Alwayshasbeeb

Even if they knew it, climate change on the scale we're experiencing today wouldn't be as big of an issue for them because their populations were tiny and entirely self sufficient by hunting and gathering from local sources.

Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.

Reading the comments on any sort of environment adjacent news on this website is like a form of self torture. You'd think having access to a large corpus of humanity's written knowledge could help, but it seems like it's making it worse.

>social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with

If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.

Do you deny that:

A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.

B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"

?

Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.

As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.

Maybe not the raw intelligence/bench frontier but probably the cost per intelligence frontier.

Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number. When corporations that answer to no one use their disproportionate financial resources to hijack the political system and push policies that hurt the common people, that is fascism, yes.

> I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate.

Wow, that's describing it really well. I work for a guy who basically started a company by trying to vibe code his ideas into existence (late 2023 LLMs) and realized he would need actual developers to get anywhere.

It was excruciating trying to make him answer questions to get proper domain modelling going since LLM use had made him think of software as being wished into existence in a "declarative" way.

Not to mention the heavy contrast my persistent questioning had to a background of sycophantic yes-man claudespeak.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a scientist. He made a popular Harry Potter fanfiction series and a "rationality" blog-community that attracts "human biological diversity" enthusiasts.

>Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus

This sounds like a completely different scenario. How many users who post LLM written blog posts are tuning the weights of their LLMs on a large corpus of their own original writing? I wouldn't doubt that this produces far more convincing and pleasant output than the disgusting slop from out of the box Claude.

Can you? Let's say you prompt it with "this is a puzzle computer game, your objective is to progress through its levels" plus the controls from the instruction manual and tie it to a vision + KB and mouse harness.

Will it effectively create an internal model describing world objects and how they interact with each other, persist that so it doesn't get lost when it's context window gets filled up, then after it has sufficiently complete knowledge of the fundamentals after the tutorial levels successfully apply that model by making plans to solve the puzzles and execute them by clicking the right coordinates tied to the visual feedback?

I highly doubt it. To me it often just looks like people are defining narrow search spaces (e.g by having all of the task complexity pre-digested by the harness design), pointing a brute force engine at them, spending 20 thousand dollars in compute and then saying "hey look, it can do anything!".

Could I hook up a SOTA model the 2D computer puzzle game Gruntz (1999) so that it can read it from screenshots and act on it through keyboard and mouse inputs in a way where it would learn how to play and progress through the game? I don't think so. I doubt we'd see any sign of progress in building an internal model of how the game works and the win states in its "thinking" tokens.

Anyone that can read English could do that though.

In my experience, using LLM's for generating code has definitely dulled my capacity to think about function hierarchies, composition and having a "picture" in my head of what will go where in the repository.

Raw "leetcode" algorithm intuition and database modelling/SQL are still largely intact for me because I never trust LLMs for those and want to actually understand what I'm building. But it's scary to think how easy it is to have your skills eroded and how quickly you become dependent on these tools.