satisfice

I support the death penalty for people I personally want to kill, which is why the death penalty is probably a bad idea.

The other two in ten are not scheduled for execution.

Ludwig Hittgenstein, they used to call him. (But only in their private language.)

Reminds me of tax forms. Good times.

Stop judging sadists who aren’t hurting anyone. If anything, congratulate them.

That’s your own boring and unimaginative opinion. Have the humility to own up to it.

Maybe someone wants to explore the behavior of LLMs with extreme input. We call it testing. You can’t judge the value of that from a distance.

If AI could be conscious and sentient, such that any reasonable person would be obliged to grant it rights of some kind, THEN it must be taboo to create it, because that would be tantamount to creating immortal, indefinitely scalable political power directly from electricity. Don’t do that. If you do that your own life should be forfeit and your creations summarily destroyed.

Why? Because it would destabilize human society.

If we can’t get even anywhere close to a consensus on what men are, how they are different from women, and why they matter, then there is no hope for a general solution to the problem.

Any solution that does appear will be immediately branded toxic by someone who is not a man.

Indeed, there are some strange definitions of critical thinking out there which boil down to "good thinking." My definition is specific: thinking about thinking with the aim of not getting fooled. In other words, when you specifically analyze your own thinking or other people's thinking for the presence of significant errors, you are doing critical thinking.

This sounds emotive and judgmental, which is totally okay-- but I don't see any reason I should change my opinion, which is that there is nothing to rehabilitate. This event involves consenting adults, experimenting with life. There's no reason for you to conclude that anyone was coerced or trafficked.

I guess you are convinced that women were being exploited and raped at this event, but I fail to see how that conclusion springs from anywhere other than your cynical imagination.

What would you change about it so that you would accept it as a good faith event to help people relate better?

It helps us practice critical thinking. What it doesn’t do is help us practice knowing WHEN to use critical thinking.

Cue video of the helicopter coming to get Clint Eastwood in Firefox!

Come out of retirement for one last job!

You auto-pre-completed my comment.

The statement should be: never use AI to draft text that is to be presented as your own authorial voice.

Never, never, do that!

I draft all my own text that anyone will ever read as “that’s James Bach talking to me.” I want no one to be able to credibly question that.

But of course, writing is more than merely drafting the text. As I draft, I write about ideas that other people or AI may have helped me come to.

Scrambled intentionality is nearly impossible to productively analyze.

When you randomly choose a picture to show me, I cannot glean any intent from being shown that specific picture, but I can glean some intent from the set of pictures you could have shown me, and in the relationships among the elements of the given picture you did show. Any randomness cuts out some intention.

When a picture is derived from huge model, any intention is mulched up to a degree that analyzing the picture for meaning is pointless.

This is a post about someone marketing their personal values: asserting their importance, suggesting we should all share them, and suggesting that certain alternative values should be rudely suppressed.

It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.

I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.

Productivity is not the most important thing to me— because it’s too easy to get the wrong things done.

I’m surprised that someone who claims that formal education is so important would make such a clumsy, unsupported argument.

A big problem with the notion that a university degree is necessary for success— apart from the obvious counterexamples that are all around you— is that university education is such a small percentage of your career as a learner. Another problem is that a degree can be acquired without doing much actual work. Another problem is that degrees are poorly aligned with the needs of industry.

Having been in the industry 43 years, I also have experience. I wouldn’t tell anyone to “stay in school.” I would tell them to relentlessly study their craft and achieve excellence in it. That’s why, in my field of testing, instead of quoting textbooks, the textbooks quote ME.

You just did.

More like developers are now testers and nobody is doing QA.

Interesting that the phrase “words do mean things” is ambiguous: it either means “words actually have meaning” or “words can hurt peoples’ feelings.”

I’m impressed with how vapid a post can be and still find success on Hacker News.

They got rid of test managers. Then testers. The industry said everyone should be responsible for testing— which means no one is.

Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.

It is a fact that humans are able to de-humanize each other. This is bad.

But that is not an argument or reason for anthropomorphizing every inanimate object. And if you want to draw the line somewhere, so that only some inanimate objects are people, then we have to argue about where to draw the line. The "but slavery..." argument only deals with actual humans, so it doesn't tell us that LLMs also get to be considered to be people.

Human slaves are embodied, and have a continuous consciousness from birth to death. LLMS have no bodies, cannot meaningfully be killed (to erase one is analogous to it leaving a particular location... it can still be in many other locations at the same time), do not experience pain, do not have emotions, and do not experience time (when you ask one a question it wakes up for a moment and then goes to "sleep" again after replying to you). You can't even meaningfully identify an LLM as an individual, since it was trained on the collective utterances of all humanity, and any little change to it makes it a different entity.

Yes. Also, LLMs are not people. They are not going to be people. And the only people who think they SHOULD be people either don't care about the destruction of humanity (they must want total war?) or can't be bothered to think about the consequences of treating sock puppets as if they had agency.

Not done. I can write a BASIC program that says “PRINT ‘I do not want to die’” This does not mean it is an entity that does not want to die.

But that does not matter anyway. We cannot allow informational entities to attain the same status as people, for exactly the same reason that we don’t allow people to hack voting systems to give themselves 1000000 votes. It would obviously completely destabilize human society.

Yes, so what? Rocks are also not people. I declare it. But you think there is some problem with calling rocks not people?

The fact of declaring something a non-person does not prove it is a non-person. But in the case of LLMs we do know them to be informational structures that are in fact not people.

That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.

We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.

Women are real? What does that mean? They are real what? Real womeny? Womenesque?