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  • They cannot be anything other than stochastic parrots because that is all the technology allows them to be.

    Are you referring to humans or AI? I'm not sure you're wrong about humans...

  • Clearly the Founding Fathers were not advanced enough to have crafted the US Constitution unaided.

    In a sense you are correct. They cribbed from lots of the most well known political philosophers at the time. For example, there are direct quotes from Locke in the Declaration and his influence over the Constitution can be felt clearly.

  • What you are describing is true of older LLMs. GPT4, it's less true of. GPT5 or whatever it is they are training now will likely begin to shed these issues.

    The shocking thing that we discovered that lead to all of this is that this sort of LLM continues to scale in capabilities with the quality and size of the training set. AI researchers were convinced that this was not possible until GPT proved that it was.

    So the idea that you can look at the limitations of the current generation of LLM and make blanket statements about the limitations of all future generations is demonstrably flawed.

  • Note that though AI is the new hotness and grabs headlines, this a) doesn't actually apply only to AI and b) has been done for at least a decade.

    Many actors have refused such clauses (I know Sam Jackson is one of them) but many have not.

    Putting actor's faces on CGI bodies has been something Hollywood has been working on for a long time, and AI is just a tool that improves on what we've been doing for a while.

  • How did the first tin cans get opened? A chisel and a hammer, writes Kaleigh Rogers for Motherboard. Given that the first can opener famously wasn’t invented for about fifty years after cans went into production, people must have gotten good at the method. But there are reasons the can opener took a while to show up.

    Our story starts in 1795, when Napoleon Bonaparte offered a significant prize “for anyone who invented a preservation method that would allow his army’s food to remain unspoiled during its long journey to the troops’ stomachs,” writes Today I Found Out. (In France at the time, it was common to offer financial prizes to encourage scientific innovation–like the one that led to the first true-blue paint.) A scientist named Nicolas Appert cleaned up on the prize in the early 1800s, but his process used glass jars with lids rather than tin cans.

    “Later that year,” writes Today I Found Out, “an inventor, Peter Durand, received a patent from King George III for the world’s first can made of iron and tin.” But early cans were more of a niche item: they were produced at a rate of about six per hour, rising to sixty per hour in the 1840s. As they began to penetrate the regular market, can openers finally started to look like a good idea.

    But the first cans were just too thick to be opened in that fashion. They were made of wrought iron (like fences) and lined with tin, writes Connecticut History, and they could be as thick as 3/16 of an inch. A hammer and chisel wasn’t just the informal method of opening these cans–it was the manufacturer’s suggested method.

    The first can opener was actually an American invention, patented by Ezra J. Warner on January 5, 1858. At this time, writes Connecticut History, “iron cans were just starting to be replaced by thinner steel cans.”

    Warner’s can opener was a blade that cut into the can lid with a guard to prevent it from puncturing the can. A user sort of sawed their way around the can’s edge, leaving a jagged rim of raw metal as they went. “Though never a big hit with the public, Warner’s can opener served the U.S. Army during the Civil War and found a home in many grocery stores,” writes Connecticut History, “where clerks would open cans for customers to take home.”

    Attempts at improvement followed, and by 1870, the basis of the modern can opener had been invented. William Lyman’s patent was the first to use a rotary cutter to cut around the can, although in other aspects it doesn’t look like the modern one. “The classic toothed-wheel crank design” that we know and use today came around in the 1920s, writes Rogers. That invention, by Charles Arthur Bunker, remains the can opener standard to this day.>

  • I finally figured out what's going on. Someone at reddit asked, "ChatGPT, what are the 10 most damaging things reddit could do to alienate users and decrease its value?" They then began working on the checklist... they're up to, what, 5?

  • There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.

    Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, "In God We Trust," motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, "And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust.'"

  • That first one reminded me of a story I heard at a small SF convention in LA back in the '90s.

    This writer was working on The Real Ghostbusters (long story behind that name) and in the episode they go in the space shuttle to a space station. Everyone on the space station is a Star Trek character analog and so hilarity ensues as the rest of the episode is just a Star Trek spoof.

    One of the characters is based on Janice Rand who, in the show, had a basket-weave hairdo. The writer included in the script a note to the animators about her hair. The animators were Asian and did not know what a basket-weave was, and it being pre-Wikipedia, they just made an assumption. The test animation they got back had the Janice Rand-alike with a basket literally woven into her hair.

    They kept it in the final episode, of course.

    Edit: found it, at about 2:30 https://www.crackle.com/watch/d4228840-874e-418c-afd7-a9b93146e6ed/the-real-ghostbusters/ain't-nasa-sarily-so