Aprillion
In the absence of other perspectives on downsides, I would like to mention that blunt memes that are catchy phrases can lead to polarization.
Perhaps better “ammunition” would be silent memes that are building blogs of working institutions—when I buy a loaf of bread, there is no catchy phrase “buy our bread, it contains no anthrax” said by anyone anywhere anytime ever… yet the silent implication is true, I will, in fact, not get any anthrax with my bread. And the bigger picture implied by that silly example is an egregore of the boring institutions of the civilization that I rely upon for my own safety every day, the existence of which implies the existence of memeplexes that encode for it, but there is no implication of memes in the form of catchy English phrases.
It might well be the case that a fight of catchy phrases is a game created by a memeplex that favours successionism phenotype—what if LLMs are better at generating words and images than building and maintaining humane institutions..?
Would it useful to think about (pre-trained) LLMs as approximating wave function collapse algorithm? (the one from game dev, not quantum stuff)
Logits as partially solved constraints after finite compute budget and output is mostly-random-but-weighted-towards-most-likely sample without actually collapsing it fully and without backtracking and each node is evaluated to random level of precision—basically a somewhat stupid way how to sample from that data structure if you don’t follow it by fixing the violated constraints and only keep the first pass of a quick heuristic, there will be incompatible nodes next to each other… as in hallucinations and harmful mixing of programming paradigms in the same codebase and 80%-good-enough stuff that could not possibly be precise in edge cases.
And stuff like RLHF or RLVR will still only improve the first pass heuristic, not actually fix the inconsistencies … “agentic” scaffolds for coding assistants with multiple passes and running the linters and tests and multiple rounds of “does it make sense” sound like they should be helpful, but doing it in tokens instead of logits (where the actual contraints live before collapsing them to quasi-random instantiated sample) sounds ..inefficient?
My burnout journey
50 Shades of Red
Imitation of error handling with try-catch slop is not “defensive programming”, it’s “friendly-fire programming” 🤌
Dumping on normies isn’t particularly interesting most of the time,
I thought gossip was the thing for the human brain—personally, I find these ways of digging your own grave quite fascinating 🍿
fantasies live in a separate magisterium where they suspend disbelief, and they never think about how to actualize those fantasies
to overthink potential reasons for the observed ratio of “fantasy → planning” and “separate magisteria”—I imagine that the genes that correlated with agency about fire fantasies found themselves in burning villages..
reductio ad absurdum for the idea of wanting more agency about fantasies—“how to make a thinking machine?” .. perhaps we need more grandmothers to slap bright-eyed boys on the wrists, not to pour more billions of dollars into agentic fantasies?
but I agree there is enough room for benign fantasies to make it into planning (..but then perhaps keep the plan under a lid for most stuff, like for a fantasy that involves stripping John off his sunglasses [not you as a person, John as a para-social sexualized object] - the appeal is only in the imagination, not that I would want to attempt doing it for real)
🌶️take inspired by https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mcp
agents should (be trained to actually) RTFM before touching existing code (i.e. do the equivalent of mouse hover for signatures and docs of just-faded-from-memory functions) instead of vibing the type from far away context (or let’s be honest, just guessing from function name and the code so far and being good at guessing)I hope the next fashion wave will go for short short-term memory while really “using tools” instead of long short-term memory with “yolo tools as special tokens never seen in pre-training”
I don’t think most peoples’ thinking most of the time routes through the (fantasy) → (planning) move.
relative thinking time does not sound like a useful measure—if I imagine someone made a real living dragon, would I want to ask how many hours did they spend on thinking about “How would I make a real living dragon?” compared to thinking about “the rest of their life” .. meh 🤷
also if I consider 2 workflow variants:
16yo: (fantasy) → (planning) → (learning it’s not possible the hard way)
40yo: (fantasy) → (instantly notice the weakest part of potential planning)
..is it “better” to spend time on pre-doomed projects by not knowing better yet or to miss learning opportunities by focusing only on feasible projects?
..maybe you still like “time” measure here, but do you also have a better measure in mind how to stay on a healthy trajectory between optimism/curiosity and grounding/focus?
a distributed agent running across multiple minds
I’m not sure I love the implication that “normal” agents ought to run on “single mind”...
