Chris @ 🦣Aug 7, 2024
The advent of LLMs masquerading as artificial intelligence has made the notion of an absurdly powerful computer, constructed at great expense, and given unseemly resources to answer a meaningful question, only to return the answer “42”, feel more and more prophetic.
Show threadStuck HereAug 8, 2024

@tenzochris

Here's a mind bender to Douglas Adams. He worked with computers in the 1970s and knew that 42 is the ASCII code for *.

An asterisk is used as a wild card. It can mean anything.

So the meaning of life is anything you want it to mean. 42.

The real answer to the meaning of life was given by the computer in the way a computer could relate it.

Show threadCiara
@MyWoolyMastadon @tenzochris That is an amazing and wonderful fact. New to me, despite decades of Adams-fangirling since I first read Hitchhikers in the late 70s. Thank you for sharing it.
Aug 19, 2024 at 5:02amWeb