Verdx - Verdx

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

Speak No Evil † See No Evil

© Molly Has a Chainsaw

i am shrunken down and brought to the gnome world and when i attempt to assimilate to their culture I use an acorn cap as a hat and they all laugh cheerfully at my silly mistake of wearing what they use as a bowl like a cap and though this is a transgression that would have humiliated me in my human life I am instead laughing alongside them at my humorous misunderstanding

"What if in the Mad Max universe everything outside of Australia was completely normal"

What if in the Mad Max universe the whole planet became a desert world but everything outside of Australia was just doing Dune shit

Little Big's music videos are direct heritage from the Bloodhound gang ones.

Reference 1:

Reference 2:

The montage of different images, scenes and very weird characters, the sexual references, I can even see a similar point in the music

There’s this guy in town who owns this little house, and a while back he rescued a street dog that was going to get put down. Turned out she was pregnant.

Problem is, he has mental health & drug issues and couldn’t afford to get them all spayed & neutered, so now there are 6 grown bitches with 15 puppies total, and they’ve dug under his fence in multiple places but he can’t afford to fix it so they go roaming all around town. (When I say can’t afford it, I mean his house is currently running on a generator because he can’t afford his electric bill.) He’s also a day laborer so he cannot take multiple full days off work to take them to the vet an hour away. He’s in a really rough spot.

He’s not a bad person. He’s just overwhelmed.

And this little conservative town with 6 churches for 300 people, have they tried to help their neighbor? Have they adopted the puppies he’s been trying to give away? Have they offered resources?

NOPE! All they wanna do is talk shit about him and complain about the dogs but never lift a finger of their own. And they come to his house to yell at him and cuss him out about the dogs, which does not exactly engender in him a cooperative attitude, as you might imagine.

So after a while of this going on, my mom gets fed up with all the NIMBY bullshit and starts talking to the guy, because she’s done animal rescue for 20-odd years and has Connections. He’s resistant at first, but when he realizes she’s not being an asshole to him on account of his addiction or the dogs, he decides to let her help.

She gets to work organizing and networking. Finds a non-profit that will cover vaccinations, spay/neuter, and flea treatments for all the dogs. Talks the next-door neighbor into paying for materials to fix the fence, since this guy can do the work of it himself. Gets him in touch with another non-profit that will adopt out the adult dogs.

Less than 2 weeks after she decided to do something, all puppies have been to the vet, 10 puppies and 4 adult dogs have been adopted out, and the second non-profit is coming by next week to pick up the remaining 7 dogs to ship them out for adoption.

I’ve learned a lot of things from my mom—some good, some bad—but I think the most important positive message she lives as an example of is this: sometimes, when something needs done and no one else is willing, you gotta stand up and say “I’ll do it.”

When you worry that you're missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that's called phomo.

The Roads Both Taken [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[A photon recites a poem:]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And so of course I traveled both Though be one traveler, still I could Explore down both as far as I could Beyond the bends in the undergrowth...

...I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took them both and recombined, And that has made interference.

[Caption below the panel:] Photon poetry

Electrical Wire Vigil

No one knows what to do with the angel tangled in the power lines. The poor thing’s body was wrapped around and around the sparking wires and twisted-up into a ball. The face was obscured by its bent halo—a golden glow that sometimes oscillates like bad television signal. The wings float loosely in the air, all twelve feet of silken bits of light, ragged and torn at the ends.

A storm had felled the trees and the poles and anything taller than a chicken coup in one swoop. Anyone who dared cross the puddles and debris had to risk being electrocuted by the live wires or blinded by the angel’s weakly pulsing light.

The creature would periodically make a break for it too—wings going taut and rising in a flurry of trumpet sounds and frantic flapping. The electrical wires held fast, twisting against the angel’s soft flesh and pushing back. It fell, it always fell, back into the nest of tangled wires and would make weak cooing noises. I was an ornithologist before all this town and couldn’t help but think, pigeon.

The chaplain went to pray under the angel’s bent bod first, getting close as he dared. Everyone knew he wasn’t but a few weeks off the drink and his hands still shook when he lifted up the cross. The nun, she was retired but we still called her just that, caught the 921 bus to the next town that same day.

Some said she was going to the next town over to get a proper priest. Others said she had crossed herself and high-tailed it out of there. What bad luck it was going to be to have a dead angel in our backyard.

All this debris and only the birds can get close enough to it, flapping around the angels head and perching on its mighty back. They call to each other.