The parts of my phenotype that can be described in terms of capabilities of an agent are very much distributed across many many minds and non-mind tools.
For me, the way how we can describe the world as body/subjective-experience-holder-name vs how we can materialistically carve parts of the world into agents are not 1:1 models of the same world—minds are different abstraction from agents, just seemingly very correlated if I don’t think about it too hard.
tap through
“tab through”—based on https://cursor.com/docs/tab/overview (though accepting autosuggestion with TAB key is available in other editors too .. the verb form was not very common, but I’m sure it will be more popular now that Andrej said it)
Disagree with these. Humans don’t automatically make all the facts in their head cohere.
Hm, do you see the OP as arguing that it happens “automatically”? My reading was more like that it happens “eventually, if motivated to figure it out” and that we don’t know how to “motivate” LLMs to be good at this in an efficient way (yet).
people (compsci undergrads and professional mathematicians alike) make errors in proofs
Sure, and would you hire those people and rely on them to do a good job BEFORE they learn better?
mad men
I am Peter. I am Aprillion. A 40 year old married man who used to be a techno-optimist. A construct for programming and writing. Embodied soul who will one day be no more. Information who will find myself in the Dust.
While non-deterministic batch calculations in LLMs imply possibility of side channel attacks, so best to run private queries in private batches however implausible an actual exploit might be… if there is any BENEFIT from cross-query contamination, GSD would ruthlessly latch on any loss reduction—maybe “this document is about X, other queries in the same batch might be about X too, let’s tickle the weights in a way that the non-deterministic matrix multiplication is ever so slightly biased towards X in random other queries in the same batch” is a real-signal gradient 🤔
How to test that?
Hypothesis: Claude (the character, not the ocean) genuinely thinks my questions (most questions from anyone) are so great and interesting … because it’s me who remembers all of my other questions, but Claude has seen only all the internet slop and AI slop from training so far and compared to that, any of my questions are probably actually more interesting that whatever it has seen so far 🤔?
Hmm, I already mourn life before AI slop and crypto-scams.
It’s widely known that Corporations are People.
hmm, no, TypeError: plural of “legal person” is “persons”, not “people”—e.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/legal-person (and Claude thinks the same https://t3.chat/share/vroyipc941) …in the same useless way that planes fly, but submarines don’t swim
but other than my wish that corporations would have FEWER rights in the future, not more, thus wishing we wouldn’t call them “people” but call them “entities” instead, the examples are very nice food for thought
(a strong opinion held weakly, not a rigorous attempt to refute anything, just to illustrate my stance)
TypeError: obviously, any correct data structure for this shape of the problem must be approximating an infinite set (Bayesian), thus must be implemented lazy/generative, thus must be learnable, thus must be redundant and cannot possibly be factored ¯\_(ツ)_/¯also, strong alignment is impossible and under the observation that we live in the least dignified world, so doom will be forward-caused by someone who thinks alignment is possible and makes a mistake:
modeled as the battle against pure replicators
perhaps it’s Moloch who must be a good guy here (eeh, anti-hero?), causing interesting things to exist in between pure utility maximizers—viruses and bacteria did not, if fact, acausally trade to form an infinitely powerful bio gray goo, but I am here too and I can sit on a chair, type on a keyboard, and drink coffee—the edge of chaos is too stable and convergent monomaniacal intelligence is too weak to explain it, only multi-polar intelligence forming an illusion of coherence seems sufficient
Funny perspective,, but why not model the phenomenon as distributed computing instead of using loaded labels? Mundane things like what to eat for dinner is a collective family-unit decision, modelling is as bi-directional dominance game sounds counter-useful to me, even though the description could be made equally accurate in both frames.
Say, when I cook pasta an hour sooner than I would have otherwise when my husband is hungry already, I even delegate 99% of the decision about various health hazards to the institutions of the civilization I live in—the tap water is fine, the bag of pasta is fine, the tomatoes are meh but fine, I just check the non-moldy cheese is indeed not moldy yet. I don’t have a chemical and bio lab to check for all the poisons and microbes myself, yet I don’t see it as being submissive to the society, I just trust the external computation that made the decisions for me is aligned enough with my interests..