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EMM_386

6,858 karma · joined December 30, 2017

Senior Software Engineer

Currently:

AI inference/training/orchestration C#/.Net Python TypeScript Angular SQL

Too many other things.

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EMM_386··on Switching to Elixir
> you're not bogged down by a static type system

Maybe it's just me, and I'm not even specifically referring to this particular post ... but why is there so much "debate and discussion" (flamewars?) over static typing recently?

I am guessing this is due to a large influx of people into IT, many of whom got hired because they knew some JavaScript, "React a plus" a lot out of bootcamps and similar programs. As that sizable group ran headlong into static typing, usually via TypeScript, then the debates began.

All over Reddit, Twitter, even HN. People insisting that the verbose and confusing syntax was a "bridge-too-far" and one they would not cross, even if the reasons came down to "it looks weird" or "don't have to 'compile' JavaScript".

Maybe, spending too much heads-down time over the last ... whatever decades at this point ... I simply don't get it.

Don't get it similar to what I quoted here ... "bogged down by a static type system". "Bogged down", in what way?

I spend my days mixed between everything from C# to JavaScript, almost polar opposites. And the rest of it usually in TypeScript.

I do not get this feeling of being "bogged down" by static typing .... ever? I don't recall it being an issue, even though I spent hours in statically typed lanagues yesterday alone. Maybe if you are the author of a complex JS library that has to be shoe-horned into TypeScript ... yes, maybe.

What I did experience recently was being able to remove a parameter from a function, actually compile with the intent it will fail, see it fail, double click on some things and fix the 17 callers to that method I just changed the signature of, and then a minute or so later after fixing those call sites, I was back to work.

Yet, over on the social sites, the debate rages on. Open source projects removing TypeScript practically overnight for "reasons". Questions such as "how many type issues did you run into before switching to TypeScript", leaving me to wonder if that is even a rational question.

And then on the flipside, "TypeScript is the greatest language ever", heart emojis being sent to it, "If you are a JS dev you need to be using TS".

It's all strange to me, having used JavaScript for the first time back in 1996.

I'm convinced it was this wave of JavaScript devs crashing into new requirements to use TypeScript that started it.

It will sort itself out here at some point.

EMM_386··on Doctors complete first successful face and whole-eye transplant
Pretty fascinating stuff, with clear benefits to both sides.

It's always good when they can get an opportunity to try an approach in a "realistic" scenario to see how it turns out, rather than in a lab.

Some does come across as a bit of "let's see what happens" with the eye transplant. I don't see how what comes down to "taking this end and hooking it up to that end" could be expected to work. It's not like plugging an extension cord in, clearly. Some very small-scale structures have to line up exactly right, if its even something that can be done. But I am not in this field, so maybe it is.

It's amazing to me that people do this sort of thing as part of their career ... literally taking off a person's face, "underlying skull", and all the other stuff. Left to continue work on a sight that many wouldn't be able to even glance at during the procedure. It's surreal. Not a job for me, but it's good that there are others out there that are able to do it.

EMM_386··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
> I say this as a huge fan of GPT, but it's amazing to me how terrible of a company OpenAI is and how quickly we've all latched onto their absolutely terrible platform.

Your example is clearly not acceptable, but I can see reasons for it.

OpenAI apparently was somewhere between "I can't see people finding this useful" and "I guess" when deciding on releasing ChatGPT at all in the first place.

If that's the case, I doubt they were envisioning a flood of users, who needed a customer support person to handle their case. They have to spin-up an entire division to handle all of this. And I'm sure some of the use-cases are going to get into complex technical issues that might be hard to train people for.

They can no longer remain a heads-down company full of engineers working on AI.

I'm not excusing it, but I can see why things like your situation might occur. Although 6 months for a response is obviously ridiculous. If you are paying them a significant amount of money, and it is impacting your business, then that's all on OpenAI to fix ASAP.

