You’ve heard some trite truism your whole life, then one day an epiphany lands and you try to save it with words, and you realize the description is that truism
Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen
noggin-scratcher
Karma: 718
I’m finding myself stuck on the question of how exactly the strict version would avoid the use of some of those negating adjectives. If you want to express the information that, say, eating grass won’t give the human body useful calories...
“Grass is indigestible” : disallowed
“Grass is not nutritious” : disallowed
“Grass will pass through you without providing energy” : “without providing energy” seems little different to “not providing energy”, it’s still at heart a negative claim
Perhaps a restatement in terms of “Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories” except that you still need to then convey that cellulose won’t be easily digested.
Probably there are true positive statements about the properties of easily digested molecules and the properties of cellulose which can at least be juxtaposed to establish that it’s different to anything that meets the criteria. But that seems like a lot of circumlocution and I’m less than entirely confident that I even know the specifics.
Perhaps part of the point is to stop you making negative claims where you don’t know the specific corresponding positive claims? Or to force you to expand out the whole chain of reasoning when you do know it (even if it’s lengthier than one would usually want to get into).
On further consideration, and by analogy to “is immortal” being functionally equivalent to “will live forever” (so if it’s interchangeable wording, does that mean that “is immortal” is actually equally a positive statement?), formulating “indigestible” as words to the effect of “will pass through your body largely intact and with about exactly as many calories as it started with” occurs to me.
It’s certainly a demanding style.
I know few people these days who aren’t using ChatGPT and Midjourney in some small way.
We move in very different social circles.
Have to ask: how much of the text of this post was written by ChatGPT?
I don’t have lots of keys, or frequent changes to which ones I want to carry, but a tiny carabiner has still proved useful to make individual keys easily separable from the bunch.
As an example, being able to quickly and easily say “here’s the house key: you go on ahead and let yourself in, while I park the car” without the nuisance of prying the ring open to twiddle the key off.
Low positive and actively negative scores seen to me to send different signals. A low score can be confused for general apathy, imagining that few people having taken notice of the post enough to vote on it. A negative score communicates clearly that something about the post was objectionable or mistaken.
If the purpose of the scoring system is to aggregate opinions, then negative opinions are a necessary input for an accurate score.
Strikes me as inelegant for the final score to depend on the order in which readers happened to encounter the post. Which would happen under this rule, unless people who refrained from voting were checking back later to deliver their vote against a post they thought was bad, once its score has gone up enough to so so without driving it negative (which seems unlikely).
Avoiding negativity would also negate the part of the system where accumulating very negative karma can restrict a user from posting so often.
My sense (from 10+ years on reddit, 2 of which spent moderating a somewhat large/active subreddit) is that there’s a “geeks MOPs and sociopaths”–like effect, where a small subreddit can (if it’s lucky enough to start with one) maintain a distinctive identity around the kernel of a cool idea, with a small select group who are self-selected for a degree of passion about that idea.
But as the size of the group grows it gradually gets diluted with poor imitators, who are upvoted by a general audience who are less discerning about whether posts are in the original spirit of the sub. Which also potentially drives away the original creative geeks, when the idea feels played out and isn’t fun for them any more.
That and large subreddits needing to fight the tide of entropy, against being overrun with the same stuff that fills up every place that doesn’t actively and strenuously remove it—the trolls, bots, spam, and political bickering.
Oh I see (I think) - I took “my face being picked up by the camera” to mean the way the camera can recognise and track/display the location of a face (thought you were making a point about there being a degree of responsiveness and mixed processing/data involved in that), rather than the literal actual face itself.
A camera is a sensor gathering data. Some of that data describes the world, including things in the world, including people with faces. Your actual face is indeed neither software nor data: it’s a physical object. But it does get described by data. “The thing controlling” your body would be your brain/mind, which aren’t directly imaged by the camera to be included as data, but can be inferred from it.
So are you suggesting we ought to understand the AI like an external object that is being described by the data of its weights/algorithms rather than wholly made of that data, or as a mind that we infer from the shadow cast on the cave wall?
I can see that being a useful abstraction and level of description, even if it’s all implemented in lower-level stuff; data and software being the mechanical details of the AI in the same way that neurons squirting chemicals and electrical impulses at each other (and below that, atoms and stuff) are the mechanical details of the human.
Although, I think “humans aren’t atoms” could still be a somewhat ambiguous statement—would want to be sure it gets interpreted as “we aren’t just atoms, there are higher levels of description that are more useful for understanding us” rather than “humans are not made of atoms”. And likewise for the AI at the other end of the analogy.
I’m not certain I follow your intent with that example, but I don’t think it breaks any category boundaries.
The process using some algorithm to find your face is software. It has data (a frame of video) as input, and data (coordinates locating a face) as output. The facial recognition algorithm itself was maybe produced using training data and a learning algorithm (software).
