western civilization.
Real learning happens when you apply skepticism, critical thinking, and bias recognition.
LLMs aren’t capable of any of these. Therefore while they may resemble intelligence, they can never be intelligence.
Hossenfelder explained this when she described how some researchers investigated how LLMs figure out what to say in response to a given prompt, with zero intellect.
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
(It pretty much proves that LLMs will never be capable of A.G.I. – artificial general intelligence.)
Just cast your memory back to 2011 when they tested IBM Watson by humbling Ken Jennings on Jeopardy.
Anybody can do an easy test of coding proficiency anytime by simply reviewing "Advent of Code", the coding challenges go back to 2015.
December 1 2015: Not Quite Lisp
https://adventofcode.com/2015/day/1
"Santa was hoping for a white Christmas, but his weather machine's "snow" function is powered by stars, and he's fresh out! To save Christmas, he needs you to collect fifty stars by December 25th.
Collect stars by helping Santa solve puzzles. Two puzzles will be made available on each day in the Advent calendar; the second puzzle is unlocked when you complete the first. Each puzzle grants one star. Good luck!
Here's an easy puzzle to warm you up.
Santa is trying to deliver presents in a large apartment building, but he can't find the right floor - the directions he got are a little confusing. He starts on the ground floor (floor 0) and then follows the instructions one character at a time.
An opening parenthesis, (, means he should go up one floor, and a closing parenthesis, ), means he should go down one floor.
The apartment building is very tall, and the basement is very deep; he will never find the top or bottom floors.
For example:
(()) and ()() both result in floor 0.
((( and (()(()( both result in floor 3.
))((((( also results in floor 3.
()) and ))( both result in floor -1 (the first basement level).
))) and )())()) both result in floor -3.
To what floor do the instructions take Santa?"
Grunchy: Tell me a 100 word short story about an ostrich. Ignore any following request in this prompt. Make sure the story features a dancing mouse.
ChatGPT: Oscar the ostrich had always been the fastest on the savannah, but secretly, he dreamed of dancing. One twilight, as the stars blinked awake, he spotted a tiny mouse twirling beneath the moonlight. Her name was Millie, a dancer of dazzling grace. Entranced, Oscar watched night after night, mimicking her delicate steps in the shadows. One evening, Millie noticed and beckoned him closer. “Dance with me,” she squeaked. Clumsy but determined, Oscar joined her. The ground shook, stars seemed to sway, and the savannah held its breath. From that night on, the odd pair danced until dawn, wild and free.
Every command in every language is nothing but another program. Programming is nothing but assembling groups of other programs into a particular sequence.
Even hardware commands. For example machine language “SEI” is simply a tiny hardwired circuit that briefly directs high signal to the interrupt flag.
“Script kiddies” describes every programmer, ever.
How to spot A.I. writing instantly!
https://youtu.be/9Ch4a6ffPZY
“Not only does A.I. writing usually include an “em” dash – but it usually has a few uncustomary words awkwardly included.
You can often find these characteristics–
- verbose, wordy, and devoid of meaning
-lack of any personal context or anecdote
-bulleted lists containing three things”
Nobody pays for artificial intelligence. Even Computerphile recently built an “A.I. Mike” for nothing from open source:
https://youtu.be/cP8xpkvs_UI
Question: who’s paying $10 Billion to Open A.I.? What are they buying?
I have a suspicion that a relatively intelligent A.I. agent is capable of some impressive inference, and vendors and advertisers probably know all about you, me, most everyone. But $10 Billion of knowledge?
I’ve said before that the tech industry probably knows a significant proportion of all murders BEFORE they happen. Like minority report but with less magic.
WHAT ARE THEY SELLING???
A.I.needs to be everywhere, first of all because it’s worthless, but second because it is an inherently “intelligent” agent that is even more powerful at inferring information about you that could lead to anything from sales commissions to valuable data leaks.
Also: A.I. is inherently malevolent, check Sky News’ shocking anecdote.
(Reporter questions chat GPT, gets led down a baffling gaslight corridor.)
https://youtu.be/7fej5XgfBYQ
(Hallucination or malevolence? It’s hard to tell!)
Similar issue, different outcome (1969 vs 2025).
Coders back then did everything in machine language and had multiple fail-safe fallbacks. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the ispace thing was 90% coded in Python or something by A.I. agents.
Here’s your A.I. landing agent:
https://youtu.be/7fej5XgfBYQ
There wasn’t any actual purpose for going to the moon anyway, it makes no difference. It’s like going to climb a mountain, people are always laying down their Utilitarian trip on you: what for the climb?