Davie, who I had once loved, offered to fetch his shotgun and put it out of its misery. The youngest one there, a girl named Clara, cried so hard she had to be walked back and forth down the lane three times. We opted to put “shooting a messenger of the lord” on the back burner. We gathered up wire cutters, holy books, rubber boots, and a good tree-cutting ax from the messes of our homes and piled them up. We'd wait a day or so at least, watching the angel and all silently hoping it would make it out on its own. 

I wasn’t a praying woman anymore. My house was a testament to a lot of broken things before it was ever leveled by the storm. But I didn’t have any little ones to walk up and down the lane and my car had survived just fine and I owned the best pair of binoculars out of anyone. So, I kept vigil–it was the least I could do. 

I sat and watched and sometimes cooed back when the angel let out long melancholy ooo's. Days of misery in exchange for just a few hours of wind and rain and fury, I thought, the relief trucks would be a while. The chaplain came at sundown and he passed me a drink from his flask. I wasn’t a praying woman anymore so I took a long sip and passed it back.

“Think it’ll make it out?” I asked, nodding at the angel, and the chaplain took a longer drink. I gave him a small smile and elbowed the man. “Glad you stayed, at least.” He nodded again and began to pray, never taking his eyes off the wires up above.

The girl came when the day tucked behind the trees into full dark.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” I told her tiny form at the edge of the puddles. She drew her knees up under her big sweater.

“I have to make sure he doesn’t try anything . . .” she said and I knew she was talking about Davie, who I could no longer love.

 “Does your mama know you’re out here?”

She mumbles from inside her little hoodie, “I can’t let ‘em do it.”

I sighed. “He won’t, not with me here,” I said and waved her over. I made the little girl climb into my lap to stop her shivering and the chaplain gave us all a long blanket to huddle under. The angel flapped those dirty wings and cooed.

“Can I see?” I let the little girl use my binoculars to make out that bent halo and loose curls. She got fingerprints all over the lens and I tried to ignore it.

“I want to be a meteorologist one day,” Clara said, unprompted. “So I can warn people about stuff like this.”

I snorted. “And I want to be a poet.”

“Hush,” Markus says to me and then to the little girl, “I’m sure you’ll make a great weather lady, Clara.” The chaplain gave a punished smile and it made me want to make fun of him just enough to stop it. Clara frowned.

“Did you always want to be a chaplain?” she asked in return and the chaplain didn't answer.

I cleared my throat. “Do you think that’s what it was trying to do? Trying to warn us?” “Or maybe it was just unlucky,” Markus says, rubbing a hand down his long face.

I snorted. “A bad day at work, for sure.”

“Does god allow for bad luck?” asked the little girl.

“Why don’t we ask it?” I say, and we laugh, weakly. We call out to the angel–questions and praise and hopes for tomorrow that we’ll get it out. Or maybe we'd have to get the shotgun tomorrow. The glow of the creature is so weak. Near midnight, the girl suggests we go looking for its horn. If it had been there to warn us, it might have carried a horn, and if it had a horn, we might be able to summon help. 

We search, feebly, avoiding the sparking wires and the upturned wood and metal. We go around in the mud on our hands and knees until we match the trapped thing. Though, we never do figure out what to do with the angel tangled in the power line. The night was long and bitter and we didn’t have anywhere else to be, the drunken chaplain and family-less woman of the birds and that little girl.

Before dawn, I am asleep, we are all asleep, dead to the world like the day will never come. And in the morning, the wires are loose on the ground and quiet. The angel is gone and a truck has come to pick us up. A part of me hopes it made it out. A part of me is relieved to see that Davie is here and he has all his supplies in the back. The trucks are here and the power company remembered us enough to cut off the power.

I have nowhere to be, and walk the little girl home. Gloria is happy to see her and offers me a place to stay the night even though I tell her my car is just fine. Still, she says, just a night.

The window in the guest room faces the electrical wires. They’ll rebuild them one day because you can’t waste the material all the way out here. Clara will go off to college one day. The chaplain will leave the drink for good, he will, and the church in the same breath. I will write a poem one day and it won’t be any good.

It’ll be about the electrical wires outside my windows. About how I don’t know if the angel made it out, but the birds still perch there. They preen and sing and fluff. I count them one by one in the pre-dawn light. Some are flesh and blood and they clean the feathers of the ones that aren’t. Pearly blue jays that sing forgotten songs from yesteryear, and there are fewer ones by the morning light. The angel wire they call it. Year after year, the birds return with their bodies or without them, to sit on the wire and preen their grandchildren and sing to lost mates, and I close my eyes and listen to the ghosts.

------------

My book! 🧡 Newsletter

DNI as in Documento Nacional de Identidad(Spain identity document), I presume

I just saw a DNI for "evil intentions". nobody puts up a warding talisman anymore just a fucking DNI