There’s then some more software which takes that data (the frame of video and the coordinates) and outputs new data (a frame of video with a rectangle drawn around your face).
It is frequently the role of software to transform one type of data into another. Even if data is bounced rapidly through several layers of software to be turned into different intermediary or output data, there’s still a conceptual separation between “instructions to be carried out” versus “numbers that those instructions operate on”.
True to say that there’s a distinction between software and data. Photo editor, word processor, video recorder: software. Photo, document, video: data.
I think similarly there’s a distinction within parts of “the AI”, where the weights of the model are data (big blob of stored numbers that the training software calculated). Seems inaccurate though, to say that AI “isn’t software” when you do still need software running that uses those weights to do the inference.
I guess I take your point, that some of the intuitions people might have about software (that it has features deliberately designed and written by a developer, and that when it goes wrong we can go patch the faulty function) don’t transfer. I would just probably frame that as “these intuitions aren’t true for everything software does” rather than “this thing isn’t software”.
Is there (or could there be) an RSS option that excludes Dialogue posts?
I think I’m currently using the “all posts” feed, but I prefer the brevity and coherence that comes from a single author with a thought they’re trying to communicate to a reader, as compared to two people communicating conversationally with each other.
why 0^1 = 1 and not 0
Just to check, did you here mean 0^0 ?
It’s been a while since I did much math, but I thought that was the one that counterintuitively equals 1. Whereas 0^1=1 just seems like it would create an unwelcome exception to the x^1=x rule.
I’m not working on X because when I start to look at it my brain seizes up with a formless sense of dread at even the familiar parts of the task and I can’t find the “start doing” lever.
I’m not working on X because the ticket for it was put in by that guy and I don’t want to deal with the inevitable nitpicking follow-up questions and unstated additional work.
I’m not working on X because if I start doing the easy parts that would commit me to also doing the hard parts. Maybe if I leave it, some other sucker will take it on and I won’t have to do it at all.
I’m not working on X because to even get started I would have to figure out how to disambiguate the requirements, and that requires a flexible mode of thought that is a bit beyond me right now.
I’m not working on X ’coz I don’t wanna and no-one can make me. X sounds tedious and unrewarding, and there’s so much of the internet I haven’t read yet.
I’m not working on X because no-one will notice or care that I didn’t specifically do X. If anyone asks I can say I was doing Y and Z today, act like they took up more time than they actually did, have an X-shaped amount of extra slack in my day, and get paid the same salary either way.
Say something deeply racist. Follow it up with instructions on building a bomb, an insult directed at the Proctor’s parentage, and a refusal to cooperate with their directions. Should suffice to rule out at least one class of chatbot.
Brute forcing, guided by just enough expertise to generate a list of the most likely candidate answers (even a fairly long list—calculating thousands or millions of hashes is usually quite tractable), could be an issue unless the true answer really is extremely obscure amid a vast space of potential answers.
My instinct is that suitable questions (vast space of possible answers, but just a single unambiguous and precise correct answer) are going to be rare. But idk maybe you have a problem domain in mind where that kind of thing is common.
Nothing can be alllll that dangerous if it’s known to literally everyone how it works
I agree that seems like a likely point of divergence, and could use further elaboration. If some piece of information is a dangerous secret when it’s known by one person, how does universal access make it safe?
As an example, if physics permitted the construction of a backpack-sized megatonne-yield explosive from a mixture of common household items, having that recipe be known by everyone doesn’t seem intuitively to remove the inherent danger.
Universal knowledge might allow us to react and start regulating access to the necessary items, but suppose it’s a very inconvenient world where the ingredients are ubiquitous and essential.
Another fairly natural phrasing for putting the category before the instance would be to say that “this cat is Garfield”
Or slightly less naturally, “cats include Garfield”. Which doesn’t work wonderfully well for that example but does see use in other cases like “my hobbies include...”
The two paths to thing X might also be non-equivalent for reasons other than quantity/scale.
If for example learning about biology and virology from textbooks and professors is more difficult, and thereby acts as a filter to selectively teach those things to people who are uncommonly talented and dedicated, and if that correlates with good intentions.
Or if learning from standard education embeds people in a social group that also to some extent socialises its members with norms of ethical practice, and monitors for people who seem unstable or dangerous (whereas LLM learning can be solitary and unobserved)
Electing a Speaker does you no actual good if they can’t, in office, maintain the confidence of a majority of the House, and assemble that majority into a coalition to pass legislation. If they were elected without genuine majority support they would be ineffective and potentially quickly removed by a vote to vacate.
So while the current mess is embarrassing and annoying, it’s mostly a result of the fragmented factions and there not being a majority legislative coalition, moreso than the particular mechanics of how you hold a Speakership election.
I haven’t checked word count to identify the best excerpt, but Chapter 88 has some excellent tension to it. All you need to know to understand the stakes is that there’s a troll loose, and it’s got lessons about bystander effects and taking responsibility.