brambleboy

Karma: 350

brambleboy 27 Nov 2025 0:50 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: I’ll be sad to lose the puzzles
Wanting competent people to lead our government and wanting a god to solve every possible problem for us are different things. This post doesn’t say anything about the former.
I believe the vast majority of people who vote in presidential elections do so because they genuinely anticipate that their candidate will make things better, and I think your view that most people are moral monsters demonstrates a lack of empathy and understanding of how others think. It’s hard to figure out who’s right in politics!

brambleboy’s Shortform

brambleboy10 Nov 2025 5:00 UTC

4 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

brambleboy 10 Nov 2025 5:00 UTC
3 points
1
on: brambleboy’s Shortform
Some people can be too dismissive of the differences between humans and LLMs.
One one hand, it’s true that some people cherry-pick the mistakes that LLMs make and use them to denounce their intelligence, even though they’re mistakes that many humans make. For example, some have said LLMs can’t be intelligent because they can’t multiply big numbers accurately without a calculator or a scratchpad; but humans can’t do that, either.
On the other hand, I see people hand-wave away some important things. Someone will point out how strange it is that LLMs still hallucinate, and someone else will say “nah, humans make things up all the time!” But like, if you ask an LLM for someone’s biographical information, it sometimes will give highly specific fake details mixed in with real details, without being misled by unreliable sources or having an agenda to persuade you of. Even an overconfident and dishonest human wouldn’t do that. There’s clearly something different in kind from what we humans do.

brambleboy 28 Oct 2025 20:46 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: anaguma’s Shortform
I don’t think this means much, because dense models with 100% active parameters are still common, and some MoEs have high percentages, such as the largest version of DeepSeekMOE with 15% active.

brambleboy 17 Oct 2025 17:41 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: That Mad Olympiad
It’s sad because the AI partners in the story seem to be fake. Not fake because they’re AI, fake because they’re fiction. For example, it’s sad to fall in love with a character on character.ai because the LLM is simply roleplaying, it’s not really summoning the soul of Hatsune Miku or whoever. I assume the world models are the same; they’re basically experience machines.
This tells me that people might step into experience machines not because they don’t care about reality, but because they convince themselves the world inside is reality.

brambleboy 11 Oct 2025 20:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: Daniel Tan’s Shortform
Yes, their goal is to make extremely parameter-efficient tiny models, which is quite different from the goal of making scalable large models. Tiny LMs and LLMs have evolved to have their own sets of techniques. Parameter sharing and recurrence works well for tiny models but increases compute costs a lot for large ones, for example.

brambleboy 26 Sep 2025 16:33 UTC
16 points
0
on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
There was that RCT showing that creatine supplementation boosted the IQs of only vegetarians.
While looking for the RCT you’re referencing, I instead found this one from 2023 which claims to be the largest to date and which states “Vegetarians did not benefit more from creatine than omnivores.” (They tested 123 people altogether over 6 weeks; these RCTs tend to be small.)
A systematic review from 2024 states:
To summarize, we can say that the evidence from research into the effects of creatine supplementation on brain creatine content of vegetarians and omnivores suggests that vegetarianism does not affect brain creatine content very much, if at all, when compared to omnivores. However, there seems to be little doubt that vegans do not intake sufficient (if any) exogenous creatine to ensure the levels necessary for maintaining optimal cognitive output.

brambleboy 8 Sep 2025 21:14 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Karthik Tadepalli’s Shortform
I tried googling to find the answer. First I tried “melting chocolate in microwave” and “melting chocolate bar in microwave”, but those just brought up recipes. Then I tried “melting chocolate bar in microwave test”, and the experiment came up. So I had to guess it involved testing something, but from there it was easy to solve. (Of course, I might’ve tried other things first if I didn’t know the answer already.)

brambleboy 8 Sep 2025 20:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Karthik Tadepalli’s Shortform
This is a neat question, but it’s also a pretty straightforward recall test because descriptions of the experiment for teachers are available online.

brambleboy 8 Sep 2025 17:18 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: In Defense of Alcohol
I think alcohol’s effects are at least somewhat psychosomatic, but that doesn’t mean you can easily get the same effect without it. Once nobody’s actually drinking and everyone knows it, then the context where you’re expected to let loose is broken. You’d have to construct a new ritual that encourages the same behavior without drugs, which is probably pretty hard.

brambleboy 16 Aug 2025 20:30 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform
I agree that the vocals have gotten a lot better. They’re not free of distortion, but it’s almost imperceptible on some songs, especially without headphones.
The biggest tell for me that these songs are AI is the generic and cringey lyrics, like what you’d get if you asked ChatGPT to write them without much prompting. They often have the name of the genre in the song. Plus the way they’re performed doesn’t always fit with the meaning. You can provide your own lyrics, though, so it’s probably easy to get your AI songs to fly under the radar if you’re a good writer.
Also, while some of the songs on that page sound novel to me, they’re usually more conventional than the prompt suggests. Like, tell me what part of the last song I linked to is afropiano.

