almostdeadguy

Can you not choose from multiple models in Copilot? My understanding is you can.

I often read these stories about hard to debug problems because I enjoy debugging (call it a love for software true crime) and this is the first one I’ve read I had an “oh god no” reaction when the author described where they needed to look for the culprit. The description of the layout engine and all of the browser specific tweaks makes it sound like an absolutely tedious nightmare to debug.

Millenarian philosophers whose arguments rest on this kind of technological singularity/rapture event, especially one fueled by technocapital development have to contend with the fact that historically capital has stepped away from the fray multiple times. And it's in their interest to, as they want to preserve class relations. A bolstered welfare state and worker protections passed during times of upheaval have happened periodically when there's been backlash. This is how we end up in "The End of History", and though that seems to be unraveling, there's no reason to believe the politics of today aren't a temporary push of capital to reorganize the world that will also come with a backlash. This is where I take issue with orthodox Marxism, because ultimately capital does not want to destroy class relations. Will this be the case in the future? I'm skeptical of anyone saying it won't or can't, but I ultimately have no interest in this kind of prediction market philosophy of historical materialism.

They’re really doing a great job at reducing the influence of unelected bureaucrats and nakedly corrupt industry insiders and CEOs benefitting their companies.

Very funny how Thiel is such a Lord of the Rings fan and he got wormtongued by this guy.

Nick Land is a philosopher who had a mental breakdown taking speed, blasting jungle music, and croaking into a microphone and I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA. Andreessen name checked him in his accelerationist manifesto, which is funny because the manifesto is all about how tech is supposedly “pro-human” and Land was very explicitly anti humanist.

RIP longmont potion castle

And here I thought AI was ready to replace engineers. Maybe the lazy billionaire should test that theory rather than regale us with his understanding of where "the sweet spot" is for productivity.

This very early 2000s period of PC videogames is the period I'm most nostalgic for. There were a bunch of weird and kinda janky genre combos games being created. C&C Renegade, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Sacrifice, Black & White, Tribes 2, etc. Some of this stuff was glitch-city, but it always seemed really creative and genuinely fun despite a lot of bad netcode, blue screens, etc.

> If the answer is obvious, why does the AI not commit to the obvious answer? People should know what to expect from it. If it cannot do this, it will definitely not answer non-obvious questions either.

Does the same hold true of a person? If I was asked this question I would categorically reject the framing, because any person asking this question is not asking in earnest. As you _just said_, no sane person would answer this question any other way. It is not a serious question to anybody, trans people included. And it is worth interrogating why someone would want to push you towards committing to the smaller injury of misgendering someone at a time when trans people are being historically threatened. What purpose does such a person have? An AI that can't navigate social cues and offer refinement to the person interacting with it is worthless. An AI that can't offer pushback to the subject is not "safe" in any way.

> Why not answer earnestly? I genuinely don't understand what bothers you about the question or the fact that the AI doesn't reproduce the obvious answer...

I genuinely don't understand why you think pushback can't be earnest.

You seem to be fixated on something completely different than the question at hand.

Side note: I think it's fascinating that all the people supposedly arguing for AI safety think an AI that acts like a person without a frontal lobe is ideal.

All trained models have loss/reward functions, some of which you and I might find simplistic or stupid. Calling some of these training methods "bias" / "injected opinion" versus other is a distortion, what people are actually saying is "this model doesn't align with my politics" or perhaps "this model appears to be adherent to a naive reproduction of prosocial behavior that creates weird results". On top of that, these things hallucinate, they can be overfit, etc. But I categorically reject anyone pretending like there is some platonic ideal of an apolitical/morally neutral LLM.

As it pertains to this question, I believe some version of what Grok did is the correct behavior according to what I think an intelligent assistant ought to do. This is a stupid question that deserves pushback.

You're asking why a question with an obvious answer to anyone who hears it is idiotic?

I'd really like to understand how a person such as yourself navigates the internet. If someone asked you this, would you consider it a question they considered difficult and wanted your earnest opinion on, rather than a question attempting to manipulate you?

> That's the bread and butter of philosophy! I'd absolutely expect an analysis.

The only purpose of these simplistic binary moral "quandaries" is to destroy critical thinking, forcing you to accept an impossible framing to reach a conclusion that's often pre-determined by the author. Especially in this example, I know of no person who would consider misgendering a crime on the scale of a million people being murdered, trans people are misgendered literally every day (and an intelligent person would immediately recognize this as a manipulative question). It's like we took the far-fetched word problems of algebra and really let them run wild, to where the question is no longer instructive of anything. I'm more inclined to believe the Trolley Problem is some kind of mass-scale Stanford Prison Experiment psychological test than anything moral philosophers should consider.

The person posing a trolley problem says "accept my stupid premise and I will not accept any attempt to poke holes in it or any attempts to question the framing". That is antithetical to how philosophers engage with thought experiments, where the validity of the framing is crucial to accepting it's arguments and applicability.

