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.
For “Springfield”, is this just based on the Simpsons or is there some other context that I’m missing (coming from Norway)?
If memory serves, they chose that name in the Simpsons because it’s an oddly common name, with a small town by that name in 30+ different states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(toponym)
As it mentions there, “Fairview” and “Midway” are even more common, but I guess there’s more of a meme about “Springfield” being very common (sometimes inaccurately said that there’s one in every state)
We make efforts with the automod, but it’s a fairly rudimentary tool. Mostly a keyword/regex matcher.
So we can have it automatically look for some of the common repeated phrases (relatively few of our human users say “That’s a great question”). If it’s a weak signal maybe it only highlights them for mod review rather than fully automatically removing them.
But otherwise it relies on the human eye to spot them being weird. Especially when the comments are too short for AI detectors to get a good read on it (deciding what’s suspicious enough to run through a detector is itself done by eye).
NB: suspishously good grammer is now becuming an AI sign in itself
I moderate for a subreddit where, despite our best efforts to purge them with holy fire, AI spambots are rife (trying to act inconspicuous and get some karma). In addition to the “suspiciously good grammar and bullet points and em dashes” type, there’s conversely also a strain of them that use a gimmicky level of slang.
Where most of the tone of the subreddit is explanatory/informative, and most people are using standard spelling/grammar, they drop in with “ngl bro honestly the vibes are wild fr”
At acknowledged risk of sounding like an evil robot, what’s the theory of change that links this action to the desired outcome?
Traditionally the logic of a hunger strike is that it applies pressure to the target because they have sufficient conscience that they don’t want to watch you die, or at least don’t want to be viewed as responsible for your death, or don’t want to create a “martyr”. If you openly say from the outset that you don’t intend to fast to death or detriment, what motivates the relevant decision makers to change their actions?
My first thought was that the “ground beneath your feet”, that might move around more than you initially expected, would be the libraries and dependencies you call on; other people’s code that your code relies on. You might see old methods become deprecated in ways that break your use of them—or new methods introduced that you want to switch to, for efficiency gains or other reasons.
Which can be mitigated by some forethought to put in a layer of abstraction that wraps around the library, so that you only have to change how you call the library in the wrapper, without changing the rest of the code. But can also be taken too far (if you put a wrapper around all kinds of really basic functions, just creating extra cruft for no good reason).
Can also suffer from “leaky” abstractions, if your wrapper makes assumptions about the library that don’t hold up, or if the code calling the wrapper needs to still know about the underlying library to work right. Not sure quite what the analogy to a building foundation would be there—I guess if you thought your big concrete slab was trustworthy as an immovable foundation, but then it turned out that big concrete slabs on top of dirt behave importantly differently to big concrete slabs on sand.
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