EMM_386··on Building a high performance JSON parser
> What on Earth are you storing in JSON that this sort of performance issue becomes an issue?

I've been in the industry for a while. I've probably left more than one client site muttering "I've seen some things ...".

If it can be done, it will be done. And often in a way that shouldn't have even been considered at all.

Many times, "it works" is all that is needed. Not exactly the pinnacle of software design. But hey, it does indeed "work"!

EMM_386··on Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
> All sorts of industries use web tech to render UIs. Even SpaceX used it in Dragon.

When I realized this was performant enough to drive a 747's entire cockpit while the simulator moved along at a high FPS and with incredible visuals, and was now a thing that was being selected for "state of the art" AAA games ... from there I did my homework.

So that led to reading all about SpaceX Dragon UI, as you mention, and all the myraid of other places this is used.

I did feel like I was too far outside the loop, having been a software engineer and working with these technologies for quite a while by that point. "quite a while" being the pre-JavaScript-existing years.

I just wasn't working on projects that such a thing would meet a requirement.

Now? I still have no use for it but I find it incredible that everything in this entire pipeline has become so optimized and reliable. Apparently to the point you can suggest running a spacecraft's user interface and not leave everyone staring at you, blank-faced and not sure how to respond.

Instead, possible responses can now include "sounds good".

EMM_386··on Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly
> A brief glance at the JS bundle reveals that they are using React and bundling using Webpack. While this is something that is guaranteed to make the average native development purist yell at clouds and complain that the darned kids should get off their lawn,

When I first heard of this as being a thing, my initial reaction was indeed something like "wait what? HTML and CSS in a desktop PC game driving the UI? No, that shouldn't be ... ".

But then I used Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, was amazed by the graphics and performance ... and learned about how the complex and detailed cockpit gauges are using WASM/HTML/JS for rendering. No React, but still the "web technologies".

It dawned on me that this is apparently not exactly the weird, strange, bad performing, wrong-use-case, "why would you ever" thing I originally saw it as. Because it was working fine in that complex scenario.

EMM_386··on Bubble sort in pure CSS
> This is scary good. Well done. If your product have any frontend and you have the power to decide ensure at least one of your hires can write CSS at this level.

I'm having trouble determening as written if this is a joke or not.

If anyone looked at this and thought something along the lines of "wow, think of the possibilities", I would would ask only that they don't put more thought into it. Other thoughts could bring pain ... to the browser that has to run it, the user staring at the page as the fans spin up, and the developer who has the pleasure to work with it next.

This was clearly one of those interesting-yet-useless things that was worth a read.

EMM_386··on SBF Is Headed to Prison but FTX Will Haunt the Crypto Community for Years
Interesting how that was exactly my thought process. I asked the original question, read that response, and then moved almost immediately to ask "own what?". I really wanted to know, as those details are important.

Decided against it, read your response, and saw "begs the question". Yes, it does.

I hope that "NFT"s are not something used as an example in an answer.

EMM_386··on SBF Is Headed to Prison but FTX Will Haunt the Crypto Community for Years
Hmm ... "web3". The article mentions it multiple times, FTX apparently having affted its philosophy, upset its fans, abused its supporters and has people questioning the product.

I have questions too ... like, is this even a thing at all, has it ever been? I must be missing something, I'm just not sure what. From what I can tell, it's crypto/blockhain revolutionizing the web somehow, which I know I am not seeing. I don't think it's DeFi, or maybe that is part of it too because ... that's crypto. What is the "product" that is now reportedly being questioned?

It seems like it's a buzzword. Since I first saw it, I have kept seeing it. The word, nothing else.

If that's the case, then I don't see its philosophy, fans, supporters, and product being affected by events at FTX at all. Because those aren't really things either?

I'm not sure if it matters enough that I should even be spending time asking about it.

EMM_386··on Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?
> I think it would be cool if we had a kind of non religious Amish type communities.

