Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

---

Read more

Posts

10

Comments

321

Joined

2 yr. ago

The way many of the popular rat blogs started to endorse Harris in the last second before the US election felt a lot like an attempt at plausible deniability.

This reference stirred up some neurons that really hadn't moved in a while, thanks.

I think the author is just honestly trying to equivocate freezing shrimps with torturing weirdly specifically disabled babies and senile adults medieval style. If you said you'd pledge like 17$ to shrimp welfare for every terminated pregnancy I'm sure they'd be perfectly fine with it.

I happened upon a thread in the EA forums started by someone who was trying to argue EAs into taking a more forced-birth position and what it came down to was that it wouldn't be as efficient as using the same resources to advocate for animal welfare, due to some perceived human/chicken embryo exchange rate.

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

wat

This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesn't crumble.

Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.

Dog, you've lost the plot.

FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.

No shot is over two seconds, because AI video can’t keep it together longer than that. Animals and snowmen visibly warp their proportions even over that short time. The trucks’ wheels don’t actually move. You’ll see more wrong with the ad the more you look.

Not to mention the weird AI lighting that makes everything look fake and unnatural even in the ad's dreamlike context, and also that it's the most generic and uninspired shit imaginable.

His overall point appears to be that a city fully optimized for self-driving cars would be a hellscape at ground level, even allowing for fewer accidents, so no real reason to belabor that point, which is mostly made in service to pointing out how dumb it is when your solution to reducing accident rates is "buy a new car" instead of anything systemic. like improving mass transit.

If you've convinced yourself that you'll mostly be fighting the AIs of a rival always-chaotic-evil alien species or their outgroup equivalent, you probably think they are.

Otherwise shooting first and asking questions later will probably continue to be frowned upon in polite society even if it's automated agents doing the shooting.

The job site decided to recommend me an article calling for the removal of most human oversight from military AI on grounds of inefficiency, which is a pressing issue since apparently we're already living in the Culture.

The Strategic Liability of Human Oversight in AI-Driven Military Operations

Conclusion

As AI technology advances, human oversight in military operations, though rooted in ethics and legality, may emerge as a strategic liability in future AI-dominated warfare.

Oh unknowable genie of the sketchily curated datasets Claude, come up with an optimal ratio of civilian to enemy combatant deaths that will allow us to bomb that building with the giant red cross that you labeled an enemy stronghold.

Maybe Momoa's PR agency forgot to send an appropriate tribute to Alphabet this month.

I could go over Wolfram's discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who've had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.

Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.

Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.

As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it's F9 on firefox.

This was exactly what I had in mind but for the life of me I can't remember the title.

why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest

I'm thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.

I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it's the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.

It had dumb scientists, a weird love conquers all theme, a bathetic climax that was also on the wrong side of believable and an extremely tacked on epilogue.

Wouldn't say that I hated it, but it was pretty flawed for what it was. magnificent black hole cgi notwithstanding.

Summizing Emails is a valid purpose.

Or it would have been if LLMs were sufficiently dependable anyway.

But “It’s Greek to me” goes right back to the Romans.

The wiki seems to say the aphorism originates with medieval scribes and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The actual ancient Romans are unlikely to have had such qualms, since at the time Greek was much more widely understood than Latin, so much so that many important roman works like Caesar's Memoirs and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were originally written in Greek, with the Latin versions being translations.

You’d think AI companies would have wised up by this point and gone through all their pre-recorded demos with a fine comb so that marks users at least make it past the homepage, but I guess not.

The target group for their pitch probably isn't people who have a solid grasp of coding, I'd bet quite the opposite.

On each step, one part of the model applies reinforcement learning, with the other one (the model outputting stuff) “rewarded” or “punished” based on the perceived correctness of their progress (the steps in its “reasoning”), and altering its strategies when punished. This is different to how other Large Language Models work in the sense that the model is generating outputs then looking back at them, then ignoring or approving “good” steps to get to an answer, rather than just generating one and saying “here ya go.”

Every time I've read how chain-of-thought works in o1 it's been completely different, and I'm still not sure I understand what's supposed to be going on. Apparently you get a strike notice if you try too hard to find out how the chain-of-thinking process goes, so one might be tempted to assume it's something that's readily replicable by the competition (and they need to prevent that as long as they can) instead of any sort of notably important breakthrough.

From the detailed o1 system card pdf linked in the article:

According to these evaluations, o1-preview hallucinates less frequently than GPT-4o, and o1-mini hallucinates less frequently than GPT-4o-mini. However, we have received anecdotal feedback that o1-preview and o1-mini tend to hallucinate more than GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. More work is needed to understand hallucinations holistically, particularly in domains not covered by our evaluations (e.g., chemistry). Additionally, red teamers have noted that o1-preview is more convincing in certain domains than GPT-4o given that it generates more detailed answers. This potentially increases the risk of people trusting and relying more on hallucinated generation.

Ballsy to just admit your hallucination benchmarks might be worthless.

The newsletter also mentions that the price for output tokens has quadrupled compared to the previous newest model, but the awesome part is, remember all that behind-the-scenes self-prompting that's going on while it arrives to an answer? Even though you're not allowed to see them, according to Ed Zitron you sure as hell are paying for them (i.e. they spend output tokens) which is hilarious if true.

"When asked about buggy AI [code], a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”

Strong they cut all my deadlines in half and gave me an OpenAI API key, so fuck it energy.

He stressed that this is not from want of care on the developer’s part but rather a lack of interest in “copy-editing code” on top of quality control processes being unprepared for the speed of AI adoption.

You don't say.