… quoth the raven, “please, some more.”

Hahaha.

Oh, I’ve owned a game.

I own many games.

I can give them to whoever I want.

… you just have to be clever.

Completely agree with all of this.

Especially the last part.

We don’t even understand our brains, our own minds, we still can’t fully agree on what consciousness or sentience… even… are.

We’re certainly making progress on those fronts… but we are a very, very far distance from the finish line.

That finish line would be like… we solved Psychology, we solved Neuroscience, we have a Grand Unified Theory of Mind, etc.

Introverts exist, and are… very often fine with solitude, prefer it generally over socializing.

But they are generally fine at participating in society and living normal lives.

Healthy people… do need doctors … and therapists.

A person can outwardly appear to be healthy… and actually not be.

Preventative medicine, regular checkups, your body changes as you grow, and habits you develop in your youth may need significant reworking.

Therapy can give otherwise healthy people a method of exploring their inner selves more fully or more consistently… they can teach them frameworks for understanding and dealing with other kinds of people, for being better able to deal with kinds of trauma they have not yet experienced.

Also… same with physical health… people with some nascent mental problems or patterns forming… probably won’t be obvious to a non specialist, untill it gets more severe.

No, I acknowledged and understood the joke.

Literally the first thing I said.

The vast majority of my comment was an explanation of the false premise that was misread into what I said, in the text following the LLM joke.

That so many people cannot follow or interpret … what I actually said… demonstrates that, in some cases, a more advanced level of literacy is indeed required.

The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.

It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.

Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.

This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.

But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.

This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.

But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.

Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.

Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.

We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.

Why are they booing me?

They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.

They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…

…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…

Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.

Here is a way of describing what I see as ‘the problem’:

An LLM cannot forget things in its base training data set.

Its permanent memory… is totally permanent.

And this memory has a bunch of wrong ideas, a bunch of nonsensical associations, a bunch of false facts, a bunch of meaningless gibberish.

It has no way of evaluating its own knowledge set for consistency, coherence, and stability.

It literally cannot learn and grow, because it cannot realize why it made mistakes, it cannot discard or ammend in a permanent way, concepts that are incoherent, faulty ways of reasoning (associating) things.

Seriously, ask an LLM a trick question, then tell it it was wrong, explain the correct answer, then ask it to determine why it was wrong.

Then give it another similar category of trick question, but that is specifically different, repeat.

The closer you try to get it toward reworking a fundamental axiom it holds to that is flawed, the closer it gets to responding in totally paradoxical, illogical gibberish, or just stuck in some kind of repetetive loop.

… Learning is as much building new ideas and experiences, as it is reevaluating your old ideas and experiences, and discarding concepts that are wrong or insufficient.

Biological brains have neuroplasticity.

So far, silicon ones do not.

Wow, what a whiff.

No, your response there is something like:

“Oh dear, you’d better pull that fineapple plug out rather slowly… got a lot of ridges, kinda sharp, no need for unnecessary suffering on the way out.”

That’s at least an attempt at recovery, instead of a total capitulation.

Comparing not knowing a niche concept to functional illiteracy

Again, this isn’t the primary argument I made.

One can make an argument, a logical construction, and then provide an example.

The example is not the argument.

It exemplifies the argument.

Being able to identify what parts of a text serve what purpose… is a part of the skillset of more advanced literacy.

it just comes across as snobbish or elitist.

A person with a broader vocabulary definitionally has a superior level of literacy, as compared to a person who has a smaller vocabulary, all else held equal.

This just literally is part of how literacy is measured.

A person with superior literacy does have an elite level of comprehension, compared to someone with an inferior level of literacy.

You cannot construct a comparative scale of levels of literacy without scores that are higher and lowers than others, sets of concepts they do and do not understand, and can or cannot make use of.

A person who can evaluate integrals in calculus has a superior, elite level of mathematical comprehension, as compared to someone who can only do algebra.

If you have no metric, no measurement, no way to compare levels of ability in a subject… you cannot objectively compare them.

You wanted the conversation to go exactly where you wanted it to go.

You’re now presuming to read my inner thoughts, read my mind.

No, I did not.

You are thinking I devised this all as a trap, that I was waiting to spring.

In reality, I woke up, read a reply to a thing I wrote before I fell asleep, and viewed it as an opporunity to further educate people on what literacy is, how this works.

But you have intuited hostile intent from this, probably because you don’t like the idea of me explaining to someone that they are not as literate as they think they are, or that its simply insulting to point this out.

To the contrary, understanding what literacy actually is, how it works, how it can be and is measured…

These are fundamental things to grasp if you or anyone is serious about improving their own literacy, or the general literacy of the populace.

This is especially important when a literate public is vital to a functioning democratic society.

You have to understand the nuances, the complexities.

But, if you instead want to attack those you dissgree with, because you do not comprehend what they are saying…

If you want to assume everything is some kind of intentional, personal attack…

Don’t expect society or your understanding of it to get any better, any time soon.

While your LLM slop is on point, you’ve ironically illustrated my actual point.

My last paragraph is an example.

It’s a pithy quip.

It is not the crux of the operative argument.

But you focused on specific knowledge of the Flesch Kinkaid reading level metric… as a primary thrust of the argument.

