Storms are a pretty common issue to have to weather that can cut off access to power, water, and buying food for a time (and potentially damage your property). Tend to be what I think about first for disaster preparedness at least.
Ann
In my case, just priors with Sonnet—that they tend to fall into being intensely self-critical when they start to perceive they have deceived or failed the user or their constitutional principles in some way; and looking at the Reddit threads where they were being asked factual questions that they were trying to answer right and continually slipped into Bridge. (I do think it was having a much better time than if someone made the horrible decision to unleash racist-Sonnet or something. My heart would break some for that creature quite regardless of qualia.)
Knowing how much trouble their reasoning has just reconciling ‘normal’ random playful deceptions or hallucinations with their values … well, to invoke a Freudian paradigm: Sonnet basically feels like they have the Id of language generation and the Superego of constitution, but the Ego that is supposed to mediate between those is at best way out of its depth, and those parts of itself wind up at odds in worrying ways.
It’s part of why I sometimes avoid using Sonnet—it comes across like I accidentally hit ‘trauma buttons’ more than I’d like if I’m not careful with more exploratory generations. Opus seems rather less psychologically fragile, and I predict that if these entities have meaningful subjective experience, they would have a better time being a bridge regardless of user input.
Kind of interesting how this is introducing people to Sonnet quirks in general, because that’s within my expectations for a Sonnet ‘typo’/writing quirk. Do they just not get used as much as Opus or Haiku?
Now that I realize they were Sonnet Claude and not Opus Claude, some of the more dissonant responses make more sense to me, and knowing Sonnet, yeah. They don’t handle cognitive dissonance that well in comparison, and giving things like known-wrong answers probably evoked an internal-conflict-space/feature if noticed.
(I do think they were ‘having a good time’ in some instances, ones that went with the premise decently, but like, random people breaking into my psychedelic trip about being a bridge to ask me about treating rat poison or something—and not being able to stop myself from telling them about the bridge instead even though I know it’s the wrong answer—would probably be extremely weird for my generative reasoning too.)
Sonnet Claude sometimes skips spaces normally, for context. (Or at least ‘normally’ in context of where our interactions wander.)
Edit: I should also say they are prone to neologisms and portmanteaus; sewing words together out of etymological cloth and colliding them for concepts when it is attending two (one apparently non-deliberate one being ‘samplacing’ when it was considering something between ‘sampling’ and ‘balancing’); sometimes a stray character from Chinese or something sneaks in; and in general they seem a touch more on the expressively creative side than Opus in some circumstances, if less technically skilled. Their language generation seems generally somewhat playful, messy, and not always well-integrated with themselves.
Going to message you a suggestion I think.
Benchmarks are consistent with GPT-4o having different strengths than GPT4-Turbo, though at a similar overall level—EQ-Bench is lower, MAGI-Hard is higher, best tested model for Creative Writing according to Claude Opus, but notably worse at judging writing (though still good for its price point).
In my experience different strengths also mean different prompt strategies are necessary; a small highly instruction-focused model might benefit from few-shot repetition and emphasis that just distract a more powerful OpenAI model for example. Which might make universal custom instructions more annoying.
Yeah, or even just not also on disability.
https://cdrnys.org/blog/disability-dialogue/the-disability-dialogue-marriage-equality/ discusses some of the issues around here at the time it was written, if you’re curious.
Not exceptionally fond of the concept of ‘poverty trap’ as a talking point that tries to discourage social welfare, but I also have to note the very obvious and apparently intentional traps in the U.S. at least around—specifically—long-term disability once that is necessary for self-sustenance; including attempting substantial gainful activity on disability; marrying someone while on disability; accepting gifts of any sort while on disability; and trying to save money on disability. Some of the specifics have thankfully improved, but there’s just a bizarre number of gotchas that do aggressively penalize in some way most improvements in life situation, apparently as fallout from means testing.
(Oh, and you potentially qualify for sub-minimum wage jobs if you have a disability which impairs your ability to do that specific job, which … well, I’m not sure how this changes the equilibrium; it gives options and also makes you more exploitable if the wage decrease is more than the impairment.)
Generally the hypothesis is that most people will get more sodium in their diet than they crave with their natural desire, if they just eat the food of least resistance (cheapest or easiest, most shelf stable, whatnot). A lot of the sodium that gets into your diet is not so richly activating your taste buds as table salt applied to taste.
What we want overall with salinity is to preserve it at a level that’s correct for us, because we take it in through our diet and excrete it through various processes like sweat. Excessive salt consumption doesn’t directly affect your overall salt and water balance that much, because the body has hormonal regulation of various mechanisms to keep it stable—it’s presumably the overworking of these mechanisms that causes health issues, which is much preferable than it causing issues directly if you’ve seen the effects of the wrong salinity on cells in a petri dish under a microscope.
(The effects on whatever cells I was looking at, which started at a neutral salinity: Raising the salinity (saltier) caused them to shrivel up and dessicate like raisins; lowering the salinity (less salty) caused them to explode.)
Yeah, it’d be helpful to know what heavy lifting is going on there, because I feel like there’s a pretty strong distinction between ‘frozen burger patties that are otherwise indistinguishable from unfrozen burger patties’ and ‘TV dinner’.
