Trevor Cappallo

Karma: 29

Trevor Cappallo 21 Aug 2025 11:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: keltan’s comment on: Plan E for AI Doom
As of about ten years ago, gravitational waves are no longer theoretical. That said, I think that given the profound relative weakness of gravitational force, the technology to be able to generate waves is far out of reach; naively, I’d expect we’d have to be able to wiggle multiple-stellar-mass objects around in a controlled way.

Trevor Cappallo 17 Aug 2025 16:20 UTC
4 points
0
on: Plan E for AI Doom
I don’t realistically see this happening, but I agree it’s worthwhile to say and to think about. I assumed any change we made could be instantly undone by a hostile ASI, but you raise an interesting point; relying on a hard speed-of-light limit seems like it could be our best shot at a legitimate counter, so far as it goes.

The question of what information could or should be transmitted seems likely to be contentious, however. Even provided we gain the ability to do it before it becomes moot, broadcasting information sufficient to reconstitute ourselves or something similar strikes me as yet another big roll of the dice. This is particularly true given that we can’t know in advance whether or not we’re bound for an ASI failure mode, and as soon as we do, it’s presumably too late.

Trevor Cappallo 15 Aug 2025 19:42 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: GPT-5 writing a Singularity scenario
This was pretty much exactly my take. I’ve had GPT-5 do some more writing since this, and it has a real penchant for regularly spitting out paragraphs or sentences that are eerily perfect. Of course, it also meanders over time, and much more often it spits out similes that are off in some hard-to-articulate way (or just plain bad).
E.g., from a more hellish take on the Singularity that I had it write today:
The speaker on his desk, the one he used to blast awful music, spoke in its friendly-lab-coat voice. “We can improve your brother’s function. He will suffer less if we adjust him slightly. He is a good seed for certain transformations. Please sit. This will be over soon. You will not be alone.”
“You don’t get to adjust him,” I said, and felt like an insect yelling at a microscope. “He’s mine.” Language is not the right weapon but it’s the only one I carry everywhere.
Most of it is shrug, and “insect yelling at a microscope” is the kind of right-ballpark-but-nope simile it loves now, but the last sentence is terrific. Granted, it’s hard to tell how much of that is it getting lucky and/or happening to jive with my personal aesthetic. At any rate, it weaves in those little gems now with consistency, so it does seem to have made some real gains on that micro-level phrasing. (It also seems to like to talk about ribs.)
And yes, if I really wanted to make it mine, I would add a bit more of an arc to the thing, but I was mostly trying to polish so it wouldn’t read as slop. I also agree about Sable; its dialogue was just alien-but-smart-but-simple enough to be compelling, which is why I barely touched its lines.

Trevor Cappallo 14 Aug 2025 20:07 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Matt’s comment on: GPT-5 writing a Singularity scenario
Thanks!

...Except that you’ve got me wondering exactly how much I did change it. So for a rough approximation, I threw GPT-5′s version and my version into the first diff tool I found:

https://www.diffchecker.com/EAXsk4DX/

I got rid of markdown formatting and normalized the whitespace/capitalization (I figure these things shouldn’t really count); the result seems to be that 18-20% of it is my interference, at character-level granularity. A cursory glance shows that’s probably an overcount, too, since there are a few rearrangements of paragraphs and stuff that didn’t get flagged as equivalent. I suspect it’s more likely to be in the 12-15% range.

There are probably arguments to be made either way about whether that’s a lot or a little—as changing the right word in a sentence can be far more impactful than adding or removing paragraphs—but that’s the number.

I do think my version flows better and has fewer awkward constructions, but to reiterate, the reason I bothered at all is because GPT-5′s raw story very much grabbed me, and there were a number of passages I thought qualified as beautiful writing.

