Yes. And chat outputs normally include footnoted links to sources, so clicking a link produced by Sydney/Bing would be normal and expected user behavior.
67 karma · joined February 13, 2017
Edit: If you could guarantee that whatever index Sydney/Bing can access will never index a url (e.g. if you knew Bing respected noindex) then you could strengthen the test by inputting the same url to Sydney/Bing after the amount of time you'd expect the crawler to hit your new url. If Sidney/Bing never sees that url then it seems more likely that can't see anything the crawler hasn't already hit (and hence indexed and hence accessible w/o Sydney-initiated GET).
(MSFT probably thought of this, so I'm probably worried about nothing.)
But I don't know if Bing (or whatever index Sydney/Bing can access) respects noindex and don't know how else to try to guarantee the index Sydney/Bing can access will not have crawled any url.
Doesn't this mean Sydney can already alter the 'outside' (non-bing.com) world?
Sure, anything can issue http GETs -- doing this not a super power. And sure, Roy Fielding would get mad at you if your web service mutated anything (other than whatever the web service has to physically do in order to respond) in response to a GET. But plenty of APIs do this. And there are plenty of http GET exploits available public database (just do a CVE search) -- which Sydney can read.
So okay fine say Sydney is "just" a 'stochastically parroting a h4xx0rr'. But...who cares if the poisonous GET was actually issued to some actual machine somewhere on the web?
(I can't imagine how any LLM wrapper could build in an 'override rule' like 'no non-bing.com requests when you are sufficiently [simulating an animate being who is] pissed off'. But I'm way not expert in LLMs or GPT or transformers in general.)
In these situations, certain 'core' parts of the code quickly become the only accurate spec. (Whether or not it's worth updating the spec docs is a management decision. But the test scripts will pass if the code is correct, and under sufficient time and money pressure etc..) Other developers then treat these 'core' parts of the code (usually some fairly high-level classes, but usually something more concrete than an interface) as the true documentation of the business requirements. If the company respects developers enough, this means that the developers that worked on those 'core' bits of code are also treated as domain experts in future business discussions.
On the purely technical side: sheesh, how much heat is generated by horrifyingly algorithmically inefficient or vastly I/O-wasteful or just redundant design (for instance religious/unnecessary use of immediate-mode GUI) -- stuff that quite possibly the IT managers don't care about at all (because of e.g. cheap horizontal scaling and inadequate measures of software project success)? The heat is bad for ecological reasons (locally at least), but also intrinsically (why are you destroying information, O Information Worker?? -- and again e.g. Toffoli gates fix this only locally). Based on code I've seen and, sadly, written (laziness, time pressure and all that) -- there must be many, many orders of magnitude of unnecessary heat/information-destruction happening because of purely technical decisions that on-the-ground developers (not even architects/designers, I mean the people that write the stuff that gets compiled/interpreted) make. @OP if you know some way of measuring this I'd love to hear more.
This makes for a larger intersection of inputs to the copypasta that produce outputs that are expected by the blogpost/googling developer and inputs to the copypasta that produce outputs that are generated at non-prod runtime.
When you don't quickly see what's semantically wrong with the code (the problem mismatch) because you pasted it and it just worked (maybe with a few small tweaks), then you quickly forget about it and black-box the snippet in your head. Then, when input space gets real-world and things break, because the copypasta never had much cognitive gravity (because you didn't think much about it), it doesn't attract log dump elements in your log-scanning brain as much as stuff you had to think through yourself does.
I guess you could automate some static checks for this by some massive trawl of snippets from a few websites (at least popular SO posts in the same language?) and finding verbatim matches in your codebase. Sounds massively impractical to do this at scale though. Does anyone know tools that do this?
The article doesn't press this point very hard, but I take the central argument to be in favor of 'systematically approach[ing] problems [of the sort that debugging instantiates]' which is just as much 'academy' as 'industry'.
(2) The 'reduction of collective intelligence to the price mechanism' objection (which is often a specific case of generic objections to dimensional reduction, including e.g. perceptron thresholds) is addressed throughout Minsky's Society of Mind[0], esp. the 'frames' concept.
(3) The article doesn't mention the benefits of localized knowledge (as opposed to the 'practical reality' of localized knowledge, which may be lamentable and/or fixable), which iirc Hayek does get into (or maybe some other Hayekians? more modern systems-oriented folks? can't think of a source at the moment). If some knowledge (for example, within a community of practice) weren't pretty strongly localized, then every knowable would be in one truly global variable space, and abstraction would be incredibly computation-intensive, and knowledge growth would be horribly O(n!), and all of thought would work like JavaScript (ZING). This is a stronger kind of localization than technical specialization (which just maps onto SOLID class design rather than variable space).[1]
[0] Beautiful html edition: http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/ [1] Broad philosophical musing on this sort of thing: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bubbles
Obligatory 'zoomout' recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-V..., which I learned about from HN (http://hackernewsbooks.com/book/mathematics-its-content-meth...). Wish I had read/pondered this before grad math classes.