Even better, we can say that it’s the actual hard prompt: this is real text written by real OpenAI employees. GPTs are well-known to easily quote verbatim from their context, and OpenAI trains theirs to do it by teaching them to break down word problems into pieces which are manipulated and regurgitated. This is clownshoes prompt engineering done by manager-first principles like “not knowing what we want” and “being able to quickly change the behavior of our products with millions of customers in unpredictable ways”.

That’s the standard response from last decade. However, we now have a theory of soft prompting: start with a textual prompt, embed it, and then optimize the embedding with a round of fine-tuning. It would be obvious if OpenAI were using this technique, because we would only recover similar texts instead of verbatim texts when leaking the prompt (unless at zero temperature, perhaps.) This is a good example of how OpenAI’s offerings are behind the state of the art.

Not with this framing. By adopting the first- and second-person pronouns immediately, the simulation is collapsed into a simple Turing-test scenario, and the computer’s only personality objective (in terms of what was optimized during RLHF) is to excel at that Turing test. The given personalities are all roles performed by a single underlying actor.

As the saying goes, the best evidence for the shape-rotator/wordcel dichotomy is that techbros are terrible at words.

I’m not sure if they’re a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I’d read that fanfiction too.

You got Schmidhuber’d! A Gödel machine would fit the bill. Nobody’s built one yet, but the hard part – proof search through something like Metamath (particularly Metamath Zero) – is long-since solved. It wouldn’t take over the world, though; it would just sit in a corner and get really good at maths over the next few centuries.

Why are techbros such shit at Lojban? It’s a recurring and silly pattern. Two minutes with a dictionary tells me that there is {seldikca} for being charged like a capacitor and {nenzengau} for charging like a rechargeable battery.

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that’s not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that I’m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It’s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

That thread from Paul is such an eyeroll. “Community”, says the VC-funded startup-builder. But it really does show how far out into the wilderness Dorsey has gone; not even his startup bros want to follow.

Microsoft is legendary for this. In fact, I’ll give you Microsoft’s entire business recipe; it’s not secret:

• Dogfood all products
• Maintain backwards compatibility at all costs
• Have at least a decade’s worth of liquid operating funds in the bank at all times

I agree, and also I find “over a decade” to be a very funny duration. ELIZA was developed in the 60s; it’s been over half a century since humans confused bots for people, which was the point.

Sure. It’s a tough question, though; morally, yes, cars are physical objects and typically well-regulated, but self-driving cars are enabled by software, which tends to flout legal demands. I hope in this case that the sheer physical presence of cars will enable regulators to ban unsafe vehicles from public roads, but it’s not as clear-cut as we’d like.

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I’ve ever seen. To recap:

• NYC elects a cop as mayor
• Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
• Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren’t business
• Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can’t find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
• Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
• NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
• Cop-mayor doesn’t understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can’t hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
• Cop-mayor’s CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It’s a fucking pattern, ain’t it.

Wow, I hadn’t read Lowe’s response before, and it is capitalist cringe of the highest order. Thanks for sharing.

To be clear: I agree with every chemical and pharmacological critique leveled at the anarchists here. I also think that none of them have addressed the actual problem that the anarchists are solving, which is that medicinal chemistry has undergone so much regulatory capture that it is no longer legal to perform it at home for one’s own private use or even to reverse-engineer the synthesis pathways. For more commentary on this, I recommend watching e.g. NurdRage reverse-engineering pyrimethamine and paying attention to what they say about obtaining precursors and carrying out various steps of synthesis.

I’d summarize it as joyriding but with skyscrapers.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s sort of a motte-and-bailey setup:

Motte: Many functions can be probably approximately learned, even some uncomputable functions

Bailey: Consciousness, appreciation for art, useful laboring, and careful argumentation are learnable functions

Go for it! I don’t have any active HN accounts and I don’t want to make one.

That’s a real possibility. At risk of going NSFW, HN seems to have a very predictable reaction to links to (English) WP; their comments are always tangents based on personal experiences. For example:

• An article about a book gets book reviews
• An article about modern slang gets whippersnapper discourse
• An article about a UNIX command gets examples of how they like to use it

But (at risk of invoking the shape-rotator stereotype) it seems like it’s hard for HN’s denizens to imagine a time when they personally were experiencing a memetic effect because memes are patterns rather than concretions. For analogy, an HN full of fish would not leave a single comment on the Fish WP article, “Water.” Edit: A fairer example would be an article like “Properties of Water”, because memetics is the study of memes, and memes are like water. (“Hydrodynamics” isn’t a standalone article, but it would be another good candidate.)

Standard HN practice. See here for a previous discussion about the phenomenon.

Exactly! Quoting myself from the conversation I linked above:

With [HN] in mind, I don’t really want to give Dan G. any benefit of the doubt. He’s had years to decide whether to open-source the forum, add features like a moderation log, switch the forum to invite-only mode, add reputation tracking, etc. It’s his website, and he chooses to leave these comments up.

At this point, reporting bad posts only serves to let Dan G. and his buddies sweep the fascists under the rug.

Going a bit on side venture here with this comment, but I’d so much prefer this to be well written up instead of a two and half hour video. And it’s so ubiquitous, watching videos over people reading, and I can’t help but think it’s extremely hurtful on a cultural/societal level.

Side sneer: Nah, video is great. Watching an hour-long video is a standard part of research for the working software engineer. Lots of content from conferences like Strange Loop, DEFCON / Black Hat, and CCC is only available as video, and was intended to be watched or accompanied by slides.

…But I may be biased, as I have no problem performing 2hr speedruns. Lately I’ve been running games with 3hr or 4hr routes, and I’ll readily agree that it’s not for everybody.