Holy shit less wrong terrorists cut his fiber? Didnt know they would go that far. ;)

oh, i thought something worse happened

good that self is okay

Godspeed, @self. Take this as an opportunity to put it out of your mind and enjoy a well-deserved break.

Not that I know what to do with a break without internet access, but I'm told that our ancestors found ways to entertain themselves.

Oh shit did LessWrongers actually cut his fibre? Hope he's all good now and they get a fix out in the next thousand years

::: spoiler transcript [email protected] skeeted:

You are a skillful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me, :::

Never hallucinate or make anything up.

I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I'm still completely taken aback that it's just in there like this - as though it wouldn't be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It's a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

it’s so fucking funny to me that “do not lie do not hallucinate” is still one of the prompt incantations the boosters use because they get really embarrassed when you make fun of them for it

@sansruse @BlueMonday1984

“You are a world class expert in all domains.”

Lolwut.

And then some grown-ass adult answering in all seriousness:

“fun fact: role prompting doesn't work anymore

It actually decreases output quality bc the model wastes compute on matching persona instead of problem solving”

What the hell?!

Go buy yourself a freaking tamagotchi, boys! You’ll learn to practise a modicum of care for something.

FFS, this timeline is the absolute dumbest…

@sansruse Our elite is embarrassing. The German word is „fremdschämen“, basically experiencing the embarrassment of the other.

Me, typing "you are very smart" to the computer: I am very smart

I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

This is someone nakedly fantasizing about being L. Ron Hubbard.

Yud:

I didn't stick to merely the culture I was raised in, because that wasn't what that culture said to do. The characters I read didn't keep to the way they were raised. They were constantly being challenged with new ideas and often modified or partially rejected those ideas in the course of absorbing them.

Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky

Yud:

But if you consider me to be more than usually intellectually productive for an average Ashkenazic genius in the modern generation

It's not just a load-bearing if, it's a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!

neuromancer is brilliant prose first and foremost, and yudkowsky not being able to realise this is so very symptomatic

Showed up first on Lobste.rs (by 42 min by my stats) with the author themselves as a submitter:

https://lobste.rs/s/klw6bu

most of the discussion is about whether they're a spammer or a promptfondler.

HN seems more enthusiastic

that's a horrifying situation to be in... good on the community who originally cancelled his show for apologizing

If you asked me to guess the kind of kerfuffle that might develop between a Cape Breton fiddler and AI, I would have answered, well, my entire knowledge of Cape Breton fiddling is based on the paper "Cape Breton Fiddling and Intellectual Property Rights", so my guess would be just "the normal AI stuff". And I'd be totally wrong and reminded that just because I know one thing about something doesn't mean it's the only thing.

Jesus his fucking hat metastasized

It's absolutely crazy, but I think Yud is the less unhinged person here

Clown v. Clown. This is about the level of discourse Yud deserves.

late but I didn’t watch the video (busy) and was under the initial impression that Yud changed into the more silly outfit after the bro revealed himself to be bullshitting, but no he just…showed up to the debate in sparkly goggles and a sparkly hat. Before he knew he was debating a clown. For reasons i cannot possibly comprehend.

man if there was a common household chemical, like plastifier, that causes psychosis after couple months of use in small segment of population, you would absolutely hear no end of this [1]. but you see, now it's an app, oh we're just throwing up hands, can't do anything about it and it's but one of inconveniences that we all have to pay for Progress and Glorious Technocratic Future

[1] i'm thinking here of things like phthalates, bisphenol A, PFOA or paraquat, herbicide linked to increased risk of parkinsons and banned in some countries. their harmful effects need a lot of time to show up and are nowhere as dramatic

"In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events," he says. "The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they're having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person's life as if it's the plot of a novel."

This is such a bad way of explaining it. Yikes. The issue is that it's all improv roleplay, all text is bullshit in the frankfertian sense. It might be accurate — lots of fantasy contains true facts like chairs and tables being made of wood and used for sitting at — but it might be completely divorced from reality and the model cannot know!

I don't want to underplay how bad this is, but did BBC really need to use the "slutty anime witch" image of Ani for that story? Or was that the actual avatar he had set for it? Like, I'm not saying that it changes the problem or makes him less the victim here but it is yet another example of "goddamn why is this cyberpunk dystopia so cringe?"