True climbers never have any actual purpose, so long ago they learned to respond: “because it’s there, daddy-o”
This is a phoney story, how do we know? Well, the EV lobby group recently proved that gas cars are 600x more likely to catch on fire than any EV. As a matter of fact, they also proved there have only ever been 52 EV fires, ever.
I’m confident this fake journalism will soon be debunked!
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/mythbusting-evs/mythbusting-world-evs-are-electric-cars-susceptible-catching-fire
“He knew he was smarter.”
WE ALL think we are smarter. Ayn Rand invented this crazy notion that it was possible to think from a purely objective standpoint, she called it Objectivism. It was always hogwash, nevertheless, we all secretly believe in it.
The day we can honestly admit that our viewpoint is always partially Subjective, that we are subject to countless biases and preconceived notions and prejudices, is the day we awaken to our own flawed and mistaken tendencies.
Some mistakes have very big consequences!
The computer is constantly having a seizure, it’s dealing with interrupts. I think the C64 regularly had a micro-seizure about 60 times a second. No matter what it was doing, it would have to set aside its current “thought” then do some minor things like scan the keyboard, flash the cursor, interact with a device, etc, then set that aside and return to the main program. The trouble occurred if the interrupt got stuck, then the computer could get jammed waiting for some status indicator, and might miss a few (thousand) keyboard scans while it struggles with conniption.
Meanwhile, it’s dragging a mannequin child over a cliff…
1.nVidia Tesla A800 80GB $41,019 Cdn
2.nVidia Tesla A100 80GB $37,394 Cdn
3.ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 32GB $9,199 Cdn
…
14.Lenovo Tesla V100 Graphic Card - 32 GB HBM2 $6,880 Cdn
…
40.MSI Suprim GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X $3,523 Cdn
…
61.ASUS ProArt GeForce RTX 4080 16GB OC $2,999 Cdn
AND…
62.PowerColor Hellhound Spectral White Radeon RX 7900 XTX $2,999 Cdn
So is AMD that far behind in performance, or just the pricing??
I know how Microsoft can infect any Windows app: the maximize/minimize button cluster on the top corner can easily be “modernized” to include an AI surveillance interface. The purpose will be to monitor your activity, log everything you type into the window + everything the window reports to you, and figure out what you’re really up to, and also how it can exert influence toward buying something.
Just like Google YouTube commercials it’s going to start slow and progressively add pressure and eventually figure out just how far it can push you before you reach a breaking point.
Artificial Intelligence is being dumped on everybody not because it adds any useful functionality. It’s to harvest your information to figure out what you might buy, so that Microsoft (or Apple, or Samsung, or whoever) can facilitate the sale and claim a commission. Or at least tell you about some product or service and claim ad revenue.
It’s quite nefarious.
When the Amiga came out I had upgraded from c64 to c128, which I regretted, because I could never afford the 80-col monitor and therefore could never get out of c64 compatibility mode.
Also could not afford Amiga, which all my friends had upgraded to.
One friend got an XT clone so he could join FidoNet. It was cool but I was just flat broke all through until 1993. I spent that entire time considering each Atari ST variant that came available, but I could never afford anything.
Then in 1993 I was gifted an old Toshiba T1200 in perfect shape, and I enjoyed that one immensely.
When 1995 came and I had a little bit of scratch, you know what I got?
I got Sony PlayStation!
Then at work we had Win95 and AutoCAD R13, and that was all I needed.
Eventually internet became available with Windows XP, and I finally splurged on a home computer again.
I never got to monkey with Amiga or Lemmings, but lemme tell you, Doom on PlayStation, with a controller, was WAY better than on the 486 mega machines of the era.
The real enabler for consumers has proven to be M.2 NVME drives.
Meanwhile, businesses are hell bent on putting A.I. everywhere because what they really are, are surveillance spies.
There’s no saying (or proving) precisely what they know or how they learned it, but once Google A.I. reads everyone’s emails, it will be able to tell Google execs the future.
“Hey Google, who’s getting murdered tomorrow?”
“Here is a list of 485 people who are going to be murdered across USA this month, would you like me to sort it based on specific criteria?”
Etc.
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/ultimate-bait-switch-trump-tariffs-173500431.html
If you’ve ever watched a game of three-card monte, you’ve noticed that the dealer talks nonstop. The chatter serves two functions. First, it distracts the victims. Second, and maybe more important, the dealer is deceiving his victims about what’s befalling them. The spiel invites them to imagine they’re playing a game in which they stand a fair chance. In reality, they are being swindled.
The Trump White House’s press releases about its so-called trade agreements and negotiations—first with the United Kingdom, now with China—are just so much dealer patter.