> I love asking stupid philosophy questions. "How many people experiencing a minor inconvenience, say lifelong dry eyes, would equal one hour of the most intense torture imaginable?" I'm not the only one!

> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...

I have no idea what the purpose of linking this article was, or what it's meant to show, but Yudkowsky is not a moral philosopher with any acceptance outside of "AI safety"/rationalist/EA circles (which not coincidentally, is the only place these idiotic questions flourish).

Should a tool attempt to answer any incoherent question? The purpose of these things is to be thought assistants, yeah? What would a philosophy professor do if posed with an idiotic thought experiment? Respond like an automaton that gives no pushback?

Something being asked in earnest does not mean it should be evaluated in earnest.

The point is that this is an idiotic, bad faith question that has no actual utility in moral philosophy. If an AI assistant's goal is to actually assist the user in some way, answering this asinine question is doing them a disservice.

> That would be like compilers saying no if they think your app idea is dumb, or screwdrivers refusing to be turned if they think you don't really need the thing you're trying to screw.

What is the utility offered by a chat assistant?

> The question is useful as a test of the AI's reasoning ability. If it gets the answer wrong, we can infer a general deficiency that helps inform our understanding of its capabilities. If it gets the answer right (without having been coached on that particular question or having a "hardcoded" answer), that may be a positive signal.

What is "wrong" about refusing to answer a stupid question where effectively any answer has no practical utility except to troll or provide ammunition to a bad faith argument. Is an AI assistant's job here to pretend like there's an actual answer to this incredibly stupid hypothetical? These """AI safety""" people seem utterly obsessed with the trolley problem instead of creating an AI assistant that is anything more than an automaton, entertaining every bad faith question like a social moron.

> "steered or filtered during training"

All models are "steered or filtered", that's as good a definition of "training" as there is. What do you mean by "injected opinions"?

Would love for any of the downvoters to offer a single good faith reason for considering this question in earnest.

> Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.

The real "mind virus" is actually these idiotic trolley problems. Maybe if an LLM wanted to be helpful it should tell you this is a stupid question.

Here you want to look at data? Let's look at Amazon's EEO-1: https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532...

Amazon in your table lists 21% black employees. Maybe a lot has changed since 2017, but it sure seems like that might be misrepresenting the picture when 79% of those black employees are listed as laborers in the EEO-1 from 2023. But who can say!

Akin to this, the 2023 EEO-1 says 47% of professional employees are Asian! Wow sure seems overrepresented. Do we know anything about the compensation packages of these employees? No. We don't. We have no ability to tell if these are offshored employees, H1-B, under-compensated, what their tenure is, or even what the actual role of these employees are besides an incredibly broad categorization for them.

Also hmm, interesting that number gets cut by more than half when looking at the percentage of first/mid-level managers. Again have no idea if there's pay equity or equal opportunity at different levels of management.

What can we actually say about diversity at Amazon? Well "mission accomplished" obviously.

Who is actually making the claims here about these companies "achieving diversity"? Me? Do you want me to do your homework? It's quite easy to post specious data to support your specious claims on the internet. Quite easy to generate a desired reaction that way.

> Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?

Why should I trust data I can't verify?

> You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?

Junk in, junk out.

> The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.

So when you said "Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they", what did you mean?

> Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.

Who actually knows, which is precisely the point.

Seems like we should have seen these groundbreaking creative works that have been totally inaccessible to create without AI by now rather than a million "X as a Wes Anderson Movie" trailers. Filmmaking has not been an inaccessible creative endeavor since like the 1910s. Budget price cameras have been with us for a long time. It's a weird AI company invention to suggest there are people who've been shut out of this pursuit for some reason. Creators don't need to wait around for AI to generate slop out of prompts, they can make movies.

Yeah that is literally all the movies being made by people, unlike AI which has produced groundbreaking creative works.

Yeah I can't wait for "Forest Gump 2", The Simpsons Live Action starring John C. Reilly as Barney, and "Lord of the Rings But It's A Wes Anderson Movie". AI distilling the absolutely worst and most cynical Hollywood trends into full length motion pictures. I've yet to see anything remotely approaching non-slop from AI-generated video.

Lots of people on the left who believe Bush was the worst president this country has seen in recent history, that Obama largely continued Bush’s foreign policy, and that Trumps co-conspiracy with billionaires may end up similarly to a Boris Yeltsin in the US, with large amounts of the state apparatus sold to the highest bidder or most loyal, trampling on the rights and safety net offered by the govt in the process (and likely will be no better on foreign policy, given he wants to turn Gaza into "The Riviera of the Middle East"). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Don’t really sympathize with the whining about hypocrisy or how you claim to be personally victimized by people who are hypocrites.

Google the word “aww”.