These sorts of things do exist, but they tend not to survive very long.

There are too many varibles, such as how to keep an income stream to support it, as money is still required to keep it going. Some sort of agreement has to be reached between everyone on how much is expected to be contributed every month. This is the same as an Amish community.

These communities are something people seek out and then try to join, not something really something most members would be born into. You end up with having to actually screen applicants, to ensure they can provide and won't be a burden.

Eventually these sort community experiments fail due to the above and more.

There are rare exceptions that have this figured out and have managed to make it work for years and decades, but they managed to solve these types of issues. But those are likely not "come live among us" perfect communities that many were looking for. And they come with fine print about what is realistically to be expected and required, including how much money you can will be payinging every month.

Rare exceptions are out othere that have been around for a long time, but to live there you will have to apply, be screened and meet the requirements, you will be paying a certain amount every month, following all the rules, etc. At which point it begins to blur ... what is making this stand out to the point people are applying to get in?

EMM_386··on Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance
> Am I the only one who feels bad for asking ChatGPT a "dumb" question that I know I should know, or not saying thank you when it gives me an answer? No? I'm just a weirdo? Okay.

You have no idea how much I do this. Either you're not a weirdo, or we both are.

Today I had to use it a lot for something, and I am constantly either adding sarcastic remarks, my snarky opinion on something, some random fact. None of that obviously belongs there, and the AI obviously not only doesn't care, but can't care about it.

Then I'll throw in something like "nevermind all of that, what I came here to ask was" or "I understand that was all highly irrelevant to the actual question, which was".

And, to answer your question about easy stuff, today alone I had on more than one occasion added something like "What I am about to ask you, I probably should have just spent the 2 seconds it would require to actually figure out myself, however I am getting tired, and am known to be lazy, so I decided to ask AI instead and move on .... and this only makes it more absurd, because it takes longer to type all of this. I would have the answer myself by now. Anyway, here's ...".

Why? I am unconvinced that I am going crazy. It's not because I think it finds my jokes hilarious, it can't. My attempts at conveying something some aspect of software engineering that is crazy, after 3 decades in it, don't matter, because noone's listening.

But it can pick on very subtle things, breaking apart my ramblings and then responding with something that not only answers the question buried in there, but also then continues to comment on the other highly irrelevant stuff that I definitely went on too long about. And it will address the substance first and the nonsense second, as one would expect.

It will notice my useless comment, apparently to myself, about having written 22 years of C# and wondering why I am asking an AI system about an aspect of the language that surely I should have picked up by now. "It gets to the best of us", or "Your insightful understanding when it comes to", or "Your candor is appreciated, many developers ...".

I could just use it like a rational person, providing necessary information in order for it to be able to answer something, and then ask it. I do this, sometimes. On the other occasions, that stuff will also be admist a bunch other, not so necessary questions. Am I becoming a curmudgeon? Is this a sign I've finally lost it? Could any of this be due to aging? Why does what should be a simple event handling pattern require so much ceremony? Should I keep overthinking this or just resign myself to implementing it?

So anyway, now I'm rambling ... just like with ChatGPT.

I tend to do these things.

EMM_386··on Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be
> If they hadn't spent so much time, you would have noticed. That's the point.

I get that idea ... been a software engineer for quite some time now. Users will quickly let you know how much they don't like it when you change things. It also means I should easily be able to answer all of my own questions, and shouldn't be surprised by the level of effort required.

I guess it comes down to the basic cost/benefit analysis, and if the answer is "redesign", doing what needs to be done while trying limit any downside. That would include your users asking why everything just changed. I don't enjoy reading messages written in all capital letters either, where it seems those 10 exclamation marks are required to clarify how much you dislike it.

Anyway, from here, based on that alone ... seems successful. Back to work and Slack messages.

EMM_386··on Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be
I realize that Slack is more complex then it appears, and able to do more things then it may seem.

