Hugh Simpson

@andrew@social.hodgson.io @abucci @robparsons@mastodon.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run @trantion@masto.ai @fasterandworse@hci.social yeah the petition as framed is a non-starter in that respect. Quite aside from the fact that the govt takes as much notice of these petitions as I do of a passing pigeon, the usefulness of these as accessibility tools vastly outweighs their possible role in the pervs perving kit. The only person I know who owns a pair is blind and it has been absolutely transformative for him. I'm sure there's a better framing available here.

@sothach@mastodon.ie @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social maybe just 'mirage'? The problem is finding one that applies to semantic weight but doesn't imply agency. 'Mirage' doesn't do that, and appropriately places all interpretive weight on the reader. A propos, if two llms converse in a forest and nobody's around to see them, did anything mean anything?

@sothach@mastodon.ie @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social I suppose 'nonsense' might do, but that doesn't quite carry the speciousness of it...

@sothach@mastodon.ie @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social a statement of fact, but it doesn't play the same linguistic role. 'That's an [llm hallucination]' vs 'that's an [example of llms being prone to emit untrustworthy output]'. Hardly rolls off the tongue... Even 'bullshit' implies intentionality, and given the context in which language evolves it's hardly surprising. Indeed, even truth/falsity implies intentionality since that's the original basis for utterances having semantic meaning. I don't see you getting away from it...

@sothach@mastodon.ie @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social dunno if many people would agree that the sun rising is a dead metaphor. Personally I don't agree that language can even be 'corrupted' -- to me that sort of phrasing implies an extant 'purity' to language. 'Hallucinate' is a good metaphor, anyway IMO - it has less implied intentionality than 'makes shit up'. What would your preferred term be?

@sothach@mastodon.ie @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social the sun doesn't really rise, it's the world that turns. Dough doesn't really rest, it's not animate. Houses, generally speaking, don't have bones - good or otherwise. Language must be a constant source of frustration for you

@rbanffy @cstross nobody passing policy pays any attention to climate models, so where's the benefit?

@altruios@mastodon.social @jadedtwin@corteximplant.com @WhiteCatTamer@mastodon.online @Eatsbluecrayon@rollenspiel.social yes but also: maths is magic

@dgar@aus.social this meme always seems like a trash take to me - seam always goes the same way, usually down in horizontally-orientated sockets and left in vertically-orientated ones; but consistently for the same socket. So how is everyone getting it wrong so often? Given that the observable facts are in, the only answer is: the tiny people in your brain get confused and interpret the signals wrong. The downfall of living in a simulated reality...

@tomw@mastodon.social @jk@mastodon.social caveat here being I have absolutely no reason to think your code doesn't work, but most of the time if other coders don't like it it's got nothing to do with whether it works, and everything to do with how easy it is to understand (Yes, I appreciate this is _remarkably_ similar to your initial claim, but there's a difference between letting the connections run riot because you get it, and actually trying to marshall the horrific reality into something another person might grok)

@tomw@mastodon.social @jk@mastodon.social honestly it's probably not that. There are consistent idiomatic ways to deal with the most arbitrary of things. It's probably just that you structure your logic in a way that assumes full knowledge of all the other bits of structure. I haven't seen your code, so I don't know. But if _everyone_ gets upset about it that's usually why

@contavespi@newsie.social @bodhipaksa@mastodon.scot rubbish. Anything anyone does that's positive is still positive - for example if the US and Europe didn't use gas for energy, China wouldn't burn coal because gas would be more cost-effective. Yes, it would be great if China's carbon emissions were shrinking, but this sort of blame-shifting is just an excuse for passivity - and they're building more renewables faster than you might think.