strbean

> Did you know if you ask <X> a question and it doesn't know the answer, sometimes it just makes something up?!

I think maybe a lot of us live in a bubble where the above statement is less frequently true of our peers than average.

They don't need to host the data for systems they develop to be subject to a national security letter.

> Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here.

"Corporation says they aren't doing a bad thing so any assertion to the contrary is crazy."

Corporations actually tend to lie when they are engaged in illegal or repugnant behavior.

> The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure,

The leadership of those corporations aren't publicly supporting the dissolution of democracy to impose neo-feudalism, so that's a big difference.

To quote:

> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

- Peter Thiel

These are the worst. I'm fine with you dumping your own half formed thoughts into an LLM, getting something reasonably structured out, and then rewriting that in your own voice, elaborating, etc.

But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.

> Based on recent 2023-2024 data, the average CEO-to-employee pay ratio at major Japanese corporations is roughly 12:1 to 20:1, significantly lower than the 200:1–300:1 ratios seen in the U.S..

In most cases, you can't evade liability for negligence that results in personal injury. You can usually disclaim away liability for other types of damage caused by negligence.

Liquidating shares over some fixed interval (1 year?) would be one option.

Scanning https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/real-id/ I'm not sure there is a single state that provides ID without a fee of some sort, across the board.

> IBM estimated in 1996 that one error per month per 256 MiB of RAM was expected for a desktop computer.

From the wikipedia article on "Soft error", if anyone wants to extrapolate.

Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016 until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a massive upswing.

> as LLMs have not produced an entirely new and more advanced model of physics.

That's a bar that only a handful of humans have met in the entirety of history.

"Adding the abbreviation 'AI' to my marketing for online courses for making millions making marketing for online courses made me millions!"

If I understand correctly, message roles are implemented using specially injected tokens (that cannot be generated by normal tokenization). This seems like it could be a useful tool in limiting some types of prompt injection. We usually have a User role to represent user input, how about an Untrusted-Third-Party role that gets slapped on any external content pulled in by the agent? Of course, we'd still be reliant on training to tell it not to do what Untrusted-Third-Party says, but it seems like it could provide some level of defense.

That's not fixing the bug, that's deleting features.

Users want the agent to be able to run curl to an arbitrary domain when they ask it to (directly or indirectly). They don't want the agent to do it when some external input maliciously tries to get the agent to do it.

That's not trivial at all.

Pretty sure there was a whole era where people were doing this with public domain works, as well as works generated by Markov chains spitting out barely-plausible-at-first-glance spaghetti. I think that well started to dry up before LLMs even hit the scene.

I wonder what impact those plastic bits used to attach tags to clothing have on durability. Woven/knit products kind of have a countdown that starts when threads break, and those tags tend to mean your clothing already has broken threads right from the store.

I really like the look of those unbleached + un-dyed shirts, but Unbleached Apparel and Industry of All Nations don't seem to have tall sizes :(

If you were never a smoker, hopefully your mucociliary escalator can deal with all the lint you inhaled!

So, based on the source of "Trust me bro.", we'll decide this open question about new technology and the nature of cognition is solved. Seems unproductive.

> We already know X is categorically false because we know how LLMs are programmed, and not a single line of that programming pertains to thinking (thinking in the human sense, not "thinking" in the LLM sense which merely uses an anthromorphized analogy to describe a script that feeds back multiple prompts before getting the final prompt output to present to the user).

Could you elucidate me on the process of human thought, and point out the differences between that and a probabilistic prediction engine?

I see this argument all over the place, but "how do humans think" is never described. It is always left as a black box with something magical (presumably a soul or some other metaphysical substance) inside.

> Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog.

This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.

> And no, the "brain is a computer" is not a scientific description, it's a metaphor.

Disagree. A brain is turing complete, no? Isn't that the definition of a computer? Sure, it may be reductive to say "the brain is just a computer".

You realize parent said "This would be an interesting way to test proposition X" and you responded with "X is false because I say say", right?

This may be sampling bias as well. Having parents with the means, willingness, and involvement to do this is probably a strong predictor of success already.

> The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth.

Weren't those better before ads got involved?

> Web rings were a thing

Aren't those literally word of mouth?

> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.

That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.

How dare the US government, which executes people, tell me that I don't get to murder at will? Where is their moral high ground? /s

Bring back Google Wave!

They could have been Slack if they didn't transmogrify it into a social media platform (Google+) and then throw out the baby with the bathwater when it failed.

Is this specific to mobile?

Feels like this could be a riff on Android's 'Share' functionality, which is actually the user-friendly name for "send an Intent". And that means that any inter-app handling ends up stuffed into a "Share" menu that pretends only social media apps exist. So you do "Share -> Edit with Photoshop" or similar.

Distributed ledger! /s... ?

Curious if you have a specific use case for sandboxed JS that you would share?