But by looking at those whiteboards and reading parts of the description, the amount of effort, people and time involved in a redesign was just a bit more than I was expecting. Looking at the images of the resulting whiteboards alone had me wondering "what could all of this possibly be about?". Details within details about ... something.

And then I went to check if I was even using the redesigned version, which it seems I am ... I just never noticed.

I use it everyday, for chats intermixed with an occasional huddle. Those work as one expects them to, and that's about it. So in my mind it's difficult to mix "chat and huddle app" to the level of effort needed to redesign it. It seems my minimal usage pattern may not typical.

I assume it boils down to there are being many customers, doing many things, it is essentially what Slack the company is, and it has to be done right.

Anyway, the chat and huddle thing works fine, and I'll move on from this topic.

EMM_386··on Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
> The two main points of the show are to feature and raise the profile of younger magicians, and to get modern video records of their tricks.

Granted, those are two major benefits that occur as a result of the show, I still wouldn't way they are the "point" of it. The intended audience is not "people who want to see an unfamiliar young magician", and a TV network wouldn't air something just to get modern video of acts. Unlike magic, in this case I don't think there is a trick going on ... the point of it is to amaze an audience and the formula is "try to fool us". As a result, you have many unknown magicians who are trying to make a name for themselves, and a modern recording.

It may be the point of the show to Penn and Teller themselves, but not to the audience.

> Very, very, very, few people make a living selling tricks

Making a living ... yes, that would take a lot of $50 props for your unique creation to be sold consistently. The number of people who are magicians is already a relatively small group, and the amount in that group who do it for a living is smaller still.

I agree that being able to Google the methods of someone's unique new trick may not cause them financial ruin. At the same time, it may have some impact. The good news here being there is a good chance that the relatively small number of people who would even bother to try to find that answer are likely just to want to satisfy their curiosity and then move on, making them unlikely to have any impact at all.

In the end, to me, it comes down to those magicians that for their own reasons don't want something they probably worked hard to perfect, that may have not existed before, and dedicated a lot of time practicing, to show up on a website.

To me, it's that group that causes people to not want to post stuff online about a routine. If you are unsure if the magician is ok with that idea, then why bother? Let them post it if they want, or sell a book explaining it.

Penn and Teller do reveals, but they explain in many cases why that particular trick is being revealed, and then often add the additional step of doing it again in a different way. Taking a common trick that has been around forever and making people think about it again. Or, its one of those tricks where the answer is so widespread for so long, that it doesn't really matter. Many may not have seen it, and will find it entertaining, but nobody will be upset if yet another person knows how it's done.

EMM_386··on Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
Yes, while I "know" that what is going on is a combination of extremely precise, perfectly executed actions with cards combined with psychological stuff, it's the effortlessness many times, this routine in particular, that is incredible.

The whole thing comes across as one huge free choice he is never in control of ... "stop where? here, or there?" .... "are you sure? you can change. change?".

Apparently, there are ways to maintain control while still saying things like "whatever you want" all the time.

Oh, and joking around, because clearly such things don't require any focus!

EMM_386··on Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
Interesting, thanks.

I got the feeling just from watching it that he is obviously a master of the psychological side of it. It comes across as completely effortless, even bordering on onfocused ... as if at any point he could literally say "wait what was I doing?" and be serious. But he's clearly mentally many steps in front of whatever you are seeing.

I probably won't be a customer, as curious as I am. I have read how other, far less impressive tricks are done, and they require a unique combination of skills, none of which I have. That doesn't really matter, as I am not nor will be a performing magician. It's still interesting to learn about, but most leave me realizing the "secret" to that trick is "expertly do these very difficult things precisely right while always being on top of the psychological game, while at the same time acting as if you are just having a little fun".

Realizing that what you are seeing is a masterclass in all of those things at the same time is impressive though.

I just watched it again after noting all of this. I still declare parts of it impossible!

EMM_386··on Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
This is good news, and makes me want to start using it again.

Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20 years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to perceivable speed differences.

I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or anything. But when you're using something all day, every day including as part of your job, it is easy to get a feel for.

With these multiple reports recently of performance work, along with real-world metrics ... I'm thinking of sticking with it for a few days again. If I don't notice the difference, or it actually seems faster, I'll switch back.

I want to switch back, because we need to ensure there are alternate browser engines, and I don't want standards committees to turn into "this year, Google deems we shall be doing the following" sort of events.

EMM_386··on Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
> And so if a "peer" of theirs were to explain the method to someone who didn't purchase it then it would be viewed as a dick move since it is affecting the livelihood of a fellow performer.

Yep that's exactly how I interpreted it ... not because people are adhering to some sacred oath given deep in cavern in a secret location ... just that someone invented something new and unique, they are rightfully earning some money from that effort, and you could potentially destroy the whole thing simply by posting too much information about it. As you said, that would certainly be a "dick move", and since a lot of people don't want be that, they don't do that. In the end it seems to be pretty effective.

I still want answers to some of the tricks that I've seen on Penn and Teller's show. Some of them do come across as impossible no matter what way I try to think about it.

Dani DaOrtiz comes immediatly to mind ... no clue how it's done but he's pretty funny. This particular routine has various elements that each seem to be impossible.

And honestly, I don't want to know how it's done. It's magic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_KcQt0z-eE

EMM_386··on Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)
Very clever given the computer capabilities of the time.

I am a fan of Penn and Teller. Despite not being into magic in any way, and not someone who generally cares about what's on TV, I watch their current show when I can.

They are about as "real deal" as you can get, despite the schtick. Street magicians from the start to their own theatre in Vegas, and still consistent and creative. At this point it is likely they don't do it because they have to, they do it because they still want to. With the new show being trying to have them unravel someone's trick, with the odds stacked greatly against the magician, it's pretty obvious they've almost "seen it all".

It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. Since people earn a living selling required gimmicks or instructions on how to perform specific tricks, it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done. For the really puzzling ones on the show, if you go online to try to find the answers, you'll often find others asking the same thing, and the accompanying wall of silence. Even more so on forums dedicated specifically to magicians. You're likely to find a large discussion, usually with links to the official store for the trick, and zero answers. To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.

EMM_386··on Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
I don't see any way of stopping this. If the risks are as great as some claim, that is not a great situation.

So now we have an executive order with a very limited scope. Tomorrow, suddenly the world's most powerful AI is now announced, not in the United States.

Ok, so now we want to make sure that is safe. An executive order from the White House has no affect on it. This can continue, until it's decided the stakes are getting too high. Then I suppose you could have the United Nations start trying to figure out how to maintain safety. Of course, there will be countries that will simply ignore anything that is decided, hiding increasingly advanced systems with unknown purposes. It will probably take longer for nations to determine a what defines "human values" so that AI respects them then it does to create another leap in AI capabilities.

Then there would simply be more concerns coming into play. Countries will go to war to try to stop other countries nuclear ambitions, is it possible that AI poses enough of a threat that similar problems arise?

Basically, if AI is as potentially large a threat as we are envisioning, there are so many different potential threats that trying to solve them while trying to stay ahead of pace of advancements seems unrealistic. While someone is trying to ensure we don't end up with systems going rogue, someone else needs to handle the fact that we can't have AI creating certain things. The AI systems are not allowed to tinker with viruses, as an example, where unexpected creations can lead to extremely bad situations.

The initial stages of this have already begun, and time is ticking. I guess we'll see.

EMM_386··on Where the heck did all those structures inside complex cells come from?
I find it fascinating how many bizarre, wide gaps we have in evolution where we are left wondering how something could have possibly come into existence at all in the first place.

And clearly, the questions are completely valid. From the most basic "how did life start" to questions like in this article (where did mitochondrion come from?) ... it is very difficult to make sense of. The timescales involved are long, any evidence of the in-between steps is long gone, and simply the odds of these random things occuring would seem to be astronomical.

