shawnghu

Karma: 179

shawnghu 9 Apr 2026 4:31 UTC
1 point
0
on: Selective modularity: a research agenda
A drawback is that split-loss gradient routing requires separate backward passes for each part in the partition.
note: at scale, this doesn’t imply any significant computational losses, as far as i can tell—as long as the partition size is very large compared to the batch that fits on a gpu/node, one can group the same-loss training samples to be processed on the same gpu/node. then you can still work with reduced tensors for the forward/backward, and computation of the total gradient for the optimizer is achieved by default by gradient accumulation.

shawnghu 2 Apr 2026 20:20 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: adamzerner’s Shortform
I agree that interrupting is an art. I love this statement in particular:

many situations (in fact almost all) won’t have time for everyone to say everything they’d like to have heard, so competition is tempting and prevalent

I feel that I have a handle on when to interrupt in a two-person conversation, but the dynamics of interrupting differ:
- as the number of participants increases (there’s a phase shift at three, and then another one at six or seven as people typically don’t like to speak less than one fifth of the time);
- as the conversation becomes less meta-cooperative (e.g, the conversation is happening in some public forum or in order for a decision to be made, so there is an incentive to speak more so that your ideas get to be heard more).
(As another note, I find that even with three people, there needs to be either a significant amount of yielding or else substantial agreement on what the topic and frame of the conversation should be/implicitly are, or else the thread of the conversation will repeatedly “miss the point” and meander.)

I would be interested to hear any insights anyone has about how to navigate any of these better, unilaterally or by establishing group norms (formally or by reinforcement).

shawnghu 1 Apr 2026 21:31 UTC
7 points
3
in reply to: tslarm’s comment on: Lesswrong Liberated
Please publish Less Schlong. It’s a public good.

shawnghu 1 Apr 2026 21:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Lesswrong Liberated
Where do I go to submit a bug report? When I click on Garrett’s link, it gives me the template given by Oliver’s link. This is despite them having different URLs and having clicked on Garrett’s first.

For some reason I can’t find the usual bug report options on LW.

shawnghu 1 Apr 2026 21:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Lesswrong Liberated
The first time I clicked through a link in a fake window, I got

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.lesswrong.com (see the browser console for more information).

This is fine in the spirit of the LLM thing.

shawnghu 26 Feb 2026 18:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: romeostevensit’s Shortform
I thought the whole thread was about the difficulty of understanding agency, i.e, breaking down the concept of agency into more useful concepts, or just making it more well-defined.

I don’t think it’s hard to make LLMs “exhibit” agency, at least not in very similar ways to the ways it’s hard to make humans do so. On the other hand, discussion of AI risk that anthropomorphizes the AI usually grounds out in some confusion about, e.g, “what part of the AI system is the agent, if the whole thing is just a collection of floating point ops, and how do we square that frame with the frames we usually use to describe agency”. (Attempts to metaphorically map this to the human setting typically just result in confusion about the human setting, too.)

shawnghu 25 Feb 2026 6:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: romeostevensit’s Shortform
Are you talking about the difficulty of exhibiting (colloquially) high agency?

That’s my reading due to your comparison to integrity.

I don’t think that’s what OP was talking about, though.

shawnghu 25 Feb 2026 6:54 UTC
1 point
0
on: shawnghu’s Shortform
Strangely, if you ask Claude “what’s the complexity of inversion of a triangular matrix?”, it says O(n^2), but when pressed to explain will say O(n^3).

This is one of those things that’s pretty elementary, and well-represented in the training set, so I’d expect it to be very well-memorized by an LLM.

This is robust to a few attempts and rewords, and held for Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

shawnghu 30 Jan 2026 18:52 UTC
3 points
0
on: social lemon markets
hmm, i’d thought of lemon markets ruining basic economic activities in modern life, and i’d also thought of urbanization being the root cause of social isolation, and i’ve even thought it was better socially when people had economic excuses to form communities, but i’ve never made the particular connection written about here (that functionally, this makes modern socializing a lemon market). thanks!

shawnghu 28 Jan 2026 4:53 UTC
3 points
0
on: Five Theses on AI Art
I often like to cite [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njk2YAgNMnE](this music video) as an example of something that was made possible by AI, and used it as just a building block in a complex artistic process (for my part, I couldn’t imagine how I would auto-generate a video like this, or even encode the movement of the camera as a constraint (without some substantial effort), and it was made in 2022!)

shawnghu 22 Jan 2026 4:08 UTC
1 point
0
on: shawnghu’s Shortform
forgive my ignorance, but is there any reason that you can’t have multi-layer sparse autoencoders, even those that are interpretably compatible with the linear representation hypothesis? like what would their drawbacks be (other than more required compute)?

no matter how it is that you’re computing the latents, 0) you still have a reconstruction loss;
1. the final layer is still a decoder that computes a linear transformation to the thing you’re reconstructing;
2. you can still have a sparsity penalty on the last set of activations.
it seems to me like this still constructs a set of latents that sparsely activate, and which are linearly represented in activation space

shawnghu 16 Jan 2026 1:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Raphael Roche’s comment on: Bitter Lessons from Distillation Robustifies Unlearning
FYI, I heard that Oliver Sacks fabricated/embellished a lot of the anecdotal accounts in his books. This was a fairly public controversy, so evidence for it can be found on Google.

shawnghu 14 Jan 2026 21:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
i would like to know where this question leads, since i in principle like children and animals and yet have no idea what to do with them

shawnghu 13 Jan 2026 1:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roman Malov’s comment on: Taking LLMs Seriously (As Language Models)
I think I see the logic. Were you thinking of making the model good at answering questions whose correct answer depend on the model itself, like “When asked a question of the form x, what proportion of the time would you tend to answer y?”

