happy 30th anniversary to #Myst tomorrow!! i don't normally do much pixel art, it was fun to stretch a bit #art

“The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin, which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …”

At breakfast the next morning, “Tommy,” some one says, “do you know which is the longest river in Africa?” A shaking of the head. “But don’t you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …”

“The – Nile – is – the – longest – river – in – Africa – and – the – second -in – length – of – all – the – rivers – of – the – globe …” The words come rushing out. “Although – falling – short – of …”

“Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?”

The eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

“But the Nile, Tommy.”

“The – Nile – is – the – longest – river – in – Africa – and – second …”

“Then which river is the longest, Tommy?”

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form “A is B”, it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction “B is A”. This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on “Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany”, it will not automatically be able to answer the question, “Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?”. Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer (“Olaf Scholz”) will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if “A is B” occurs, “B is A” is more likely to occur).

-Berglund, et al

My wife hypothesizes that Berglund et al (and, as of last check, the HN commentariat) don't mention Huxley is that when we were kids, there were only three dystopias: We, 1984, and Brave New World. So that's what everyone read. Now there are so many that every kid can just ask ChatGPT to generate one to match their specific fears.

two space-based adventures written predominantly in C# include squad's kerbal space program (2015) and debussy's clair de lune (1905)