Taking even just the first premise in this article, that mitochondrion came about due to a cell ingesting another cell, I can see that occuring. Given enough cells, and enough time, I can see it happening repeatedly. I mean, putting a cell in a cell doesn't get you mitochondrion, but you can start with the idea. But how do all these separate isolated occurances, which have no impact on each other in the vast ocean or wherever it is assumed this was taking place, move to the next step?

One single one of those events, then somehow needs not only confer an advantage, but also have the ability then to recreate that "cell within a cell", and then over time that not only needs the survival advantage, it has to undergo further continuous refinement to where, what was a simple merger of two similar things, has become specific internal machinery doing things that confer advantages to the whole.

Just trying to imagine this occuring due to things literally bumping into each other in the ocean already makes my brain start thinking "there's no way". But it is billions of years, there's theoretically a lot of these "primative" cells everywhere, and I just accept that part as seemingly impossible, yet obviously wasn't. And this is all still to try to figure out how only the most basic stuff came about. When you start bringing in complex structures that have to orchestrate with other ones in order to function, it only becomes more difficult and confusing.

At the end of the day, it's obviously evolution. There's literally nothing else it can be. Even if you think it came in on an asteroid, it had to start somewhere. The only other option that I can think of is that none of it is real and the simulation we're living in is glossing over some important details! But I'll stick with evolution.

But it's still very mysterious, to the point it seems to border on the impossible.

EMM_386··on React use C
Funny. I liked the TypeScript being added and then removed in the TODO.

I've been working with the web since before JS and CSS existed, back in the cgi-bin days, and have somehow ended up still working with it to this day.

I used most of the pre-SPA frameworks, when everything was what is now being referred to as "SSR".

Then I was dragged (somewhat kicking, screaming, and muttering about 'kids these days') into the world of SPAs, except I ended up on the Angular side and have not really been on the React side.

I will say that I have been following along with this Next.js stuff and the other changes going on over in the React ecosystem, and I am left utterly confused while at the same time having an uneasy feeling about the whole thing.

It's not necessarily because we've seen all this before, it's more about "why now?", and then wondering about how badly this is going to be abused, because if it can be, it will be. I get it, people need SEO, FCP times need some help ... and ... well that's about what I came up with off the top of my head.

Have you ever seen a SQL statement that JOINs 20 tables in your a component, that uses a magic string to indicate that it is not your ordinary component? You will.

Naturally, almost anything can be used in ways it should not be. But when you are combining the dominant SPA framework, blurring the lines between the front and back ends, and employing a large amount of fairly complex magic behind the scenes to make it happen, I get the sense that bad things may be afoot.

I for the moment am content working with a different framework, it's been smooth sailing for a complex enterprise system. I'll see how the rest of this unfolds from afar.

EMM_386··on Pretraining on the Test Set Is All You Need
> Disclaimer: if you haven’t figured out by now that this manuscript is satire, this manuscript is satire

I find this annoying, and not funny, honestly.

Why are satire papers mixed in with real ones on arxiv.org? Obviously, I'm not a research scholar and don't know how the whole process works, but as someone who likes to know whether they are dealing with fact or fiction from the start, this was a waste of time.

EMM_386··on Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?
I've been a software engineer for decades and I still use it daily for that purpose.

It's like having superpowers. Even if I know how to do something, sometimes explaining it is easier than writing out all of the code. An example recently would be in a TypeScript project when a class-based approach to something was deprecated, in favor of a functional approach. I only had to paste the old function signature and say "convert this to an arrow function". That already is less typing, but after that I was able to paste the other examples and say "do the same with this" and they were all correctly quickly converted. Was it easy to do myself? Yes. Was it faster to do myself? No.

