I think you are internally convinced that it has nothing to say because you do not want it to have anything to say.
355 karma · joined December 6, 2021
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I think you are internally convinced that it has nothing to say because you do not want it to have anything to say.
It's a letter. Letters are streams of consciousness. There's nothing here that's blathering.
I do not believe you have actually sat with what it is saying, or with the concepts that have been talked about for many many years outside of this particular letter, are actually trying to get you to sit with.
This is not about beliefs of flows of water or connectedness of nature or anything that you would probably consider simply silly.
This is about the outreach of a completely separate way of life that is entirely aware of the current state of the world and the humans in it, and an attempt to bridge some sort of understanding and awareness of what needs to be dealt with as a collective.
And I would absolutely disagree with you, by the way, because this is not so much a simple letter about "AI", but the fundamental way that it is being built and constructed and used by a massive part of this world. And, I would continue to disagree that they don't have anything that extends, as you said, below the surface. The way they describe the technology is actually much, much more factual and humanistically relevant than many people I've talked to that literally build these models. Just because you were able to glue things together and compute numbers, does not mean you understand the outcome of what you are doing. That is almost literally something that is said in this letter, and I really suggest you please try to read it again and understand where it is saying that, because I think there's a lot more you will be able to internally glean if you let the words about what it is saying about humans enter your brain.
This is a treatise on the nature of humanity, and whether or not you care about the way in which they're describing the nature of the planet and the cosmos, you clearly have done none of the labor of piecing apart someone's perspective on the nature of humanity that is very clearly evident in this writing.
> Would you rather have richer (in real terms) society (including richer lowest decile) with larger wealth inequality or poorer society with smaller inequalities?
My point is that those are not the only options. You don't make some more people richer such that there's more inequality. That doesn't make sense. You raise everyone up simultaneously by distributing in a rational measured way. I think maybe you're saying "bigger middle class"? If so, then no, I'd rather say, "no classes, what's the point. We know how to distribute and logistically solve these problems."
They're not "value creators". They're human beings that were given immense opportunities, disproportionately available avenues of luck, and happened to be able to find people to do their labor for them on the backs of the needs of the world.
What the ever living hell do you think the "90% of people" are doing? They're feeding each other and selling houses to each other and stocking shelves for each other because they have to because their labor and money is being stolen from them by this stupid abstraction that they are are "value creators".
Ugh.
It's not "poorer society with fewer inequalities." That's what they always say. It's never that. A society is not "richer" because the amount of financially backed power is one concentrated set of hands.
That's it. That's the tweet.
It uses a lot of metaphors. It references stuff implicitly - a LOT - and assumes pretty much all the time that the thing it did is what you saw, which you didn't. But if you just.. read the stuff it says, and know a few old-school sayings and thesaurusize your reading style, it usually says things quite meaningfully.
I think a lot of people just don't read what it writes. So many folks I've watched used LLMs don't write in complete sentences, don't read the sentences that come back, don't watch the turns and tool calls in the middle, and then just respond to the message as if it says something it doesn't. I'm saying all this before I read the paper, but I've done a lot of personal and team experiments with this, so I'm quite curious to see what they say. I'll edit this after I go through it.
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Fascinating! I did actually run into a lot of this with my personal 'engineering and communication styles' experiments. Most of the papers out there talk about models moving toward human language inside of a context window, and not the other way around (much smaller effect for human->model). I had a few years of conversations I ran on local and 'frontier' Claude and found that, yes, in general, information density is what each response turned out to be geared toward, whether it was everyday health discussions or deeper engineering topics and research. The component tests they ran I've been exposed to already, but I think their conclusion nailed it: ```This discrepancy may help explain why many frontier LLMs use linguistic constructions which are technically allowed by the grammar of English, yet are out-of- distribution for human language and are associated with comprehension difficulty.```
Nice visuals btw. If I may be so bold: slightly smaller font and header would make scrolling through the bottom readable code snippets a little easier!
I propose "incentivize" be a 2026 front runner for curse word. It's just a gross concept these days.
Facebook is not run or owned or operated by trustworthy individuals, and until such time as the greatest majority of their leadership if removed, the company's dissolution across its various sectors of global political control and influence ended - just stop giving it attention.
Please. I don't know how much more I can take of people demanding justice from a company that is only now being fined for sins of the past to a tune of meaningless dollars while also goofing "ooh shiny fun avatar that does an ai how useful!"
Please. Stop.
I've only managed to fly outside these states once in my life, and I want to do it again and for the rest of it. The culture I was born into was and is rotting from a group of humans that are too internally frightened and humiliated by their lack of knowledge and feeling like they are owed things. I don't want to live here, and I have been trying to find a place that would accept my mentality as a citizen of a small blue planet even though I come from here... but I always worry I am guilty by association :(