In this age of 'ear worms', write a song.
In this time of propaganda, tell a story.
In this era of vulgarity, create art.
In this epoch of 'shouting power to power', speak the truth in love.
Culture is won by Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Use those to prevail.
A MICROSOFT RESEARCHER BUILT A WORKING LLM INSIDE AGE OF EMPIRES 2 USING GOATS, JUST TO PROVE AI ISNT SENTIENT
he was tired of people talking to an llm, seeing it reply in a human tone, and deciding its alive
so heres what he did. computers are built out of tiny yes/no switches called logic gates. he used the age of empires 2 map editor to make goats act as those switches, a goat moving means yes, staying put means no
stack enough of those goat switches together and you get a working computer. he wired up enough to actually run a tiny language model. inside the game. out of goats
his argument:
> if you can build the exact same thing out of goats, or lego, or people passing notes, then the intelligence was never the magic part
> the human feel of an llm isnt the actual system, its just the layer sitting on top
> you can measure how persuasive or consistent it sounds, but none of that proves anything real is happening underneath
> take away the chat window and the friendly voice, and you're just watching goats shuffle around a map
what he found: the goat version still produced the same kind of consistent, convincing output that makes people think a real llm is alive
but obviously nobody thinks a field of goats is alive. so if goats can fake those exact traits, those traits were never proof of a mind in the first place
his actual paper is titled "if llms have human-like attributes, then so does age of empires 2"
we spent two years arguing about whether ai is alive, and this guy answered it with goats
"Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world."
G.K Chesterton in Orthodoxy chapter 7
Sadly I see this all the time. There is no interest to invest in their family unless it is about themselves.
It now seems that all the complaints leveled against younger demographic groups over decades was just a smokescreen to avoid the same issues in themselves.
Boomer is upset she moved to be closer to her children/grandchildren who are in the middle of living their lives raising children. Doesn't offer to help with any of the day to day, ie become integrated and part of their lives, and is dissatisfied when they're busy and don't have time to entertain her lol
"The Dark Ages are a myth. The long centuries between the fall of Rome and the full emergence of a Christian Europe were incomparably the greatest period of moral improvement in human history. In the Classical world, such practices as infanticide, abortion, pederasty, sodomy, slavery, suicide, and crucifixion were everyday facts of life. Public entertainment in Rome included going to the Colosseum to watch gladiators kill each other or wild animals tear helpless people apart. As Christianity gained ascendancy, all these things were abolished by law. By the end of the so-called Dark Ages they had been banned throughout Christendom and ceased to exist, except insofar as they could be performed illicitly. Until recently we took their non-existence so much for granted that we forgot our huge debt to the Dark Ages — the very name of which signifies our modern ingratitude.
The Dark Ages understood virtue and built a civilization; the progressive age doesn’t understand virtue and is tearing down the civilization it inherited." - Joe Sobran
To be filled with wonder, we must first be humble creatures who believe it worth our time to bend low to examine this world, to get into the grit of it, and see it for what it truly is.
https://t.co/S5DdDVDdXS