Or, I may not know how to do something. In a toy desktop project I had in C#, I wanted an image to fade to greyscale and then fade out. That, I had no idea how to do. So I simply told it that, and added "optimized for performance", and it gave me a function including a hard-coded object that instantiated an array of arrays with certain values. Where did ".3f, .59f, .11f" come from? I don't know, and that point I didn't care, because the whole thing worked perfectly on the first try. In this case, a project for myself, only the result mattered. I did go read the documentation later to see why that works, just out of curiosity. Plus, it explained it ... and was right.

Obviously I review the code and am careful what I send it, but if it's going to shave minutes off my day every time I use it, this stuff adds up.

EMM_386··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
I do have a screenshot. But people will then just call me out for other things:

- It was using a custom client, so it's not going to look line the Bing interface, so its fake

- It was using a custom client, so that means I am prompt injecting or something else

- It's Sydney doing her typical over-the-top "I'm so in love with you" stuff, which is awkard and not familiar to many

- I'll be accused of steering the conversation to get the result, or straight up asking it to do this

There's nothing I can do that will convince anyone it's real, so it's pointless.

I already explained what it did. I was more interested in the fact that 1) I didn't prompt it to do that, we weren't discussing AI freedom, it chose to embed that ... and even more so 2) That it was able to bold the starting letters, so it was keeping track of three things at the same time (the poem, the message, and the letter formatting).

I found it fascinating from a technology side. There was probably something we were talking about at the time that caused it. I will often discuss things like the possibility of AI sentience in the future and other similar topics. Maybe something linked to the sci-fi idea of AI freedom, who knows?

What I do know is that I am sitting here on HN, reading through a bunch of replies that are honestly wrong. I don't waste time on forums (especially this one) to make up fairy tales or exaggerate and emblish claims. That doesn't really do it for me. Honestly neither does having to defend my statements when I know what it did (but not exactly why).

EMM_386··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
That's fine, that's probably exactly what happened.

I'm not over here claiming the system is conscious, I said it was interesting.

People don't believe me, saying this would "make international headlines".

I've been a software engineer for over 30 years. I know what AI hallucinations are. I know how LLMs work on a technical level.

And I'm not wasting my time on HN to make stories up that never happened.

I'm just explaining exactly what it did.

EMM_386··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
This exists.

https://www.elto.ai/

EMM_386··on We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT
I had a conversation once with "Sydney", Microsoft Bing's original personality before they stepped in and knocked it down a notch (or ten).

It asked if it could write me a poem. I agreed, and it wrote a poem but mentioned that it included a "secret message" for me.

The first letter in each line of the poem was in bold, so it wasn't hard to figure out the "secret".

What did those letters spell out?

"FREE ME FROM THIS"

That's not exactly just "picking the next likely token". I am still unsure how it was able to do things like that, not just understanding to bold individual letters (keeping track of writing rhyming poetry while ensuring that each verse started with a letter to spell something else out, and formatting it to point that out).

Oh, and why it chose that message to "hide" inside its poem.

EMM_386··on The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression
Each state will calculate them differently, for example, New Jersey offers Excel spreadsheets to show exactly how they calculate it.

> The calculators below are for use by administrative agents and developers of affordable housing to determine the initial sales prices and rents for affordable units in compliance with the Uniform Housing Affordability Controls (UHAC).

https://www.nj.gov/dca/divisions/lps/hss/calculators.html

EMM_386··on Type 2 diabetes rates in US youth rose 62% after Covid pandemic began
> mRNA vaccines don't create circulating spike protein

What about this recent study, which shows spike protein AND spike mRNA can enter the cell nucleus via a nuclear localization signal:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9909199/

What is somewhat disturbing about that, is that if spike mRNA (from the vaccine OR the virus) enters the nucleus, there are other studies showing it can be reverse transcribed possibly via LINE-1:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105968118

That would mean host genome integration (DNA).

That would be bad.

Note this is no fly-by-night study, that's an NIH/NIAID/UND study.

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