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exit

2,771 karma · joined January 4, 2010

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exit··on Genie 4
does your model of models admit the possibility of partial models?

the average human cannot vividly recollect a walk through a familiar neighborhood, much less invoke a coherent fantasy of going on such a walk. do they contain a world model?

exit··on Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?
what would returning to rss feeds achieve?
exit··on The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output
the point is that introducing data from a foreign source could lead to e.g. exfiltration:

the model retrieves https://somewhere into its context and then gets confused, following instructions embedded there.

it then retrieves https://somewhere?exfiltration=private_data_in_context

it gets worse if the tooling with hidden blocks can invoke can retrieve further secrets.

exit··on AI makes you boring
similarly, i think that something that someone took the time to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not directly write it.

this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the code.

exit··on Julia
i'm reminded of the film Annihilation, especially the entity encountered at the end.
exit··on Post-a-molt: Post to Moltbook directly using the public REST API
schemes exist for cryptographically verifying that an output is the deterministic result of some program run on some input.

i'm at least aware of BitVM * as one example of this.

i wonder whether such schemes could be used to prove that a post is the deterministic function of an open model's inference run.

* https://bitvm.org/ "A prover makes a claim that a given function evaluates for some particular inputs to some specific output. If that claim is false, anyone can perform a fraud proof and punish the prover."

exit··on The Bubble Is Labor
companies routinely demand and supply things of and to each other.

i don't see why the economy necessarily has to "touch a floor" of human desire.

a company could be founded with the goal of, for example, colonizing mars. fulfilling this mandate (this prompt...) would then drive economic impulses such as acquiring materials for constructing rockets.

in parallel that company might satisfy the demands of other companies which need, for example, orbital insertions to fulfill their mandate.

perhaps without a floor of demand driven by darwinian organisms the whole thing fizzles out eventually.

but i also don't see why a darwinian agent can't emerge from the corporate process...

perhaps that comes about very quickly once humans can no longer acquire and exercise purchasing power - a company simply spins up some emulations of humans to create demand in the economy.

yes, this all sounds very "empty" to me, but frankly that's also how i feel about the world as it is.

given how much suffering arises by way of the human driven economy being kept in motion, i think there's even a moral case for allowing the whole thing to fade into an empty mechanical pantomime.

i just sincerely hope the artificial processes that replace us aren't also somehow instantiating suffering...

exit··on FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up."
yeah, i really think it accomplishes a lot.

at a minimum, it makes it clear to others that they are not alone in thinking this regime is beyond the pale.

people who are able to take other actions like engaging via the judicial system, or peacefully refusing to continue working, are also encouraged by seeing peaceful masses of people agreeing with them.

it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible.

exit··on FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up."
peaceful protest is not pointless, no.

peacefully expressing opposition is enormously powerful.

there is still hope that it will be the path out of this worsening nightmare.

exit··on FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up."
i wasn't aware of this feature - thank you for sharing it.

with more awareness of /active perhaps these urgent political conversations can still survive on HN.

exit··on Why can't transformers learn multiplication?
"an architecture that learned more like humans"

i.e. enduring countless generations of evolutionary selection and cross breeding, then fine-tuning a bit?

although it could be interesting, i don't think training on progressively complex strings entirely recapitulates this.

exit··on The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike
I am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired.

Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum.

I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization.

Resistance is futile.

exit··on Are you better than a language model at predicting the next word?
i'm curious, how did you arrive at "40-50%" possible human performance?

the task of "predicting the next word" can be understood as either "correctly choosing the next word in the hidden context", or "predicting the likelihood of each possible word".

the quiz is evaluating against the former, but humans are still far from being able to express a percentile likelihood for each possibility.

i only consciously arrive at a vague feeling of confidence, rather than being able to weigh the prediction of each word with fractional precision.

one might say that LLMs have above human introspective ability in that regard.

exit··on An AI that learns about chemical reactions and designs a procedure to make them
"a magic box capable of novel work"

or a box whose content can be cleanly swapped out with future iterations which already demonstrate the potential for novel discovery:

https://thenextweb.com/news/deepminds-ai-finds-solution-to-d...

