Thoughts on Attack on Titan anime series that may have been missed (but not by ChatGPT)

Season 4 of Attack on Titan raises a number of philosophical and moral questions that are central to the show’s themes and plot. The series tackles complex and thought-provoking issues that relate to human nature, morality, ethics, and the nature of war. Here are some of the key philosophical and moral questions posed by season 4 of Attack on Titan:

The nature of humanity: The series explores the nature of humanity, and the concept of what it means to be human. This question is central to the conflict between the Eldian people, who are considered to be ‘monsters’ by the rest of the world, and the Marleyans, who view themselves as the superior race. This raises questions about the nature of humanity, the value of life, and the meaning of identity.

The ethics of war: Attack on Titan raises important questions about the ethics of war and the use of violence as a means of conflict resolution. The show depicts the brutal and devastating consequences of war, and raises questions about the morality of using violence to achieve one’s goals. It also raises questions about the relationship between soldiers and their commanders, and the responsibility of those in power for the actions of their subordinates.

The concept of freedom: The series explores the concept of freedom and the idea of what it means to be free. This is shown in the relationship between the Eldians and their Marleyan oppressors, as well as in the various characters’ attempts to escape their oppressive circumstances. The show raises questions about the value of freedom, the limits of personal autonomy, and the extent to which individuals are free to make their own choices.

The role of morality: Attack on Titan raises questions about the role of morality in society, and the extent to which individuals should be held responsible for their actions. The show depicts characters who struggle with their own moral values and the consequences of their choices. It raises questions about the relationship between personal morality and the larger moral framework of society, and the extent to which individuals are responsible for their own actions.

In conclusion, season 4 of Attack on Titan raises a number of philosophical and moral questions that are central to the show’s themes and plot. The series explores complex issues that are relevant to human nature, morality, ethics, and the nature of war. These questions are often framed in terms of the characters’ struggles with their own values and the consequences of their choices, and are inspired by various philosophical schools of thought, including existentialism, determinism, and Utilitarianism.

P.S. The symbols in Attack on Titan are often seen as having real-world analogues and relevance to human history.

For example, the airships can be seen as analogous to modern military and government technology used to exert control over populations, such as drones or surveillance cameras.

The Eldian armbands and internment camps are similar to the identification badges and concentration camps used during the Holocaust, which were used to discriminate against and persecute Jews and other minority groups in Europe.

Additionally, the internment camps can also be seen as an analogue to the forced labor and prison camps used in various countries throughout history, such as the gulags in the Soviet Union or the forced labor camps in North Korea.

These symbols are meant to evoke real-world events and systems of oppression, and help to draw attention to the ongoing struggles for freedom, justice, and equality in our own world.

NOTE: this post auto-generated by ChatGPT. It’s pretty scary/awesome how well written the outputs are from this AI. How are colleges and schools going to adapt once this technology goes mainstream?

ChatGPT is going to seriously impact the white collar job market!

The widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other advanced language models will likely have significant implications for the knowledge worker and the job market. On one hand, these technologies have the potential to increase efficiency and productivity by automating various routine tasks and enabling humans to focus on higher-level, creative work.

For example, ChatGPT could be used to automate customer service tasks, freeing up human customer service representatives to handle more complex issues. Similarly, it could be utilized in legal and financial services to automate the generation of contracts, reports, and other document-intensive tasks.

However, the widespread adoption of these technologies could also lead to job loss and economic disruption. As ChatGPT and similar systems become more advanced and capable of handling a wider range of tasks, some jobs that were once performed by humans may become obsolete. For example, some low-skilled jobs in customer service, data entry, and document preparation may be at risk of automation.

On the other hand, the widespread adoption of these technologies will likely lead to the creation of new jobs and industries that did not exist before. For example, there will be a growing demand for individuals with the skills to develop, maintain, and improve these systems, as well as those who can integrate them into existing workflows.

Additionally, the impact of these technologies will be felt differently across different industries and regions. For example, some regions and countries with a heavy reliance on low-skilled labor may experience significant economic disruption, while others with a strong technology sector may benefit from the increased demand for tech-related jobs.

In the future, it will be important for individuals and society as a whole to adapt to these changes and ensure that the benefits of these technologies are distributed fairly. This may require a combination of education and training programs, government policies, and investment in technology infrastructure to ensure that everyone has access to the skills and resources needed to participate in the new economy.

In conclusion, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other advanced language models will have far-reaching implications for the job market and society. While these technologies have the potential to increase efficiency and productivity, they also carry the risk of economic disruption and job loss. It will be important for individuals and society to adapt to these changes and ensure that the benefits of these technologies are distributed fairly.

Note: thanks ChatGPT for these insights

A more technical explanation of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. It is built on top of the transformer architecture and trained on a massive amount of text data from various sources such as books, websites, and forums. The model utilizes a deep neural network with multiple layers to generate text that is coherent and contextually relevant to the input prompt.

ChatGPT is capable of performing various natural language processing tasks, including text generation, text classification, and question answering. The model uses an attention mechanism to weight the importance of the input tokens, allowing it to focus on the most relevant information when generating text.

ChatGPT is fine-tuned using the maximum likelihood estimation method, which maximizes the probability of generating the target text given the input prompt. During inference, the model is fed an input sequence and generates an output sequence word by word.

Note: yes, this post was also auto-generated by ChatGPT

Fishy Fun with Doc2Vec

Using a fishkeeping forum corpus with everyone’s favorite vector representation

I wanted to play around with word2vec but did not want to use the typical data sets (IMDB, etc.). So, I said, what if I were to do some web scraping of one of my favorite fishkeeping forums and attempt to apply word2vec to find “experts” within the forum. Well, turns out this is a much longer journey than I originally thought it would be, but an interesting one nonetheless.

This is a first blog post of hopefully several of my adventures with word2vec/doc2vec. I have a few ideas on how to leverage this corpus using deep learning to auto-generate text, so stay tuned, and if interested, drop me a line or leave a comment!

Background

So word2vec was originally developed by Google researchers and many people have discussed the algorithm. Word2vec provides a vector representation of a sequence of words using a not-deep neural network. Doc2vec adds additional information (namely context, or paragraph context) to the word embeddings. The original paper on Paragraph Vector can be found at https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf A quick literature search revealed I wanted to use doc2vec instead of word2vec for my particular use case since I wanted to compare user posts (essentially multiple paragaphs) instead of just words.

Later, I found this very informative online video from PyData Berlin 2017 where another data scientist used doc2vec to analyze comments on news websites. I thought that was cool, and further fueled my interest to tinker with this algorithm in my spare time… fast forward a few hours, and its almost daylight and I’m still here typing away…

I highly recommend watching this video for additional context:   

What I’m trying to do

I’d like to do the following:

  • analyze user posts on Fishlore.com to identify who are the “experts” on fishkeeping and plants/aquascaping
  • have fun with doc2vec while doing this

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