We are just recovering from a similar situation here but the Overton window has shifted so far the supposed left-wing workers’ party now look like centre-right conservatives.

Right on cue, the descent into fascism begins ahead of the impending climate disasters.

It’s so depressing to see France like this, I always held it up as a prominent antifa nation.

Oh, I thought this was a security feature.

Probably because it’s down. I for one am surprised they have no failover for when Bing goes down.

Nah it’s just SFA with extra steps.

So if all world leaders collectively agreed to put aside their differences, ditch capitalism and mobilise their entire populations to actively work to reduce emissions tomorrow we might stand a slim chance of preventing the worst case scenario…

Yep my sentiment entirely.

I had actually written a couple more paragraphs using weather models as an analogy akin to your quartz crystal example but deleted them to shorten my wall of text…

We have built up models which can predict what might happen to particular weather patterns over the next few days to a fair degree of accuracy. However, to get a 100% conclusive model we’d have to have information about every molecule in the atmosphere, which is just not practical when we have a good enough models to have an idea what is going on.

The same is true for any system of sufficient complexity.

This article, along with others covering the topic, seem to foster an air of mystery about machine learning which I find quite offputting.

Known as generalization, this is one of the most fundamental ideas in machine learning—and its greatest puzzle. Models learn to do a task—spot faces, translate sentences, avoid pedestrians—by training with a specific set of examples. Yet they can generalize, learning to do that task with examples they have not seen before.

Sounds a lot like Category Theory to me which is all about abstracting rules as far as possible to form associations between concepts. This would explain other phenomena discussed in the article.

Like, why can they learn language? I think this is very mysterious.

Potentially because language structures can be encoded as categories. Any possible concept including the whole of mathematics can be encoded as relationships between objects in Category Theory. For more info see this excellent video.

He thinks there could be a hidden mathematical pattern in language that large language models somehow come to exploit: “Pure speculation but why not?”

Sound familiar?

models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on.

Maybe there is a threshold probability of a positied association being correct and after enough iterations, the model flipped it to “true”.

I’d prefer articles to discuss the underlying workings, even if speculative like the above, rather than perpetuating the “It’s magic, no one knows.” narrative. Too many people (especially here on Lemmy it has to be said) pick that up and run with it rather than thinking critically about the topic and formulating their own hypotheses.

It’s just a bit of a pointless distinction. No atheist could claim they know for sure.

I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong.

Sounds like straight up atheism to me…

As an atheist who would fully accept the existence of a deity if any form of rigorous proof was provided, these boxes are dumb.

How does one “lean” agnostic?

It’s not a strawman argument, I’ll let you pick any imaginary creature you please.

Mind if I take some of your income to fund my unicorn sanctuary instead of improving tangible public services?

Now that you mention it, I’m not entirely convinced it is a fully coherent belief in its own right, more of a lack of wanting to enter the debate or a subcategory of atheism.

Shall we try it with unicorns? Unicorn believer says they saw a unicorn.

Atheist viewpoint would say something along the lines of “To persuade me they exist I’d need to see one in the flesh or at the very least a full anatomical breakdown of how their magical properties work with corroboration from other unicorn enthusiasts.”

The agnostic standpoint is what exactly? “We can’t know whether unicorns exist or not so there’s no point discussing it.”?

No they don’t and agnosticism isn’t an upgrade, it’s just sitting on the fence.

Most athiests are agnostic to some degree and vice versa.

The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim.

Logic and reasoning preferably with scientific evidence.

Slay the Spire for improving risk analysis skills.

David, is that you?!

I expected it to be difficult with a possibility of not enjoying it but seemed pretty popular so thought I’d give it a go.

Will give your suggestions a shot but I find everything about it obtuse to be honest. To me good game design lowers you gently into mastering the controls and ramping up difficulty, not just chucking you in at the deep end with confusing menus so it’s on the player to look everything up.

Weirdly I like Guitar Hero, but think that’s mainly down to enjoying the songs and playing with friends. Scraping through Cliffs of Dover on expert was enough Eden Ring for me lol.