Earnest first reaction, is that this sounds like an environment that it would be actively self-harmful to optimise yourself towards, and a cognitive hazard to feed into your unconscious self assessment.
Actually no, that’s not quite true. My first reaction, because it was a reaction to an earlier part of your post, was that there’s something incoherent about wanting to attract attention while also being embarrassed to post a link.
If we use the word “threat” to encompass any possibility of declining the offer, then you reduce the game to having only two solutions: either total capitulation, or some kind of use of threats.
I think it’s more useful to draw more distinctions. Whereby one can negotiate (including the possibility of that negotiation resulting in no-deal) or otherwise have your actions be contingent on their offer, without calling it a “threat”.
Probabilistic acceptance at least lacks the element of spite that leads to senseless destruction of value.
Not sure that is the standard theory: it was “around here” that I saw described the strategy of accepting low offers at reduced odds.
Essentially give them the choice of “100% chance of $5, or somewhat less than (5/6) chance of $6, or less than (5/7) chance of $7, etc”
That way the other party can’t expect to benefit by deviating from what you deem a fair division, but you’re also not destroying all the expected value available, in retaliation to an unfair offer.
Which will also more gracefully handle differences of opinion about the value being divided or the ‘fair’ midpoint, in cases where it’s less clear cut than just dividing $10 by two.
Ancillary to the point of the post, but I took “you probably can’t” as a challenge
Carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared.
Energy arrives from the Sun mostly as visible light, passing easily through the atmosphere—but energy leaves the Earth mostly as infrared, which gets blocked and retained.
More energy is emitted at higher temperatures, so the temperature rises until that boosts the rate of heat loss by enough to get the same overall amount out through the blockage
This is analogous to the water level rising, when you run the tap into a sink with a partially blocked drain.
Weird and not sure if it’s just me, but the frame with the video in it has failed to load in Firefox (seems fine in Chrome)
For anyone with the same issue, it’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHpnWiBHHaU
If that’s a theorem, what are the axioms and permitted inference rules?
Strict formal logic might struggle to infer that those people even exist, let alone anything about the unobservable contents of their minds.
But I assume there’s no $10k on offer for generic skepticism, so the question becomes “What would be deemed valid and satisfying by the person posing the problem?”—which is a futile tarpit if they’re motivated to disagree.
I had a different thought in reaction to the title/opening, before I’d read further: proportional representation by splitting the duration of the term in office between candidates in proportion to the number of votes. If the vote for a 4-year office splits 60⁄40 then put the first candidate in for 2.4 years, and the other candidate for 1.6 years.
But there would be questions to resolve about who gets to go first (probably either rank order by number of votes received, or “largest share of the vote entitles you to choose the order”), and also a sensible minimum required threshold (does receiving 10 votes mean you get to be POTUS for a period of about 8.4 seconds?)
If a human could figure out a safe way to test the black hole reactor before deploying it, then MegaBrain could do even better.
What if a human also couldn’t do that? There would be a remaining dangerous gap, if something were to require superhuman capabilities to invent and even more superhumaner capabilities to test thoroughly and deploy/use safely. We and MegaBrain alike might get blindsided by an unforeseen risk.
3⁄5 human preference for me.
On the Sagan quote they both felt like clichéd meandering dross on the theme of “universe big, human small, emotions, wow” but the AI picked something a bit more concrete by reference to the calcium in bones (although as kbear mentions above, that is itself a cheap knockoff of a different Sagan quote)
On the Wolf Hall excerpt, the human version just felt a bit vague to me. Everything by halves; half light, half seen. Do people actually go around pouring all their fears and desires into someone who just happens to have a good poker face? Whereas the AI was more specific about writing multiple meanings into text.
I’m with you on the other three though; the AI version was just plain bad.
Friday’s Far Enough For Milk also has some divergence between the music and the lyrics
I read the site primarily through my RSS aggregator, which doesn’t know that <div class=”llm-content-block” data-model-name=”Claude Opus 4.6″><div class=”llm-content-block-content”> is meaningful to render. An indicator that’s present as regular text would be appreciated.
But also count me as another in the group, saying that even when viewing the site directly the supposedly visually distinct block is basically invisible to me, and I would much prefer that it be less subtle. If I skim down a post and miss the subtle little introductory note of the model name, I would still want to be able to tell I’m reading LLM output from somewhere in the middle of the block.
(I see a comment saying “The goal is not to make readers constantly aware what they are looking at.” : I would actively prefer to be constantly aware of what I’m looking at)
Is @guardian aware that their authors are at this point just using AI to wholesale generate entire articles?
Another one from not long ago, which I’m confident is largely generated.
Although that one is in the “commentisfree” opinion column, where standards have always been lower.
No apology required. Honestly just intended as a compliment, to illustrate that you must be doing something right, to provoke a visceral reaction. Akin to how a particularly tense action scene might raise the reader’s heart rate—but located in a different organ.
Something about this made me faintly nauseated. Great job!
Also the character being Sarah had me in mind of Labyrinth as in the 80s film, but there was in the end no rescue forthcoming from Ludo or Hoggle or Sir Didymus.
Reminds me of CGP Grey’s “mostest closest” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SumDHcnCRuU
Which doesn’t show the working, but does present a similar answer.
if I win, you have to give me your name. If you win, I will tell you mine
The distinction here between “give” and “tell” had me in mind of fey deals, where you accidentally lose your name—you’ve given it away, so now it’s their name.
If the number is larger than 2, subtract 2 until it’s in the range 0-2
Think there might be an off by one error in here; I’m not seeing a way for it to ever return 0 as the answer
You sometimes see multi-colored Jack-o’-lanterns, even though pumpkins only come in one color.
Naturally occurring pumpkins might not come in garish neon primary colours, but they do come in more than just orange
I tried freezing some, but unfreezing frozen lentils turned out to be way too annoying
I make what sounds like a similar lentil/tomato sauce, and freeze it as individual portions in small foil trays (they measure about 15cm by 12cm and hold about 400g or so of food). Those trays can go directly from the freezer to the oven, and 30mins at 180°C will generally suffice to defrost whatever.
Can of course defrost in the fridge overnight then heat the sauce through in a pan, but that requires forethought so I mostly don’t. Have at times defrosted a frozen brick of lentils in a pan (adding a splash of water to help moderate/circulate the heat) but it is indeed quite annoying that way.
I have several other meals that similarly go from batch-cook to freezer to oven in the same foil trays, including a vegetarian lentil+mushroom shepherd’s pie and a roast vegetable tagine (and also meat-eater options). Can supply recipes if interested.
Sounds like a generalised sense of fear/anxiety about there being something not yet considered that implies the plan will go wrong. Which can’t be articulated as a specific weighed factor because they don’t know what it might be, because they lack the life experience to confidently enumerate all the things that can happen. Even with assurances from a competent adult, that uncertainty can be hard to push past.
Contrast that against the opposite mistake, of one who throws themself confidently into an uncontrolled situation, because they’ve already considered all three ways they can possibly imagine it going wrong, and developed a strategy that (they think) accounts for all of them. Who then gets utterly blindsided by “actually it’s more complicated than you thought”, or “actually there are more requirements than that”, or “turns out that thing you did was illegal”.