• It’s
• better
• to
• list
• them
• one
• at
• a
• time

insteadofallmushedtogether.

At least the most innovative. I think it was meant for kids, so the stories were fairly simple, but the way of using the visual medium to tell those stories was ingenious.

Yeah. I knew the character from the comics, but I didn’t know how they were going to tell that story in a TV medium. What they came up with was unexpected but great.

What I like is that there’s a reason for the surrealist vibe. Often surreal stuff is the way it is because that’s just how the director likes to make things.

I guess I can sort-of see where you’re coming from. Presumably when they’re bombing an airbase they’re trying to hit planes, destroy runways, etc. If you’re in the break room at the time there’s a decent chance you don’t die. If you’re working on a plane, you’re probably dead. But, when you sink a ship, everyone goes into the water and there’s a good chance they’ll die.

To me, the fact that it happened nowhere near Iran is the bigger deal. It means that parts of the world that aren’t aligned with either side in the war now have to wonder what might explode in their own territory.

OTOH, at least when you sink a military ship there won’t be civilian casualties. If the US had actually declared war on Iran, which of course never happened, but if… then another warship is actually a valid target. This isn’t like blowing up an apartment building because a guy on your kill list is in one of the apartments.

I don’t think it’s going to change either, so we need to adjust the way we do things to compensate.

We put seatbelts and airbags in cars because we know that people are going to drive like idiots. Maybe we need similar rules around LLMs to save people from their own instincts.

In a sense, if he can speed that often and never be involved in an accident, he might be a very good driver.

My mom is a significantly worse driver. She never speeds, but sometimes she drives so slowly on the highway that she’s a danger to other drivers. In addition, many times, she has damaged her car trying to maneuver in an underground parking garage. AFAIK she has never been in an accident where someone was injured, so there are worse drivers out there.

Was he a terrorist? Spy, sure. Torturer, sure. Assassin, yeah. But terrorist?

Also, the important part is that he was exiled to Terok Nor. He wasn’t trustworthy, but he was no longer employed as a spy, torturer or assassin when we meet him. By then he was a tailor who was on the lookout for a way to improve his situation using all the tricks he’d learned from his previous life. I think people loved him because he was a believable character with a lot of depth to him.

Tell him it’s a test they don’t think he can pass. Tell him Obama passed easily.

Different from smashing their airfields with missiles? Or, is it different because of where it happened?

Also Monk, Beef, Life, Taxi, and other 4-letter TV shows.

I imagine it’s kind of like when real people interact with Muppets; from what I hear, they still end up perceiving them as people, even though they can see the person with his arm up Kermit’s ass.

It’s a “known failure mode” of humans that they anthropomorphize things, that they spot patterns that aren’t actually there, that they assign agency when something is random, etc.

An LLM is a machine designed specifically to produce plausible text. It analyzes billions of books and web pages to figure out the structure of language. Then it is given a bunch of text and it figures out what is likely to come next. It’s obvious what humans will do when exposed to something like that.

Individual humans should be smart enough to say “We humans are flawed, I better approach this cautiously”. But, as a society we should also protect individual humans from themselves by making laws that prevent them from being preyed on.

So good.

Only when those presidents are “deep state” types. Most of the time he’s killing and torturing all kinds of people, uncovering all these hidden plots. And he has to be the one man army righting all the wrongs because the establishment is either corrupt, or too slow to react, or whatever.

On the one hand, these LLM companies really shouldn’t be foisting their beta technology on unwary users. If a Google employee couldn’t tell someone to kill themselves and get away with it, why is it that they get to absolve themselves of responsibility if the sentence is generated by an LLM?

On the other hand, people in the future will look at the early LLM users (people who used it in the first few years) as complete idiots. It’s like the scientists who first studied radiation who just poked at radioactive things without understanding the danger. Or, like doctors who used to do surgery without washing their hands. They’ll hopefully understand that it was a new technology so we were dumb about it. But, they’ll still think that people were absolute idiots for feeding text into “spicy autocomplete” and then taking whatever it generated at face value.

Because it’s not possible.

LLMs are just machines that generate text. The text they generate is text that is statistically likely to appear after the existing text. You can do “prompt engineering” all you want, but that will never work. All prompt engineering does is change the words that come earlier in the context window. If the system calculates that the most likely words to come next are “you should kill yourself” then that’s what it’s going to spit out.

You could try putting a filter in there to prevent it from outputting specific words or specific phrases. But, language is incredibly malleable. The LLM could spit out thousands of different ways of saying “kill yourself”, and you can’t block them all. If you want to try to prevent it from expressing the concept of killing one’s self, you need something that can “comprehend” text… which at this point is just basically another version of the same kind of AI that generates the text, so that’s not going to work.

You’ll probably also be a fan of MASH, Dark, Rome and Silo.

Yeah, this is a good one, a hidden gem.

24 was highly influential, but the story just isn’t ever believable, and the amount of death and torture is absurd. I’m sure it’s a MAGA favourite, but for other people I think it’s mostly interesting as a cultural artifact.

One I haven’t seen listed here:

Samurai Jack

It’s a cartoon you need to sit down and pay attention to. There’s often action, and it can be goofy, but it also has a lot of really quiet, contemplative scenes.