So the most basic fallacy I was alluding to, from people who believe you can refine your faith by talking with an LLM is this: An LLM has no subjective experiences, because it doesn’t experience anything at all. This is one way how using the output from an LLM as a source of inspiration for your faith sets you up for psychosis. You start believing things that have no basis in reality or anyone’s genuine experiences. Rather, you may start believing in machine-generated approximations from which coherence has been lost.

Reasonable, though it could be argued they are full of subjective experiences, just all mixed together.

But i expect it’s probably more about the coherence of the experience that provides the meaning in this context.

Coherence as in , one coherent explanation of a subjective experience by a person rather than a plausible sounding experience made up of many bits of experiences from a corpus of data.

But it seems your understanding was slightly different, in that people might develop their own sense of faith from experiences with an LLM itself rather than through the exchange of presumed experiences with the LLM. Do I understand correctly that you think some people attribute godlike qualities to the LLM, maybe through the presumption that it is an AGI? That would be a bit of a different discussion indeed :)

Not exactly, i think there are two different things here from my side.

The first:

I think people might attribute person like qualities to an LLM, the “ghost in the machine” as was mentioned earlier.

I wasn’t trying to imply someone who knows what an AGI is supposed to be would use that knowledge to assign godlike attributes to an LLM (a “god in the machine”).

Though , as a concept that would also be a valid example of “belief in the absence of proof”.

I don’t expect most people to know the terminology or have even an idea of what’s happening behind the scenes.

The second:

The part i’m struggling with is why “faith” in something like ability for meaning to come from LLM generated text (god-like or person-like) is any less acceptable than “faith” derived from perceived meaning in seemingly random (based on the knowledge of the time) events, like thunderstorms or plagues.

They would both cover the idea of belief in something in the absence of proof, so how would someone decide one is less valid than the other.

i thought the religious cult was the government, or did they seize power later ?

i have posted a response to the above comment that might contain relevant information.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

That is a well thought out and helpful answer, that’s useful to me in understanding come aspects of faith in general, thank you.

Before i continue i want to highlight the differences i see between:

- LLM (Large Language Models)
	- The trending technology that is a smaller part of a general field.
        - it's what you are interacting with using ChatGPT, Claude etc
- AI (Artifical Intelligence)
	- The general field, which includes LLM's but also Neural Networks, certain kinds of algorithms and more.
- AGI (Artificial **General** Intelligence)
	- The common scientific term for what most people think of when they hear "AI". 
        - roughly and borderline inaccurately:
              - "a machine intellect of the same type as a human, matching or exceeding common human capability"

I get that faith, mysticism etc are how some of us deal with subjective ( from our point of view ) phenomena . I’d imagine this is why gods for things like storms or seasons etc come about.

As i said , I have no issue with any of that unless it starts being forced on people, i even vaguely understand how people could come to that conclusion and i’m not pretending to have any better answers.

My original question was more about this part:

Now, some people get tricked into thinking you can do the same with machines, but well, I think you can guess where I too stand on that idea.

Are you saying that the subjective experiences with the LLM’s are the trick or the feeling of understanding and appreciation with the machine ?

Some peoples experiences with LLM’s (perhaps what they consider to be an AGI?) sounds like they’d fall exactly in to the type of subjective phenomena that would bring about faith as a means of processing.

That some people seem to think that that kind of faith is any less valid than a guardian deity or a wind god is where I’m struggling.

I don’t understand how people are making that kind of distinction, unless it’s not something based in reasoning?

I want to make clear i don’t think LLM’s are sapient or sentient at this point, though i can’t personally disprove it and am not against being convinced otherwise should sufficient rationale be provided.

I am 100% genuinely not trying to start a fight, this a legitimate question to which I really would like to know the answer.

What is the difference between a divine creation and the "ghost in the machine "?

I will give context , faith is genuinely confusing to me.

I have no issue with personal faiths unless you are trying to force everyone to have the same faith as you.

I consider anything above small scale organisation of religion to be the worst thing that can happen to faith, because people are people and power corrupts.

I suppose my real question is , for a concept that prohibits proof as part of it’s definition, how do you determine that one faith (or system) is better than another?

They’ve had solar incentives,multiple times, the government fucked around and made it absolutely excruciating, then fully dropped it with a big fuck you.

There were legit financial reasons for this afaik, but it still left a bunch of people holding the bag.

People are understandably wary of any new promises.

I wonder if this it is a coincidence that this comes closely on the heels of : this or this or this

They were arresting people for talking walks by themselves in the woods in 2020-2022

Citation ?

That seems like it’d be right in the region of lockdown and curfews.

