BubbleRings

Give a youngster a Lego set and he loves it.

Give them a huge bin of Lego pieces gathered from many sets, all sorted by color and type, and…

They don’t know what to do with it.

Thank you! Yeah I think I would have experimented more with interrupting it by now, but my jobs only recently got longer and multi step. Plus I could never figure out, if I do want to interrupt this, what’s the best time to do it?

The new version:

“I can’t go to sleep yet hun, somebody on the internet doesn’t learn the way I think they should!”

Bring a camera, it could make good (if wildly disturbing) reality TV. You wandering Medieval England, wearing a face mask, gloves and a Tyvek suit, with your completely unknown accent, trying to convince a whole society “you’re doing it all wrong!”

> what would these forboding circumstances have been attributed to at the time?

I’ll bet witchcraft got brought up, and praying to the wrong god or going to the wrong church.

So wild and sad, reading the article and discussing the subject with a “knowledgeable entity”. (It’s great having smart “friends” that don’t mind when you pester them with rabbit hole questions at 3am.)

The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.

The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.

Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.

This is close to how I do it also. Except I have never interrupted it in a task, I always worried it would destabilize it and it would leave some function half finished or whatever. I just have standing instructions for it to pause places and ask “ready for the next phase?” Do you find it responds well and correctly to being interrupted in the middle of things?

Except, it’s the top entry in HN right now. It could have gone down to the hug 20 minutes after it was posted, so nobody much has had a chance to have a go at it.

Well, it doesn’t seem to be a time for dilly-dallying. IMO the danger and promise of AGI is through the roof, and the urgency is up there with them.

It’s time to decide your stand. But if you want to make an informed decision, you probably want to:

- Read up on the possible dangers until you get it,

- Learn about the advantages and breakthroughs already happening, and,

- Do some extensive work on a real project with at least an Opus-level LLM, so you really understand what an astounding new thing it is in our world.

I feel like this approaches a sweet spot of coolness but doesn’t quite get there. What might have nailed it would be a way to send multiple messages that contain a hidden message, doesn’t look suspicious, and can be decoded by the recipient with little or no training once they know the secret. Like how @nickcw in the comments here was able to decode the Morse code one, but using a method that wouldn’t take so long to learn.

For instance, what kind of message could seventh graders send to each other five times a day that, if a teacher found three days of messages, it would still look plausibly like the kids were just playing checkers over email, but the recipient could eyeball decode it?

Or, what kind of AI-generated/code-generated message could be eyeball decoded, but repeatedly posted on a bulletin board without raising suspicion?

How about, someone is selling a secure box of some sort, and their factory starts putting glitter nail polish over the screws that hold it together, as is sometimes done for security reasons.

Then the intern decides, “I can just glue these identical little white circles with blue sparkles onto the screw, and it will be faster and I can take more breaks!”

Do you think they left because they figure they’d never get enough trust back to make it worth trying?

That article takes 15 pages and 9 ads (some of them very sketchy) to say the following:

Ctrl-Shift-Esc -> Startup -> Firefox -> Disable.

And the facts were pretty slanted. If the page didn’t have so many ads I would say it was probably written by Firefox people.