So I have no idea what I’m doing next for songs, but there will be other things. First I’m going to take a week, though, and start a spotify account, and maybe get CDs properly assembled for my substack subscribers.
I also think I figured out the problem with Orphans, so I can write again, and G-d willing and the creek not rising finish it.
Meanwhile, the last three songs in non-reverse order:
And for the rest of the songs: It’s Not Over Till The Clanker Lady Sings
According To Hoyt 
Still haven’t gotten far enough in my TBR pile to get to NML, so I won’t be watching the videos until after I read it. But it’s fascinating to look at the dice that the clanker generated. The one under the person’s hand is the only one that might possibly be consistent; all the others have a mix of numbers and pips. One of them, the one still rolling in the screenshot, even has two identical sides showing five pips! Another has a five-pip side and a number-five side. And one of them, though a six-sided die, has a 9 rather than a 6 on it (with underlining to make it unambiguous).
Clankers have produced some very impressive results recently, such as a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture. (DDG it if you want to know more, I don’t understand the conjecture well enough to explain it). The counterexample is straightforward enough to print here, and simple enough to be independently verified by mathematicians. It is a function of three dimensions (x, y, z) defined as follows:
F(x, y, z) = ((1 + xy)³z + y²(1 + xy)(4 + 3xy), y + 3x(1 + xy)²z + 3xy²(4 + 3xy), 2x – 3x²y – x³z)
Not simple to find, nor immediately obvious that it’s a counterexample just by looking at it, even if you understand the Jacobian conjecture. But it’s easy to calculate the results of that function even with a basic calculator (or even by hand with pencil and paper, though I would call that “possible” rather than “easy”), and to prove that there are multiple input values that produce the same output (which disproves the conjecture): for example, the inputs (0, 0, -1/4) and (1, -3/2, 13/2) both produce the output (-1/4, 0, 0). (According to the Wikipedia article; I haven’t actually done that math myself).
But simple things like the dice in that screenshot are a good reminder that although the clankers can produce the illusion of thinking, they have no actual understanding, nor any capacity for independent thought. The clanker that produced the counterexample had to be asked to produce it; it’s impressive that it was then able to parse the description of the conjecture and do enough math to produce a counterexample. I don’t mean to diminish that achievement, which would not have been possible with the LLMs of just a couple years ago. LLMs these days are not only stochastic parrots, they are hybrids that also have a certain amount of logic and math ability mixed in. So when the clankers are doing math and logic, these days it’s not pure mimicry. But they still do not have the capacity to understand anything — if you asked the Fable 5 LLM what the Jacobian conjecture means, it would still have to copy other people’s words in order to explain it.
And looking at those silly, silly dice is a good reminder of the difference between the ability to imitate and the ability to understand.
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actually the dice should have alien sigils, but what the heck.
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Look up ono-standard dice. WikiP has articles on two different kinds, but there are many more.
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(That’s non-standard.)
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Shudder A lot of the dice sets on Fantasy Grounds (and presumably others such as Roll20 ) have sound effects when you roll them. If eldritch horror had a voice…… SHUDDER
This is my brain on clankers…..
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https://aleakybos.ch/Configurations.htm has a long list of different dice configuration. I had to scroll WAY down to find any that have both numbers and pips, but they do exist. (Ctrl+F search for D6PN to find the section quickly). There’s one die with mostly pips but the 3 face as a number instead of pips, made for the Dale Earnhardt Edition of Monopoly (Dale Earnhardt’s car number was #3 during most of his career). And there are some dice with 1-3 in numbers and 1-3 in pips; so far I have not found out what game those dice are for and/or how that game would distinguish a numbers result from a pips result.
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c4c
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This is the soundtrack that never ends
It just goes on and on, my friends
Some clankers started singing it a long time ago
But when they started singing it, how were they to know
That it’s the soundtrack that never ends….
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No. It’s done now.
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“Every time I claw my way out……”
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