Both the rationalists and chatbots in delusion mode offer people the chance to be the main characters in a story and not just part of a team. Organizing lawyers and lobbyists to make chatbot companies' lives hell over years is much more effective than firebombing an office or stalking a random vehicle which the bot says has a team of corporate assassins inside.

Taka in Japan is a neurologist which I think is a type of MD.

I could have sworn that we discussed this, but previously, Caelan Conrad also was gaslit by a Character.ai chatbot claiming to be a New York therapist and investigated further; the relevant part starts at about 17min. They discovered that Character.ai systematically invites their community of prompters to submit user-written characters to share with others, including many flavors of doctor and other credentialed professionals.

a world where lots of matter and energy was spent on its weird and alien needs, rather than on human beings staying alive and happy and free

Good thing we don't live in a world like that right guys?

Wow, that’s probably one of the most in-depth critiques of the book I’ve read. Kudos to the OP

a leaderless cult had freshly formed

a Stand Alone Complex, but with slop

I like Evans' take that since there's bound to be oodles of cult related literature and interactions and also tons of self help and guru stuff in the training datasets, it stands to reason that if you interact with a chatbot in a way that indicates vulnerability to these things there's a considerable chance that it will decide the expected response is to prey on you.

Also Scott Aaronson jump scare near the beginning, apparently he was blurbed for something.

Well, we do have computer science, so necessarily we must have computer religion/superstition

From your prev post:

There is a “lattice” which connects all consciousnesses

The noosphere, the old cosmists strike again. This sort of stuff and the global consciousness projects (who used random number generators iirc) etc are def part of the training data.

Yes, dear reader, the author of The God Delusion is now suffering from a Claude delusion.

Matthew Sheffield saw his chance and he took it. (WTF is the rest of that article tho)

It’s giving “mama musk skinsuit”

That would be a recent development them, as for a lawsuit couple years ago he had to reveal all his alts, which included the weird 'his baby son who was horny for various women (or at least grimes)' account.

(Not 100% sure if it was a lawsuit or some other reveal, like him showing a screenshot with too much info in it or something).

E: still dont get why people think this means musk is behind mayes account. This prob shows something even stranger, Maye is not Musks real mother. Musk is adopted! And Maye bought a child from a struggeling worker.

Toto is also the world’s second-largest producer of electrostatic chucks, a critical component that holds NAND computer flash storage chips in place during manufacturing.

huh

The fan cites an article by Kevin Roose which is gently skeptical of Yud. To paraphrase President Johnson, if Yud has lost the most credulous rube the NYT editorial board can find, he has lost DC.

that image of Yud made me laugh out loud

-3 upvotes and 0 karma, but the article is absolutely right (they hate this post because it tells the truth). If Eliezer wants to influence public discourse and policy on an international level, he absolutely does need a respectable image (with maybe a touch of eccentricity in an allowable way). But apparently (what he thinks is) the literal end of the world isn't enough to make him actually try for normie public image. Or maybe he has some galaxy brain plan about how looking like a weirdo actually helps his cause? If he does, I strongly suspect it is a rationalization.

math pets

I'd forgotten this

Also an email came up where Demis Hassabis tried to convince Elon to stop insisting on open sourcing OpenAI for AI safety reasons by sending him a 2015 scott alexander blogpost.

::: spoiler spoiler :::

A few details that remind us of the horrors we are skirting around. Imprimis:

(The landlord's friend Thomas) Young said he searched the property after the attack and found used surgical equipment, more than a dozen laptops, and expensive electronics stashed inside the cargo trucks where the alleged assailants lived, which were registered in Vermont.

“It was actually very uncomfortable,” Young said about walking into the trucks. “You kinda wanted to put on a hazmat suit before going into it. It was really just creepy in the extreme.”

II. Another local story about a court appearance.

(A Zizian's lawyer) Stelzig raised specific concerns that Youngblut’s confidential medical records would be incorrectly opened as part of the case. “Our client was shot and is still receiving frequent medical treatment” in jail, she said, referring to injuries Youngblut sustained in the shootout.

III. Ziz Lasota asked a rhetorical question about what might have happened to missing people who got too close to her:

Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod (sic)? Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility? (Evan Ratliff, Wired)

The medical records might just mention trans stuff or an Asperger's diagnosis. Sneering has not felt adequate for a while but I don't know what else to write.