The previous remark about being a microscope into its dataset seemed benign to me, e.g, if the model were already good at answering questions like “What proportion of datapoints satisfying predicates X satisfy predicate Y?”

But perhaps you also argue that the latter induces some small amount of self-awareness → situational awareness?

shawnghu 12 Jan 2026 7:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JennaS’s comment on: Why AIs aren’t power-seeking yet
While the particulars of your argument seem to me to have some holes, I actually very much agree with your observation we don’t know what the upper limit of properly orchestrated Claude instances are, and that targeted engineering of Claude-compatible cognitive tools could vastly increase its capabilities.

One idea I’ve been playing with for a really long time is that the Claudes aren’t the actual agents, but instead just small nodes or subprocesses in a higher-functioning mind. If I loosely imagine a hierarchy of Claudes, each corresponding roughly to system-1 or subconscious deliberative processes, with the ability to write and read to files as a form of “long term memory/processing space” for the whole system, and I imagine that by some magical oracle process they coordinate/delegate as well as Claudes possibly can, subject to a vague notion of “how smart Claude itself is”, I see no reason a system like this can’t already be an AGI, and cannot in principle be engineered into existence using contemporary LLMs.

(However, I will say that this thing sounds pretty hard to actually engineer, i.e, it being “just an engineering problem” doesn’t mean it would happen soon, but OTOH maybe it could if people would try the right approach hard enough. I can’t imagine a clean way of applying optimization pressure to the Claudes in any such setup that isn’t an extremely expensive and reward-sparse form of RL.)

shawnghu 11 Jan 2026 2:33 UTC
1 point
0
on: Taking LLMs Seriously (As Language Models)
(paraphrasing would be a markov kernel here, and with the transitivity property I mentioned earlier, I’m asking that achieves its stationary distribution in one iteration)
for this condition, if you also want symmetricity, this is a very strong condition; you’d only accept “lossless paraphrasings”. i think not only are you achieving the stationary distribution in one iteration but the distribution cannot change, so this is either a markov kernel for every semantically different phrase, or not-markov.

shawnghu 11 Jan 2026 0:17 UTC
1 point
0
on: Taking LLMs Seriously (As Language Models)
There is some danger in this suggestion: it can improve the situational awareness of the LLM.
Why?

shawnghu 10 Jan 2026 1:36 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: beyarkay’s comment on: Where’s the $100k iPhone?
i think compute and networking speeds are honestly enough that most people struggle to take advantage of more of those things (streaming video is about the most data-intensive thing a lot of people do, and what’s above that is mostly actual computational tasks), so it would take (significant) additional innovations in figuring out how to convert these things into better experiences in order for this to be tenable. it seems a lot of the time that the line is usually drawn somewhere around gaming enthusiasts (e.g there is a cohort of people who will buy a more powerful smartphone so it can render graphics better so they can game on their phones more enjoyably, same for the display). this could be because economic incentives towards innovations in compute still favor commoditizable things, since compute is more generally useful (for the amount of work you could employ to make phones better for a small contingent of people who would buy them, you could just make some similarly advanced/complex system better for some industrial/trad-tech purpose and make way more money)

shawnghu 10 Jan 2026 1:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: beyarkay’s comment on: Where’s the $100k iPhone?
i think there is a false premise assumed here. a lot of products are not luxury products because of superior quality that can be innovated past. it’s primarily raw signaling value, sort of fiated by the brand.

shawnghu 10 Jan 2026 1:04 UTC
10 points
5
in reply to: beyarkay’s comment on: Where’s the $100k iPhone?
alcohol is possibly cheating, because it’s not really food and an expensive luxury category of its own? (but even there, really, most of the wine all the way at the highest end is like $1000 for bottles you’d consume semi-regularly, and about $10 at the cheap end).

naively, fast food is about $30 a day (fast food is actually kinda expensive, i guess the cheapest things you can do, bulk beans and rice sorts of things, are about one OOM cheaper). i think $1000 a day is actually more than enough to afford an entire person to do skilled work all of the time, although you could push it upwards a bit more if they were truly elite at the thing that they do, but probably not one OOM more.

(accounting tends to get tricky up there because I imagine a big part of the value proposition for your worker past a certain point is a sort of security, access to other commodities/conveniences, connections, etc.)

but to the original point, i do really struggle to imagine how an iphone is meant to provide you more value. i think a lot of what an iphone is supposed to do for you in terms of productivity is better achieved by other means, and it’s hard to improve for entertainment at its form factor. as for signaling value, here are two websites that sell phone cases in the $10k range, as a sort of jewelry.

https://caviar.global/ https://leronza.com/24k-gold-luxury-samsung-galaxy-z-fold7/

i guess you could switch between these regularly, as with jewelry, to effectively recover another OOM.