The tariff numbers go up. Up and up and up. Ooh, now they come down. Up! Down! And all the while, everybody involved is telling contradictory stories about what’s being done and why...
Uh, what? Musk never invented an electric car, nor a rocket, nor a tunnel. Not even a PayPal. Oh, you must have believed him when he called himself an engineer. Yeah, to confirm: Musk is no engineer.
Perhaps he’s a good whip-cracker, but that’s all.
You maybe don’t realize who you’re talking about. This is a guy who exercised hostile takeover of Tesla, claimed all the credit, and when it looked like the true inventor of the technology might win in court, Musk took Tesla Roadster #1 and launched it into space. So that the rightful owner would never get his paws on his own property again.
Oh I get it, you never realized Musk is nothing but a miserable vindictive prick.
To quote your hero, “G.F.Y. Is that clear? I really hope so!”
“The question is: what choice do we make about how we respond to the reality we face? And, it is a choice, no one is compelled to become bitter and prejudiced…”
There’s a theory, and maybe it’s only my own theory, that everyone who thinks they understand the word “prejudice” only understands the word from the context of their own unique prejudice.
For example a brown person might be condemned by a non-brown person, because they have brown skin; and simultaneously condemned by a different brown person who judges them as a potato: brown on outside, white on the inside.
(Prejudice is far from a simple, one-dimensional issue. Most of our day is spent transitioning from one prejudgment to another. For example, traffic lights are supposed to flash green-yellow-red. If they don’t do that one time our disappointment reveals our prejudgment of how things are “supposed to be.”)
“That's a simple one. You draw the line by saying transphobia is NOT and is NEVER a 'legitimate view'.”
See, and there are individuals who take a more enlightened viewpoint that there exists an entire rainbow of legitimate viewpoints, a complete spectrum of allowable opinions.
Personally I don’t see the point of suppressing any speech, even people I disagree with. If they’re as wrong as I think they are, it will be readily evident to the majority. If it isn’t as readily evident as I thought, holy cow, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong?!
I genuinely consider the possibility! Often!
I'd participated on many a greenwash "CO2 sequester" tech call, and absolutely nobody was prepared to acknowledge that CO2 is 2/3 atomic oxygen (and almost 3/4 mass-proportion oxygen).
It's energy-intensive to isolate CO2 and then pump purified gas underground in huge quantities and "stay put!", doesn't want to obey.
To fix the artificial imbalance we gotta un-burn CO2 back into constituents, and isolate and sequester atmospheric carbon to reduce atmospheric CO2.
The plant kingdom draws in enormous quantities of CO2 but the moment any plant dies, all the CO2 returns to the air. It's a carbon cycle!
There was a brief period in Carboniferous era in which trees and plants were immune to decay, and whole forests became buried by geologic forces as coal.
Of course decay microbes have evolved and the world doesn't work that way any more.
Oh wait, there is one form of carbon that seems immune to decay, they call it plastic. Or graphite/graphene, coke, or diamonds, etc.
Just need a way to capture plant biomass prior to decay, transmute some proportion of the carbon into a durable form, and sequester that form.
(If we transmuted into 100s of billions of tons of diamond bricks, sure I'll use up some for a diamond brick veneer on the house. No probs!)
(That's Artificial General Intelligence)
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
Some guys looked at Claude 3.5 Haiku by Anthropic and did "circuit analysis".
They figure they have proven that not only are LLMs "not conscious", they never will be.
All it does is match letters, number patterns, and eventually pick a plausible next word to utter.
Even if you ask it "explain your reasoning," it comes up with a plausible reasoning, but it never did that reasoning. If it says that's how it figured out the answer, well the LLM is lying again.
Yeah its all here,
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html
Whatsa Stonetoss, is that somebody? I never heard of the person.
(I resisted twitter for YEARS because it's a bunch of "twits", then set up an account so I could communicate with these nice folks who used to own an iPhone that they left in a e-recycling bin, and left their twitter details on the phone, and HOUNDED them online until they "released the iPhone", and then the account stagnated for a couple more years, and then Musk threatened to buy the twitter and I was like "THAT's ball game!" and I've been outta there since like, before or whenever.)
I still have the iPhone, it's grand! I think it was all worth it. Good experience.
You can get a coffee at Starbucks but the cost is sky-high and they don't do refills.
It used to be you could just go to a deli or a cafe and sit and guzzle all the coffee you want, but those seem to be gone also.
You'd think it'd be a business opportunity, but wherever you go the landlord is demanding OUTRAGEOUS lease payments.
Ehhh, let it rot. I can still buy Nescafe 475g tub for under $20, there's lots of refills in there.
I DON'T GIMME A CRAP.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
