Samantics

The middle stages of typical Alzheimer's disease patients sometimes resemble the behaviour of a high-parameter large language model with a small context. In particular, some patients will exhibit a tendency to 'play along' with an interlocutor, inhabiting a persona from some arbitrary part in their lifetime that best fits the available stimuli. When they generate nonsensical utterances, these may seem to be attempts to decode incomprehensible stimuli with damaged hardware. This tendency toward annealing, and the resultant glimpses of a sophisticated memory or personality composed of the experiences of the individual, are iconic LLM behaviours—hallucinating and recall. […]

I used to spend a lot of time on r/linguisticshumor, being a smug idiot. Recently I got it into my head that shouting at the never-ebbing tide of first-year linguistics students was a waste of my life, so rather than continue piling bricks in an ever-eroding wall, I'll just post them here, and you can throw them through your own window (or your enemies' windows) at your leisure. […]

Lately I've been on a retro-computing binge, revisiting some past nostalgias (and borrowed nostalgias) with fresh eyes. I don't usually think highly of nostalgics in the purest sense—I've always thought of rose-tinted glasses as an obstacle to true appreciation of history rather than a justification for it—but this time I took a long, hard look at the technology of my own childhood for once, particularly the quirks of 90s Windows, from 3.0 through 2000, and in the midst of this I've come to realise that the standard terminology we use to describe the experience of using old computers is missing an axis, one that's worth defining. […]