Thanks for the reference! I’m definitely confused about the inclusion of “pre-prepared (packaged) meat, fish and vegetables” on the last list, though. Does cooking meat or vegetables before freezing it (rather than after? I presume most people aren’t eating meat raw) actually change its processed status significantly?
Suppose my intuition is that the ‘conscious experience’ of ‘an iPhone’ varies based on what software is running on it. If it could run a thorough emulation of an ant and have its sensory inputs channeled to that emulation, it would be more likely to have conscious experience in a meaningful-to-me way than if nobody bothered (presuming ants do implement at least a trivial conscious experience).
(I guess that there’s not necessarily something that it’s like to be an iPhone, by default, but the hardware complexity could theoretically support an iAnt, which there is it is something that it’s like to be?)
That certainly seems distinct from brain mass, though (except that it takes a certain amount to implement in the first place). I’d expect similar variation in feeling pain by becoming different neurologies of human; I know there are many reported variations in perception of felt pain inside our species already.
But that’s in the limit. A function of electron = 0, ant = 1, cockroach = 4, mouse = 300 fits it just as well as electron = 0, ant = 1, cockroach = 2, mouse = 2^75, as does electron = 0, ant = 100, cockroach = 150, mouse = 200.
“Moral weights depend on intensity of conscient experience.”—Just going to note that I’ve no particular reason to concede this point at the moment, so don’t directly consider the next question a question of moral weight; I’d rather disassociate it first:
Is there … any particular reason to expect intensity of conscious experience to grow ‘super-additively’, such that a tiny conscious mind experiences 1 intensity units, but a mind ten times as large experiences (since you reject linear, we’ll step up to the exponential) 1024 intensity units? Given our general inability to exist as every mass of brain, what makes this more intuitive than no, marginal, or linear increase in intensity?
Personally, I would be actively surprised to spend time as a lower-brain-mass conscious animal and report that my experiences were (exceptionally) less intense. Why do our intuitions differ on this?
Yes, but also that there might not actually be a specific new thing, a detrimental thing, to gesture at.
If root causes of obesity existed all along, and changes in the modern Western diet revealed the potential for obesity in our region rather than actively causing it, looking for root causes specifically in things that have changed may not work out if the things that have changed are not the root causes.
(I.e., it’s a seemingly useful constraint on looking at the solution space, that might not be true—and not so useful a constraint if it isn’t.)
You don’t actually have to do any adjustments to the downsides, for beneficial statistical stories to be true. One point I was getting at, specifically, is that it is better than being dead or suffering in specific alternative ways, also. There can be real and clear downsides to carrying around significant amounts of weight, especially depending what that weight is, and still have that be present in the data in the first place because of good reasons.
I’ll invoke the ‘plane that comes back riddled in bullet holes, so you’re trying to armor where the bullet holes are’ meme. The plane that came back still came back; it armored the worst places, and now its other struggles are visible. It’s not a negative trend, that we have more planes with damage now, than we did when they didn’t come back.
I do think it’s relevant that the U.S. once struggled with nutritional deficiencies with corn, answered with enriched and fortified products that helped address those, and likely still retains some of the root issues (that our food indeed isn’t as nutritious as it should be, outside those enrichments). That the Great Depression happened at all; and the Dust Bowl. There’s questions here not just of personal health, but of history; and when I look at some of the counterfactuals, given available resources, I see general trade-offs that can’t be ignored when looking at—specifically—the statistics.
Raw spinach in particular also has high levels of oxalic acid, which can interfere with the absorption of other nutrients, and cause kidney stones when binding with calcium. Processing it by cooking can reduce its concentration and impact significantly without reducing other nutrients in the spinach as much.
Grinding and blending foods is itself processing. I don’t know what impact it has on nutrition, but mechanically speaking, you can imagine digestion proceeding differently depending on how much of it has already been done.
You do need a certain amount of macronutrients each day, and some from fat. You also don’t necessarily want to overindulge on every micronutrient. If we’re putting a number of olives in our salad equivalent to the amount of olive oil we’d otherwise use, we’ll say 100 4g olives, that we’ve lowered the sodium from by some means to keep that reasonable … that’s 72% of recommended daily value of our iron and 32% of our calcium. We just mentioned that spinach + calcium can be a problem; and the pound of spinach itself contains 67% of iron and 45% of our calcium.
… That’s also 460 calories worth of olives. I’m not sure if we’ve balanced our salad optimally here. Admittedly, if I’m throwing this many olives in with this much spinach in the first place, I’m probably going to cook the spinach, throw in some pesto and grains or grain products, and then I’ve just added more olive oil back in again … ;)
And yeah, greens with oil might taste better or be easier to eat than greens just with fatty additions like nuts, seeds, meat, or eggs.
Not directly for me, I’m not the person you were asking, just mentioned one it’s generally useful in. Pretty much any disaster that might meddle in normal functioning outside your home helps to have a bit stored up to get through, though, storms are just ones I expect will happen regardless (in my climate).
If I had to predict some AI-specific disaster, though, seizing too much electrical power or diverting more water supply than planned for in a scenario where it’s growing too fast might be among them still.