brambleboy 7 Aug 2025 2:06 UTC
9 points
3
on: Inscrutability was always inevitable, right?
This is what I think he means:
The object-level facts are not written by or comprehensible to humans, no. What’s comprehensible is the algorithm the AI agent uses to form beliefs and make decisions based on those beliefs. Yudkowsky often compares gradient descent optimizing a model to evolution optimizing brains, so he seems to think that understanding the outer optimization algorithm is separate from understanding the inner algorithms of the neural network’s “mind”.
I think what he imagines as a non-inscrutable AI design is something vaguely like “This module takes in sense data and uses it to generate beliefs about the world which are represented as X and updated with algorithm Y, and algorithm Z generates actions, and they’re graded with a utility function represented as W, and we can prove theorems and do experiments with all these things in order to make confident claims about what the whole system will do.”(The true design would be way more complicated, but still comprehensible.)

brambleboy 5 Aug 2025 18:07 UTC
8 points
4
on: OpenAI releases gpt-oss
Putting GPT back in the name but making it lowercase is a fun new installment in the “OpenAI can’t name things consistently” saga.

brambleboy 26 Jul 2025 21:57 UTC
16 points
5
on: AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery (arXiv)
Looks like BS. They basically just prompted ChatGPT to churn out a bunch of random architectures that ended up with similar performance. It seems likely that the ones they claim to be “SoTA” just had good numbers due to random variation. ChatGPT probably had a big role in writing the paper, too. The grandiose claims reek of its praise.

brambleboy 20 Jul 2025 0:19 UTC
1 point
0
on: Emergent Gravity—Order out of Chaos
Your other posts about game theory were high quality. However, this post doesn’t make sense to me.
You try to frame your simulation as “simpler” than regular Newtonian gravity, even though you’ve added many extra parameters (groups of particles with different forces between each other) which technically makes it more complex. You talk about emergence, but the results are pretty simple too; the particles just form clumps every time. It comes across to me as adding an extra weird feature to a simple gravity simulation and then being impressed that a weird thing happens. Also, the rapid oscillations look like they might be artifacts resulting from forces that are too strong relative to the framerate of the simulation. Particle Life is similar to this, but executed much better.
Then you also talk about forces emerging from entropy, but that doesn’t seem relevant. Your simulation doesn’t have action at a distance emerging from local interactions, it’s just pre-programmed action at a distance where some of the particles happen to be repelling each other instead of attracting each other.
I’m not sure I correctly understood what this article was trying to say, because it jumps between different points and it talks as if you have a theory while being incredibly vague about what it is. What does it mean for gravity to come from “nothing”? There’s no concrete explanation.

brambleboy 18 Jul 2025 16:46 UTC
2 points
−12
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
The true slowdown in the world where this happens is probably greater, because it’d be taboo to race ahead in nations that went to such lengths to slow down.

brambleboy 15 Jul 2025 3:38 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: brambleboy’s comment on: Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant
Elaborating further: I think LW isn’t just one of these or the other. I think the community aspect is there and so it’s good not to discourage too much and to be helpful in other ways besides criticism/correction, but I also think you can be helpful without making your own posts.

brambleboy 15 Jul 2025 3:18 UTC
8 points
2
on: Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant
Allow me, someone who only comments, to weigh in.
My impression is that this is an issue of different frames. Consider a different metaphor: filmmaking. It’d be absurd to claim that only people who’ve made films of their own can be critics. Films aren’t just for other filmmakers, they’re for the public, and the public should be able to criticize them. If a filmmaker was really bothered by an outspoken critic of their movies, it would be reasonable to tell that filmmaker to get over it and worry about making better movies instead.
On the other hand, it’s different if the criticism is within a community of people trying to make good films. To be as successful as they can be, a community of filmmakers benefits from helping each other out by sharing knowledge and tools, encouraging each other, making connections, and so on. Critique helps, too… but if there are critics who hang around the community and tear apart everyone’s films without making anything or helping in other ways, then that can hamper the goal of making better films, even if they have good criticisms! “Get over it and make better movies” would be a lame defense in this case.
Thus, it depends on the context whether it’s helpful or unhelpful to discourage criticism without contribution.

brambleboy 10 Jul 2025 17:52 UTC
2 points
0
on: 80,000 Hours is producing AI in Context — a new YouTube channel. Our first video, about the AI 2027 scenario, is up!
Videos like this are really valuable because even though I read AI 2027 already, I didn’t get as emotional then as when I watched this.

brambleboy 8 Jul 2025 21:57 UTC
7 points
7
on: The Cult of Pain
I’m tired of arguments that hand-wave away whole ideologies as the result of simple biases without any substantial engagement with their beliefs. You can find plenty of essays by critical theorists arguing that people believe in capitalism because of greed, propaganda, racism, etc. and I don’t find them convincing for the same reason.

brambleboy

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