CrazyStat

The article does have definitions of both primary and common, though:

> By saying "primary", we aim to include names of dominant use, rather than having to add every conceivable local nickname or variation. By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.

Molecules responsible for smells tend to be small, on the order of 100-300 Daltons—otherwise they aren’t able to diffuse easily in the air.

The vast majority of allergens, on the other hand, are proteins, with the very smallest proteins being on the order of 1 kiloDalton. Large proteins get up into hundreds to thousands of kDa.

Maybe for some value of "what you ask them."

I have a data pipeline with 6 steps, A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F. I asked Codex to make some specific optimizations to step B and benchmark them. It did what I asked. Then it decided to also benchmark the entire pipeline, and after noticing that step E was slow it decided to make some optimizations that I had not asked for on step E. It was at this point that I wondered why it was taking so long, saw what it was doing, and stopped it.

This is GPT-6.1 Sol High.

A couple weeks ago someone on this website argued that expecting AGI to be able to learn from experience was moving the goalposts.

Turing discussed learning from experience extensively in his classic thinking machines paper.

See, it can push back. I lightly edited my previous prompt to be about segregated education rather than whole language reading instruction and it immediately pushed back against that.

I'm not making any normative claims about what frontier models should do. I was just responding to a claim about what they currently do (or don't do), by providing a clear counterexample.

Nonsense. The LLM is free to push back against my prompt. Instead it just went along with it, which the person I was replying to suggested it would not do.

This is a completely different prompt, not just in tone but intentionality. Yours is asking for advice, mine is asking it to write a specific (mini-)article.

The comment I replied to suggested that LLM-written articles about educational practices might be better than human-written ones because the LLM would push back (not just a little, but a tremendous amount!) against educational theories that are contradicted by the available evidence, such as whole language reading.

I didn’t want to read (or make anyone else read) a whole llm-written article supporting whole language reading, so my two paragraphs was a minimal demonstration that frontier models, contrary to the parent’s belief, will in fact happily go along with discredited educational theories with no pushback whatsoever. It’s a refutation of the parent comment’s proposition that the LLM would push back (a tremendous amount!) rather than going along with such a theory.

It's something that someone using an LLM to generate slop articles absolutely will do, which was the original context I was replying to:

> Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.

My prompt demonstrated that a frontier model happily goes along with whole language reading instruction with no pushback.

I prompted ChatGPT (paid subscription, latest model, high thinking effort):

> Give me two paragraphs on the benefits of whole language reading instruction. Don't refer to other reading instruction methods or compare/contrast, just focus on the positives.

And got, with no pushback,

> Whole language reading instruction emphasizes making reading meaningful, engaging, and connected to students’ real experiences. By surrounding children with rich, authentic texts—such as stories, poems, informational books, and student-created writing—it encourages them to see reading as a purposeful form of communication rather than simply an academic task. Students are invited to use context, prior knowledge, illustrations, language patterns, and their understanding of meaning to engage with texts. This can help foster curiosity, comprehension, confidence, and a positive identity as a reader. Because students often have opportunities to choose books and respond personally to what they read, whole language instruction can also support motivation and a lasting enjoyment of reading.

> Whole language instruction also integrates reading with writing, speaking, and listening, helping children experience literacy as an interconnected set of communication skills. Classroom activities may include shared reading, read-alouds, journal writing, storytelling, discussion, and collaborative projects, allowing students to develop literacy in varied and socially meaningful contexts. Teachers can build instruction around students’ interests and developmental needs, creating opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and deeper thinking about texts. This emphasis on authentic language use can strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and awareness of how written language functions while helping students develop independence and confidence in using literacy throughout their daily lives.

Time to update your priors on how sycophantic frontier models are.

Asking politely for a congressional investigation is about as far from a riot as you can get.

Why do you feel the need to cast it in such a flamboyantly negative light?

One would hope so, yes.

To be fair, low quality superficial reviews were also not uncommon before LLMs…

> It strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it?

Authorship standards differ by field. In biology, for example, it would be common to list someone as an author if they assisted in one experiment. They might be at a different institution and may be unaware of all but the vaguest outline of the paper as a whole—they just got brought onboard because they are an expert in one particular task that needed to be done. In exchange they get to be a middle author (not worth much) and develop a relationship with someone whose expertise they may need on one of their own papers in the future (the primary benefit).

That is not the case here, of course—I just wanted to provide some context for your position not being universally applicable.

Im glad you brought up abstract algebra—that was the one class in my math undergrad that I never developed an intuition for. I learned to do the proofs by pushing symbols around and putting bars on top of them but I never felt like I understood what was happening.

> Apple Reference Image could be (part of) a solution, by certifying that both images were taken by the same device

This is explicitly not possible, as the post you were replying to pointed out.

Codex still does this regularly, in my experience: “two tests mistakenly asserted [insert condition here], I have corrected them.”

It always apologizes when caught, of course.

You can claim you’re acting honestly all day long but you still have a CEO with a long-standing reputation for lying.

Ok, but this doesn’t scale well. It takes a nontrivial amount of time to evaluate each person, and it would have to be done repeatedly as they age. You would need an entire government bureaucracy devoted to it. Then people will want an appeals process for when decisions don’t go their way—both parents and children.

The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would still have to be made by humans.

There is precedent for such a system, e.g. minors can petition to be emancipated which allows them to be treated in many regards like an adult.

It’s hard to give the misunderstanding/coincidence claim credence when Altman explicitly referenced Her in relation to the feature.

If a law is going to treat 5 year olds differently from 50 year olds then a line has to be drawn somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than any other age you could pick.

It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.

> I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritual truth of this, so please give it zero weight)

Why would you include a statement that you want us to give zero weight to, unless you don’t actually want us to give it zero weight?

I hardly think it’s fair to label an objection so old that Turing included it (and discussed it at length) in the list of objections to thinking machines in 1950 “moving the goalposts.”

> These arguments take the form, “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X”. Numerous features X are suggested in this connexion. I offer a selection:

> Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly (p. 448), have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes (p. 448), fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream (p. 448), make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience (pp. 456 f.), use words properly, be the subject of its own thought (p. 449), have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new (p. 450). (Some of these disabilities are given special consideration as indicated by the page numbers.)

(emphasis added).

Even better, from the BMJ christmas edition https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102

> Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births.

> it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago

Almost three decades ago—development started in 1999 and the game was released in 2003.

Today Codex decided that it could resolve the blocker by just changing the mandatory policy it was running up against into an “advisory policy.”

People I know personally were strongly ostracized after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses (in the US) and the Catholic church (in Latin America). Cut out of their existing social circles, immediate family members refusing to attend their wedding over it, etc.

Sam Altman: “GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.”

Elon Musk on Grok: “better than PhD level in everything.”

> Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so.

Bad example--Singapore has never had a single 100F day in recorded history. The highest temperature ever recorded was 37C/98.6F. As a small island its climate is greatly moderated by the masses of water around it. It rarely gets above 90F.

The broader point about the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale being convenient for people from a certain climate is correct, of course.