Samuel
another good example of “it doesn’t have to be like this”
Cabel Sasser@cabel.panic.com· 5 Oct 2025
i don’t like or understand ai. but it’s wild to see this person, who clearly DOES understand it and obviously knows a LOT about it, be repeatedly told they are stupid? i think a lot of bluesky thinks the simple solution to discomfort is bullying which is so weird given we were all surely bullied??
then: you don't need to "understand how the human mind works" on any level in order to make a computerized map of the connectome including every protein and cell. this is similar to how we do not currently understand how LLMs work but we can run them using opaque frozen weights.

bluesky: We do know how LLMs work. What the fuck are you talking about? Lmfao.

them: this is a common misconception about modern ai systems. they are grown, and not crafted; we understand the process that builds them but lack a paradigmatic understanding that answers the question
"how do these 1 trillion floating point numbers do ‹x>". this has been the case since the DL revolutionthem: the way it actually works is that we initialize 1 trillion random floating point numbers as activation weights and biases in an enormous multilayer artificial neural network, give it tasks, and use vector calculus to update those 1 trillion neurons based on empirical task performance

source: i am literally one of the engineers/ research scientists who builds and optimizethem: and when i say "we update the neurons based on empirical task performance",
, the “we" is not any human at all, it is an automatic process called gradient descent

the job of these engineers is to make the framework that grows the neurons and feed the pipeline that executes, measures, and backpropagates task pertormance

geoffrey hinton won the nobel prize in physics in 2024 for his contributions that helped make this possible

bluesky: i think you maybe unwell
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Samuel
quality of discussion is so poor it doesn’t even qualify as “discussion” anymore
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Tim
the people who wanted to escape the nastiness of twitter brought the nastiness here with them at least that's been my perception
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Samuel
eh. more like the problem wasn’t twitter, the problem is a social problem neither us nor twitter have solved
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Emmathyst
Regrettably I don’t think anyone is going to solve the largest social crisis in history via a social media platform bound to the rules of technology.
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