cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 29 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • This article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:

    “Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."

    To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.

    edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)







  • The primary purpose of those buttons is of course to let those sites track everyone’s browsing activity across every site that uses them, which does not require that anyone ever click on them.

    Even if less than 0.0001% of people click them, anyone with an SEO/spammer “grindset” will assure site operators that the potential benefit of someone sharing a link they otherwise wouldn’t have is still at least theoretically non-zero. And, since there is absolutely no cost at all besides an acceptable number of extra milliseconds per pageload, really, it would be downright irresponsible not to have them there!













  • Because Netanyahu doesn’t want to testify at his corruption trial

    Yes, that was one reason…

    and because the United States has not stopped giving them weapons to carry out this war, regardless of what they did and or who the US president was

    and that is another.

    But, this article buries the lede about what was probably the most compelling reason for Benjamin Netanyahu in making his decision to murder hundreds of people yesterday and today:

    Netanyahu has a deadline: his government must pass a national budget in two weeks, or face the prospect of his government collapsing, triggering new elections.

    Returning to war paved the way for Netanyahu to bring his far-right ally Itamar Ben Gvir back inside the coalition and beef up his governing majority. Ben Gvir had quit because of the January ceasefire with Hamas, and returned Tuesday with the resumption of the war.

    […]

    The strikes could last at least another two weeks until Israel passes its national budget, giving Netanyahu a stronger position in power and more flexibility to resume a ceasefire, analysts say.