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by noduerme 393 days ago
But did you memorize that quote, or was it sufficient to know its gist so you could google it?
3 comments

At least with writing it's fairly easy to implement on your own with little more than what most people would have available in a rudimentary survival situation. It'll be a tough day when someone goes to sign into their GoogleLife (tm) and find out that they can't get AI access because "precluding conditions agreed to upon signing"
As I see it, the solution to this is to invest in open source. As for a "survival situation", a solar-powered laptop with a locally running LLM would definitely be the first item on my list.
It shouldn't be, because LLM:s can't be trusted in the way literature can. People around you are also going to question why you insist on such a power hungry setup.
I’m not suggesting LLMs are infallible, but boy you’re overselling the accuracy of literature
Why do you think that?
Oh definitely the latter. My memory is too far gone from a lifetime of reading. May the next generation avoid my dire fate.
I mean, that's all any of us needs. It's an honorable quote.

I know you're not trying to draw any parallels between Plato's admonition on written thoughts supplanting true knowledge and the justifiable concerns about automated writing tools supplanting the ability of writers to think. To a modern literate, Plato's concern is legible but so patently ridiculous that one could only deploy it as a parody and mockery of the people who might take it as a serious proof that philosophers were wrong about modern tools before. I was obviously just kiddin about whether you googled it. Unfortunately, now a whole new generation is about to use it to justify how LLMs are just being maligned the way written language once was.

Socrates was wrong on this. But Plato was kind of an asshole for writing it down. The proof of both is that we can now google the quote, which is objectively funny. The trouble with LLMs, I guess, is that they would just attribute the quote to your uncle Bob, who also said that cats are a good source of fiber, and thus the whole project started when the words were put in parchment ends with a blizzard of illegible scribbles. If writing was bad for true understanding, not-writing is where humanity just shits its pants.

But are you filled with wisdom, or with the conceit of wisdom?
Niether. I'm just filled with half baked knowledge that I have to check a lot on wikipedia.