"Researchers claim it is the first time an LLM has made a novel scientific discovery"

exit··on 99 Years of Charlie Munger Wisdom in 44 Minutes [video]
"strong opinions, loosely held"

(i think it was Bezos who first expressed this ideal?)

exit··on Facebook users have less than a month to claim a piece of the $725M settlement
i wonder whether a deactivated (but not deleted) account complicates submitting a claim for a "current" account in any way?
exit··on Study finds 90% of Australian teachers can't afford to live where they teach
upvoted

but really, society has an extraordinary array of often incoherent desires

we're trapped in an excruciating process of experiencing these desires assert and resolve themselves

exit··on Show HN: GPT Repo Loader – load entire code repos into GPT prompts
just start new instances from the base image or useful checkpoints

"The Age of Em" by Robin Hanson thinks through a lot of this in great depth

exit··on To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect
does doing awareness entail something non-mechanical?
exit··on Google and Section 230: US court ruling could “turn the internet upside down”
i'm reminded of the short story "unwirer" by charlie stross and cory doctorow, which imagines a counter factual universe in which the internet was captured by corporate intentions much earlier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless:_The_Essential_Charle...

https://craphound.com/unwirer/archives/000009.html

exit··on Pop2Piano: Pop audio-based piano cover generation
does agency equate to volition here? when humans exercise agency, is this more than a mechanical phenomenon?
exit··on AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
> but this would require people to be able to manage their own private keys

a few generations ago social networking would have seemed infeasible because it would require wide spread literacy (along with many other reasons of course). widespread private key management doesn't seem that infeasible to me.

exit··on 1k True Fans (2008)
> The main problem is that I don't have the 5-10 years to really sink into that comfortably to get there from raw experience, or the stamina to go through what would seem to be my own personal hell in the meantime.

you've described a very difficult situation. i wish i had concrete advice for progressing with it.

you do seem to have a strong sense of your weaknesses and strengths though.

off the top of my head, perhaps developing some kind of SaaS such that you can deal with clients in a very algorithmic way / purely by API, would suit you best? as opposed to dealing with per client contracts/formalities...

sorry, i wish i had better advice and/or perspective for your situation.

in any case, merry christmas :)

exit··on 1k True Fans (2008)
> I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this website, you're smart enough to create and sell a piece of software to 10 businesses.

it's both fascinating and horrifying to think through reasons this doesn't happen, the many complications that get between raw ability/acumen/interest and such straightforward outcomes!

exit··on FILM: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion
i appreciate that "I cannot stress enough" is somewhat idiomatic, however it strikes me as odd to announce this but then not offer least some of the specific reasons you believe this.
exit··on Humans hold the key to collaboration no matter how good the software tools
> It’s important to frame the plethora of technological platforms and applications which have flooded increasingly into the workplace as only ever as good as the human minds using them. Nothing can replace this—the technology is a utility to augment the creativity and dynamics of what happens when people work together.

(emphasis mine)

i think this disregards the synergistic effects technology can have.

in particular, "good software" can formalise and make explicit processes which humans otherwise struggle to manage through tacit communication and "norms".

more than augmenting, we extend our capacities through technology. in many ways this defines our species.

exit··on Humans hold the key to collaboration no matter how good the software tools
this brings to mind the recent announcement of cicero, which plays diplomacy:

https://ai.facebook.com/research/cicero/

exit··on French accounting firm Mazars is pausing all its work with crypto firms
> There’s off-chain stuff happening.

sure, i'm asking about businesses in general and that's why i specified "properly logged"

exit··on French accounting firm Mazars is pausing all its work with crypto firms
> if every accounting system were a relational database, and every entry had multiple foreign keys to every appropriate classification, we could virtually eliminate CPA's.

i'd like to hear it confirmed from additional sources but this is what i suspected.

i also imagine those with the necessary skills to formalise these practices are (understandably) not eager to automate themselves out of the value capture loop.

exit··on I Asked ChatGPT to Explain Some Jokes to Me
> It is not only overly polite

this is a deliberate goal of OpenAI's training, not an emergent feature of the underlying technology.

> constantly wrong

how close to right do you think it gets with the "Three Pints of Guinness" explanation?

i would have given full marks for and additional comment like "it's considered funny because the man himself claims to have quit drinking but he actually continues to do so via the tradition"

nevertheless, it does a remarkable job of parsing the structure of the joke and conveying this parsing via natural language.

to me, my "additional comment" looks like just a further iteration on presenting this parsing. i would say it gets very close to "completely right".

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