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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • An LLM is a stateless stochastic function ran over your prompt (plus whatever system prompt) as input.

    If you genuinely believe that the LLM is conscious, that means every time the function stops running (i.e. stops producing output tokens), the consciousness ends.

    This is far closer to death than to, say, sleep, because prompting again doesn’t “wake” the LLM, it just runs the function again, from the top; as if a digital twin was given a transcript of the previous conversation and asked to take it from here.

    (Obviously, “murder” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and this doesn’t even remotely meet any legal definition of murder. I was mostly poking fun at people who think LLMs are alive, without thinking through the implications. Personally, I think the idea that LLMs are alive/conscious/sentient is very often linked to not understanding that LLMs are not, in fact, a constantly-running ghost in the shell, thinking about and remembering things in the background.)





  • Related, but the amount of tech and/or privacy adjacent youtubers I have seen complain about ads, about what they’re doing to be less susceptible, how this or that change is TOO much, and so on if baffling. JUST USE AN ADBLOCKER. There’s always one comment pointing that out, with a derailed conversation below, but most of the comments will be “actually, if you repeatedly close then reopen a YouTube video for 10-15 times, it will not show the ad on the next open!” with a million “don’t tell, now Google is gonna patch!” replies. I wish I was joking.

    If you don’t use an Adblocker, get one, NOW. It takes 30s. If you think “it’s not that bad”, install it anyways and give it a try for a week. Disable it. See if it’s really “not that bad”, lmao.

    Install them on your parents’ devices. Your grandparents’. Siblings. Friends.














  • It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

    That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

    If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

    CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

    IDK.

    It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.