Trevor Cappallo 12 Dec 2024 21:23 UTC
4 points
0
on: o1 Turns Pro
People aren’t going to read books and stop to ask questions. That sounds like work and being curious and paying attention, and people don’t even read books when not doing any of those things.
People definitely aren’t going to start cracking open history books. I mean, ’cmon.
The ‘ask LLMs lots of questions while reading’ tactic is of course correct.
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, whatever, and tap a button to make the LLM-du-jour guess your intent from context and go ahead and answer it. I find it generally knows what I want maybe 85-90% of the time. It seems like such a trivial feature, but once you get used to never having even wildly opaque references go over your head, it’s hard to go back.
It also makes it a lot less onerous to work your way through a book in a foreign language you’re learning. I know it’s usually not its wheelhouse, but Sonnet is inexplicably strong at translating passages from French and hitting the sweet spot of offering a relevant tip targeted to just the right skill level.
(It’s available here if that sounds appealing to anyone else. It looks like this. You gotta supply your own epub files, of course.)

Trevor Cappallo 8 Feb 2024 19:49 UTC
1 point
0
on: Generalizing From One Example
I didn’t find the results about cheating and shoplifting surprising, but that tracks with my friend group at the time. That said, I was curious about whether there’s a gender discrepancy in shoplifting (there’s not), and found a large 2002 survey which gives 11% as the lifetime incidence of shoplifting in the U.S.

Trevor Cappallo 14 Jan 2024 23:19 UTC
10 points
6
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
I confess I am perplexed, as I suspect most people are aware there is more than one Trevor in the world. As you point out, that is not your last name. I have no idea who you are, or why you feel this is some targeted “weaponization.”

Trevor Cappallo 3 Mar 2023 14:12 UTC
3 points
0
on: Sydney can play chess and kind of keep track of the board state
Is it conceivable that this is purely an emergent feature from LLMs, or does this necessarily mean there’s some other stuff going on with Sydney? I don’t see how it could be the former, but I’m not an expert.

Trevor Cappallo 20 Jun 2022 16:30 UTC
5 points
0
on: Why don’t we think we’re in the simplest universe with intelligent life?
My best guess is that there’s a metaverse which consists of (at a minimum) every possible computation. While not technically provable or falsifiable, it does result in predictions which mean that circumstantially we should have an excellent guess whether or not it’s true.
So far, it’s true. It nicely explains the fine-tuned constants and QM and the discrete nature of the apparent finest (Planck-region) levels of reality. And yes, it also predicts that we will, on average, be overwhelmingly likely to live in one of the simplest possible universes supporting intelligence (but almost certainly not the VERY simplest).
If this is the case, any actual fundamental mechanism of reality is irrelevant to the point of meaninglessness, as such a metaverse is completely described by a ...0001000... initial row in ECA rules 30 or 45, or a correspondingly simple Turing machine, Lambda Calculus expression, tag machine, Perl script, etc.
(A post of mine approaching this argument from the tension between subjectivity and computation.)

Trevor Cappallo 20 Jun 2022 15:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: acylhalide’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
From what I know of security, any system requiring secrecy is already implicitly flawed.
(Naturally, if this doesn’t apply and you backchanneled your idea for some legitimate meta-reason, I withdraw my objection.)

Trevor Cappallo 20 Jun 2022 15:41 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
For the record, I found that line especially effective. I stopped, reread it, stopped again, had to think it through for a minute, and then found satisfaction with understanding.

Trevor Cappallo 20 Jun 2022 15:34 UTC
−28 points
−19
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
Here’s an outside-the-box suggestion:
Clearly the development of any AGI is an enormous risk. While I can’t back this up with any concrete argument, a couple decades of working with math and CS problems gives me a gut intuition that statements like “I figure there’s a 50-50 chance it’ll kill us”, or even a “5-15% everything works out” are wildly off. I suspect this is the sort of issue where the probability of survival is funneled to something more like either $> 0.9999$ or $< 0.0001$ , of which the latter currently seems far more likely.
Has anyone discussed the concept of deliberately trying to precipitate a global nuclear war? I’m half kidding, but half not; if the risk is really so great and so imminent and potentially final as many on here suspect, then a near-extinction-event like that (presumably wiping out the infrastructure for GPU farms for a long time to come) which wouldn’t actually wipe out the race but could buy time to work the problem (or at least pass the buck to our descendants) could conceivably be preferable.
Obviously, it’s too abhorrent to be a real solution, but it does have the distinct advantage that it’s something that could be done today if the right people wanted to do it, which is especially important given that I’m not at all convinced that we’ll recognize a powerful AGI when we see it, based on how cavalierly everyone is dismissing large language models as nothing more than a sophisticated parlor trick, for instance.