The sheer stupidity of using the r’s in strawberry question as evidence of LLM incompetence

The meme of asking an LLM how many R's are in the word strawberry went viral because of public ignorance about how LLMs work. An LLM doesn't even see the individual letters in a word. It takes its input in the form of word-sized chunks. As such, questions relating to individual letters, like asking it to count the number of letters or asking which words start with a specific letter, are uniquely difficult and completely unrelated to performance on other tasks in general.

If you think about it, the only way it can even infer strawberry has any r's at all is purely based on context clues from somewhere deep in its training set where someone may have spelled out the word "b-e-r-r-y" with dashes in some random blog or forum post. Therefore, the fact they even sometimes get these types of questions right should be considered nothing short of amazing.

On Generative AI Art: A Prompter is not an Artist (yet)

I have heard a number of people claiming that they are creative authors of these works of art because they are refining their prompts until they get what they want. However, this fails the litmus test: Isn't refining a prompt still more similar to what a manager or client would traditionally do? They'd tell the artist what to make, the artist makes it, then they tell it what edits they want, etc. until the piece is done to their liking. Therefore a prompter's role is still more like a client who hired an artist, the artist in this case being the AI.

Additionally, I propose a way to objectively measure creative contribution, without any technical/knowledge gatekeeping nor requiring it be done a certain way; a mathematical definition of creative authorship:

The fewer variations of an output that can match your spec, the more you contributed to the creative process.

Consider the 3 scenarios: A classical piece with all notes fully written out; a jazz piece which allows significant improvisation from the soloists; an AI-generated piece where someone prompted “Epic orchestral soundtrack, sci-fi battle, heroic with French horn melody, high-quality”.

1. The composer already restricted the subspace of possible sounds to a small slice, so they’re recognized as contributing to the majority of the creative process. There is still room for interpretation for dynamics, expression etc., and the musicians are recognized for putting their personal touch when performing these pieces, reducing the subspace from that small slice to that unique recording.

2. There is much more leeway for interpretation via improvisation. In any particular recording, the composer and the soloists are all rightfully recognized as having contributed significantly to the work, because the soloists are composing important parts of the piece on the fly.

3. It is such a vaguely specified instruction that there’s an uncountable number of wildly different pieces that could’ve fit the requirements. As such, your role as the prompter was more like a client who hired the AI to do all the creative work for you, rather than an actual artist.

This concept can be applied universally to both music and visual arts. It also leaves the door open in the future for a prompter to legitimately be an artist; they'd just have to be incredibly specific with their instructions and the model would need to be very good at following those instructions accurately. 

Defeat Sleep Paralysis by Snoring

 I am surprised that this does not seem to be documented anywhere on the internet (or maybe search engines just suck these days), but I discovered a few years back that eye muscles aren't the only thing you can control during deep sleep. There is a muscle in the back of the throat that can cause snoring, which you can also control while lucid dreaming or while in sleep paralysis. I activate that muscle to try to cause the loudest snore possible and wake myself up within 2 snores. I have been using this method to great success most of the time, except today where even after 2 extremely loud snores I still did not wake up, which was quite disconcerting.

I was then awoken by my wife loudly complaining about my snores, which confirms that the control over my snores was real rather than imagined.