exchemist

Ah so that's it. Keywords.

Yes but why such a concentrated burst of them, with many of them being just repeats of what they posted a few minutes earlier? Seems very strange to be some kind of commercial strategy. But maybe it’s just an unintended consequence of how these guys are remunerated or something: sudden panic to meet targets, leading to a splurge of posts to meet a deadline.

I'm curious as to what might be the motive for today's attempt to flood the forum with spam. We've had these in the past from time to time. It can't be to advertise a service or a scam, because of the random subject matter. Can this be an individual with a grudge against the forum, or something like that? Seems pretty pointless and ineffective.

Are you going to address my question or are you just here to preach?

A field has a numerical value, of some quantity or other, at each point in space. How can you have an information field? Information does not simply have a numerical value.

Yup. And here is a direct citation of the relevant Catholic theology: https://www.catholictheology.info/summa-theologica/summa-part1.php?q=543 That goes back to Augustine of Hippo, ~ 200AD, so it's not a recent idea. I'm don't know my way round Jewish theology enough to comment on how the rabbis interpret this concept, but I imagine it may be fairly similar. It seems a pretty obvious way to think of it.

Royalty commonly used the plural form, e.g.Queen Victoria: "We are not amused." I expect this may be a similar usage. No, "the made in the image of God" idea is to show mankind as being in some way specially godlike, compared to the rest of creation, through possession of an immortal soul. As for went before, it is clear in the Genesis story that Man is portrayed as being created after other things. As for "let" that is just an English grammatical usage, e.g. "Let us go to the park and have a picnic", conveying a proposal or suggestion. It does not mean permission is being sought.

It doesn’t sound quite right to me. Do you perhaps mean “traverse”?

The most productive way to do this is for you to do some reading on your own first, and then come here with questions on things you find hard to understand. Obviously a discussion forum is not the place to write out a whole textbook on science. But there are people here who can explain particular points or issues.

Yes "carbuncle" would be a reference to Prince Charles, as he then was, commenting on the extension to the National Gallery which he described as "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a well-loved friend" or something. Fryscraper is new to me however. Another screw up in London was the hotel at the top of the Shard at London Bridge. People quickly discovered that the angles of the glass produced reflections that allowed them to see into one anothers' bedrooms.😁

This is not surprising to me. As I have understood the issue so far, LLMs are AI in the sense they use neural networks to learn how to construct sentences and create bodies of original text. So they are very ingenious at that. But that's all. They are brain-dead when it comes to the meaning of the words, i.e. the content of the sentences they read and write. Emily Bender describes them as "stochastic parrots" because they simply look up a load of references on the subject they have been given and construct a reply out of the statistically most common features they encounter. A further characteristic of LLMs is that, because they are designed to engage the user in chat, they will obsequiously try to construct an answer that tells the user he or she is right, or at least one that lets them down very gently if they are wrong. The obvious danger is that lazy users, or those lacking adequate critical faculties, will feel their wrong ideas are vindicated because "AI has told me I'm right". As these false responses build up in the on-line bank of knowledge, there is the further danger that this "botshit" will get start to be ingested by other LLMs and repeated, causing progressive contamination of the knowledge base.

No he reverted to the interests of his grandfather and great grandfather, history. But I suspect part of it was wanting to plough his own furrow and thereby escape the shadow of his STEM parents. Haha I remember that one. Somebody's Jag got melted - at least some panels and mirrors. I think they had to fit some kind of shading on the windows to stop it. It wasn't just because it was under construction; it was a problem intrinsic to the design.

Oh yes we had that on the recent not-really-a-creationist-honest-guv thread: a load of "references without the detail needed to look them up and which, on researching them, seemed not to exist.

That response makes no sense. Are you a human being or a bot? They work in the north. It’s south of Rome where things get iffy. He will be between Genoa and Milan. The job is a thing called Workaway, whereby you do temporary work in exchange for board and lodging and get some free time to experience the place. He has a GCSE in Italian and is fluent in French so getting fluent in Italian in a couple of months should be feasible. His Scottish girlfriend will have a job in Madrid teaching English as a 2nd language and there is talk of him moving on there to pick up Spanish as well. We’ll see. His mother spoke French, English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, so maybe he has inherited her linguistic aptitude. He certainly does not get it from me. His degree is in Ancient History and Archaeology. Dissertation on the cultural significance, trading and manufacture of (so-called) Egyptian faïence in the Eastern Mediterranean, before the Bronze Age Collapse. Quite interesting actually.

Yeah he's taking a year off, starting with a job in Italy, to try to get fluent in Italian, to add to his French and English. He's got an EU passport so maybe he can find something in the EU later on. To prepare, he's working his way through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Italian, which his girlfriend got for him. Vogone prostetnico Jeltz.

Globe has a flat bottom. But clearly a lousy idea for a paperweight. Haha, I prefer the science explanation. But maybe it's a signal that I need to be more careful. Now that I'm getting old and forgetful, I need to be aware of such things. Regarding my son's graduation, thanks. I was slightly surprised to find that my son's MA hood and gown at St. Andrew's were identical to the one I had at Oxford. I had imagined all these universities would have their own designs. Also the Bachelor one e.g. BSc for the science grads is almost the same too - white rabbit fur lining, though they have a magenta strip that we didn't have. However the PhD gown at St. A is something else: sky blue. Quite striking. (The Oxford D Phil one is blue and red: my friend from uni days, now married to my then girlfriend, looks like an exotic parrot at gaudies.) I chatted to an evangelical vicar and his charming wife from Preston (whom I had sat next to at the ceremony and chatted up). He had been awarded a PhD for a study of the 12 minor prophets of the Old Testament - most of whom I had never heard of, apart from Micah. She had come dressed in sky blue as well. They made a striking couple. I was quite sad to take the train back to London. He's been happy there and very much at home. Now it is all uncertainty and rootlessness again for him. The jobs market in the UK is pretty bad now for graduates, not helped by bloody AI.

Limitless nuclear energy, too cheap to meter.

I've been away for a few days, attending my son's graduation and found a burn mark on the papers on my desk when I returned. I have a paperweight in the form of a transparent glass globe, which I had left holding down some papers because I had the window open in the hot weather before I left. The glass globe had evidently focused the afternoon sun onto the paper and burnt it. It had gone through 3 sheets. I'm damned lucky it didn't set the whole room on fire. Definite learning point there.

Yup, that's a simplified free radical reaction scheme showing the same basic idea as the more complicated ones in the paper.

Good luck then. Good luck, then. So long as you are aware of the pitfalls of AI and use it wisely. 👍

Ahem, yes. Or a sudden 8 para screed full of palaeontological terms about the Cretaceous…..

It has always seemed to me the output of these things reads like a bad undergraduate essay, full of padding and long words to sound impressive. The sort of thing my tutor at uni used to really hate. Interesting to see you and others are starting to quantify the characteristics of their style. On this forum the usual giveaway is a post that suddenly reads like a long piece from a textbook, quite different from the normal style of the person posting it.

But how do you know it is not rubbish? When Large Language Model AI tries to do maths it usually screws up, because it is a language model, not a mathematical model.

There’s a funny story in “American Prometheus” about Feynman, when he was at Los Alamos, discovering a gap under the wire of the security fence and puzzling the guards by repeatedly leaving the compound without apparently ever returning. He was a mischievous fellow.

Exactly. See my later post and the link to the paper. It’s pretty complicated but you can see the sort of thing that goes on.