The Switzerland part is verifiable, somewhat.

The British part is dubious in its subject, you can see many arrests for protesting and other things the government doesn’t like. But preaching? Like, religion? Thats a stretch.

You can probably find a couple over the years but not much more.

The beatings in Europe part seems anecdotal and vague.

The small town America part has strong “trust me bro” vibes and a long history of anecdotes and news stories to the contrary.

The native reservation part is verifiable in numbers but lacking in context.

North Alaska I’ve no idea.

Areas with high levels of organised crime (not the governmental or ruling class kind) being potentially dangerous isn’t exactly high detective work, but sure.

Experiences do very wildly though, so points for that.

Overall a solid 4/10.

Or perhaps listing 3 different positions and claiming someone is between them is confusing…

Given they were directly responding to a quote of the confusing statement, perhaps they were not remarking on the actual position, but on the confusing nature of the description ?

i was talking more of the prosumer and close to prosumer units that could theoretically be retrofitted or housed in homelabs.

If datacentres went down en-masse i’d assume there’d be mix of hardware generations there.

Damn though, i didn’t know anything about the stuff you just mentioned, so my estimates of what could be available/usable are probably way off.

Now i have to go and do a deep dive, thanks.

Not strictly, there are usualy hurdles to overcome for home usage of datacentre tech, but it’s possible.

An easy example that comes to mind is that the datacentre GPU’s might have cooling configurations that rely on a large amount of airflow from the surrounding cabinet, which you’ll get in a datacentre, but not so much in a personal tower.

Also, noise, in a datacentre, noise is much less of an issue than in a personal computer, so they can eschew noise reduction in favour of performance.

Many people that live near data-centres would disagree, but i mean strictly from a usage point of view, not a broader community perspective.

That’s true, but sitting in a warehouse is costing someone money and I’m sure they were more than happy to sell the books even if they knew they’d eventually get destroyed.

Sure, thats a possibility, I wasnt arguing otherwise.

But the other thing is, what should these companies do instead? They scraped the internet and got skewered for that. They pirated books and got in trouble for that. Now they are legally purchasing books to scan.

For me, them doing sketchy and illegal shit, mostly getting away with it and then charging you for access to said ill-gotten gains is a valid reason for people to be upset at them, rage inducing, even.

That aside the equivalent of mass book burning isn’t a good look regardless of legality, even less so when its the same people that did the sketchy shit before.

There is no benefit of the doubt left.

I can see how someone could get to:

“all they do is sketchy shit so even though this might look legit, let’s vocally show our disdain for them and anything they are doing”

They aren’t in current circulation, not the same thing.

Not arguing that they are useful, just that sitting in a warehouse and physical destruction aren’t equivalent in terms of potential use.

“Piranesi” or “There Is No Antimemetics Division”

Though the later is more about exploration of hard to grasp cognitive concepts than a structure.

What you’re describing is skill atrophy, it’s just in skills you don’t value.

It’s also skill acquisition/reinforcement for skill you do value.

I think it honestly might just be my sublime muscle memory ruining it for me, that and it feels like it should be more IDE than text editor.

I use helix quite a bit for dev so lsp’s and editor based coding is known to me.

Perhaps it was just bad timing.

Do you have any good resources for how to use kate in a dev scenario ?

I’ve tried multiple times, but it always seemed clunky to me.

As a text editor its great, though i prefer sublime ( not FOSS however ) but i haven’t been able to get it to click as any kind of ide or part of one.

Not who replied to you originally but,

You aren’t wrong (you even stated that more is probably better) , just not necessarily presenting the whole picture.

Ram compression isn’t a benefit only scenario, there is a cost in processing power to make that happen.

So it’s a trade off of memory utilisation vs processing requirements.

Whether or not it’s worth it is down to circumstance, though i agree that generally i think it’s worth the tradeoff.

Unified memory is useful in specific circumstances, most notably LLM/ML scenarios where high vram utilisation is part of the process.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison by any means.

Easy answer is , they don’t

Though that’s just the one admitting to it.

A lightly more nuanced answer is , it probably depends, there’s likely to be some inference made between age ranges but my guess is that it’d be sub-par given that it sometimes struggles with reproducing images it has a tonne of actual data for.

“anonymous” downvotes aren’t a good replacement for an actual response, but you do you.

and I’m saying it’s not a common occurrence, intentional or not.

Guns aren’t common enough in the UK for “they’ve got a gun” to be a go-to for the police.

“They’ve got a knife” or “They’ve got a sign the ruling class don’t want people to see” are more likely.

As another poster pointed out, it has happened, but it’s by no means the norm.