No, the argument is in the first sentence.

Also… having a full, broad and deep understanding of the concepts at play, being mentioned and referenced in an article, by a book, in a movie script, etc…

That actually is a part of being rated as high reading level by the Flesch Kinkaid metric.

Essentially, its breadth of vocabulary.

If your vocabulary lacks less commonly used, but specific concepts, relevant to the point being made… people will tend to either pretend they aren’t present in the text, or, just make up an intuited meaning, which may or may not be accurate, or, as you have done, will actually take the time to try and learn what they mean.

But, because you cognitively spent so much time/energy on expanding your vocabulary, you interpreted or reinterpreted the totality of what I said to be focused on knowledge of Flesch Kinkaid.

Again, no, that isn’t the crux of the argument.

But, in doing this, you have ironically demonstrated why a pre-existing functional understanding of the concepts at play is an important component of more advanced literacy.

A term I used basically flippantly, because I am so familiar with it that I find it mundane… to you, that is a new term, so your brain focused more on comprehending the new term, over interpreting the entirety of what I actually said.

If you don’t understand the more uncommon or advanced concepts that a piece of media is using, referencing, prior to engaging with it… you won’t understand a joke based off of that more advanced concept.

Thus, if a character in a show/movie does that… or an op-ed in a news article does that… or a youtuber in a video essay does that… you are more likely to misinterpret the media.

I mean, personally, I think the greatest stumbling block to media illiteracy, is just literal, functional illiteracy.

Median adult American reads at a 5th grade level.

Normally I’d also say ‘Look at the Flesch Kinkaid level of Presidential speeches overtime’, but at this point, a person would need an LLM to explain Flesch Kinkaid reading level to them, and … well I don’t even know if most of the things Trump have said in the last year or two… are even actually comprehensible.

Oh god.

IIRC, they had to explain that the island would not sink due to putting the weight of more troops and equipment on it.

I think the general said something like “No sir, we do not… forsee that happening, no.”

I also assumed this was serious, untill I read these comments.

Yep, the bar is in hell.

Yep, a town crier like role.

Hell even in the American West, people would gather round for someone actually literate to read the latest newspaper.

“And they say, ‘whoah, ain’t you glad you’re single~!’…”

…

…

Boone?

… oh. fuck. right.

… ‘Bansky goes to Space’ …

That would make for quite a story.

Yeah, there is no denying that NiN and industrial in general was… running through the blood of the late 90s / early 00s FPS pioneers.

Heck, not even just FPS:

Frank ‘Motherfucking’ Klepacki.

… who the fuck comes up with both Hell March… and IndustroFunk?

He just like invented a subgenre, as a song.

Ok, I was going to edit this in to my last comment, but you already replied, so:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9F030ERnQ84&list=PL059AC88C849E7A20&index=24

‘You’re Not Supposed to Be Here’

Ok so we open with… I think:

Either a very distorted bass guitar or synth… and… a marimba?

At about 10 seconds we start the action, angry synth and … drum kit that includes a steel drum?

We’ve also got another kind of haunting synth doing a more complex melody…

Then at about 35 seconds, the song basically explodes into… all the synths are here (maybe some are guitars with lots of effects/delays/fades?) now, big sound range from the synths/possible guitars…

And then at about 55 seconds, slight lull, piano is here now,

Some synths/guitars? are still going, piano is somber, breakbeat drumming is intense … thats quite a juxtapostion…

Synths get more prominent, piano fades out…

Then by about 1:35 we downplay the synths a bit, piano is sad again… drumming is still happening.

Ok, then by about 1:55, pretty sure this is a guitar, that uses a delay pedal/effect to basically punctuate itself for 1-2 second melodic bursts, gets accomoanied by either another heavily modified guitar or synth untill…

About 2:25, sad piano is back again, to basically play us out, but the breakbeat drumming is still here, untill it isn’t, and we actually fade out on bass guitar/synth… and the marimba.

This is a 2:41 song.

It took me like 15 minutes to attempt to comprehend what is happening.

I do know Master Boot Record and yeah I agree, its more like chiptune metal…

I will have to check out The Algorithm and Ishkur’s site… though probably tomorrow.

I know that if I start now, I will not get to sleep untill 4 am.

You’re good at this.

Yeah, actually, this is pretty close, if you had these guys make ‘instrumentals’, no lyrics songs.

Like if you took all of the differing elements, and patterns of maybe 3 of their songs, and essentially remixed them into one song, stripped out the vocals… that would approximately be pretty close to a good deal of HL2 songs, imo.

Maybe increase the range of effects and synths used a bit, but yeah, this is pretty close.

I guess the main difference left that I can think of is that… a lot of this kind of 90s/00s industrial, it will be built kind of around a guitar riff, like the distored/noise guitar is kind of the foundation, the thing that is basically always there, keeping the tempo, driving the song.

But a lot of HL2 songs will… kind of swap this idea: The driving melody is synthetic, the guitar is used for the occasional/repeated kind of bits of flavor.

… I feel like I don’t music theory to know the right words, lol.

Hehe, the top one is slightly off for me, but uh… yeah, lemmy has like 20+ client apps … so… lol