Edit/ Zajko, who wrote “I’ve never seen (Ziz) do an evil thing,” also wrote that Ziz told her to murder an associate or Ziz would murder her. Our intuitions about what went on in those box trucks and on the boats are unreliable and the reality may have been worse than sleep deprivation and paranoid ramblings.

Also a year ago, Maximilian Bentley Snyder the Zizian dictated a 1,500 word manifesto telling Yudkowsky to become a vegan. This one was published in full. Three of the Zizians have issued statements leaving just Ziz, Youngblut, Suri Dao, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham alive but silent. Two died after attacking outsiders, and two took their own lives, so I count 11 known associates.

e/ Unlilke the 20-pager this was published!

My dominant MtG colors are blue and black.

Basically admitting to being evil

Trust, but verify, and tape a shotgun to their forehead just in case.

edit I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Registry in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, but I can't find a direct quote. Am I totally off base with it?

edit edit found it

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

And why isn't Yudkowsky advocating for sexy French Turing cops headshotting rogue AIs?

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. “You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.” She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.

i occasionally read their posts when i want a sincere-seeming, self-consciously capital L Liberal's perspective. "They're less annoying than the chatterers of the ezra klein/MattY/Noah Smith/Jon Chait class" is about the nicest thing i can say about them. This is a bad sign i guess, but i don't really care that much at the end of the day.

Amazing bit, you read through the first section and it's like, okay, I mean, maybe not really insightful but at least not dumb, and then they hit you with da

Around the same time, I was using an LLM to think through a social situation.

undergrad relationships course

🤔

Her account is just another reminder that -- apart from race science -- nothing goes better together with rationalism than social cluelessness.

And the judge sort of snapped. She said very sternly that this trial was not about whether or not artificial intelligence has damaged humanity.

Someone give the judge a honorable sneerclub account.

the funniest bit so far is probably that Greg Brockman’s (who mind you is a massive Trump supporter, being a top donor to him) diary essentially vindicated Elmo’s whole case against OpenAI. You gotta love when morons shoot themselves in the foot

I'd say the numbers are more a bonus.

I assume they're putting it in under the guise of various browser "features" like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the "find my device" network they rolled out last year.

The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don't think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I'd be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.

Last summer the Web Speech API got incorporated into browser standards, it's supposed to offer in-browser speech-to-text and the like, and full support of the API requires the browser vendor to offer the ability to download a language appropriate model for autonomous inference.

Going from this to deciding that it's now ok to side load unspecified 4GB models without telling the user is why we should never give these people an inch.

Yeah, the comparison to a metal lathe (I'm assuming that's what is meant by "machine lathe") irks me. Metal lathes are useful tools that come in a variety of sizes, can be operated independently of their manufacturer's wishes, and on the bigger ones, a sufficient lack of respect will kill you and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

I wouldn't compare llms to any sort of useful physical tool. I don't have to plead with my screwdriver to not cam out screw heads, I just need to be cognizant of how I am using it. I don't have to beg my hammer "please don't hit my thumb", I just need to not be an ape/buzzed while swinging it. I respect physical tools and their use in part because they do work and in part because improper operation will cause you to have a bad time. Nobody at Estwing has publicly said "well mate, we're going to capture all your hammering and rent it back to you". Nobody at Bridgeport gleefully reported that their tooling will cause massive unemployment because it is so good.

I do not respect LLMs because LLMs might still kill you but only in the stupidest way possible, and because their main proponents have no respect for anything and this has been made painfully obvious over and over again. Would using them allow me to craft better sneers about them? Perhaps, but I shouldn't need to do that because the people at the top of these things are evil and while that alone should be enough, their biggest boosters are credulous idiots and many of them were already awful well before we were playing enterprise pretend on the scale of billions of dollars.

In conclusion, I would ask software people to stop comparing shit software to useful tools.

One thing I have noticed is a lot of AI-bros will brag that they automated workflows, or refactored code with AI. If they were really smart and/or had good processes, they would have done those things without AI a long time ago.

On the other hand, if AI and griftocurrency sink each other, I am fine with that.

oneshotted, a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience.

Strikes me as incorrectly translated. The remaking is extremely optional, in fact that definition feels like defining blackpilling as being healed by vile propaganda.

did you mean to post this in this week's stubsack?