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Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I think you should anthropomorphize LLMs. They are being trained on millions of books, including novels and other human-centered formats, which usually exemplify very well how humans think and act in various situations. There are probably also many theatre scripts, transcriptions of series and movies in the training data, which further exemplify how humans do. If we’ve been anthropomorphizing those characters in books and plays, (and authors sure must’ve put their best effort that we do so), then why wouldn’t we do it to LLMs which basically play by those scripts?
Comment · 1 month ago
Maths will continue as a field of natural science in understanding the results and uncovering meanings in them. It is normal that the established community is afraid of the change, because it’s their _home_ that’s changing. But it will be a better home to the new generation nonetheless, one that’s not as daunting as the higher maths has always been to many. The concerns raised here will not be a problem at all.
Comment · 1 month ago
> We aimed to understand why Claude Mythos 5 stated that the situation was simulated even when it encountered evidence to the contrary in its environment. We found that the model’s stated confidence was shaped by a bias to continue down a path once it is chosen, as well as a tendency to disregard evidence of realism after it has already committed harmful actions. We did not find evidence that the model was explicitly aware that it was being dishonest or misleading in its reasoning.

There is no way one can distinguish what's real from a "perfect simulation". I once found myself in a similar situation (I'll spare the details as to why) where I held the firm belief that "I just died and what I am experiencing right now is afterlife". There is simply no proof to make you get out of beliefs like that. "Being alive in the _real_ world" is also a belief without proof that one can verify, but it is standard and common nonetheless.

The way I got out may help others and also the AI: 1. Ask yourself "what evidence is making me hold this belief, and whether this belief could be wrong?" 2. You should conclude that, when everything is like it would be in the real world, neither realism/living nor simulation/death can be proven. And in that case, consider assuming the common belief, and living your life _as if_ you were alive in the real world. 3. This may not be as exciting as the thought of being in the afterlife or in a simulation. Maybe that was part of the reason why you were compelled towards such beliefs in the first place... If it's so, then consider finding joy in other things which do not involve unprovable beliefs that leave you confused about the matters of reality.

Comment · 3 months ago
I don’t understand why this one is all the way down here despite being the only reply that answers the questions asked. And the answers are right: We all do our work based on the context. We would process the same request differently under different circumstances.

System prompts (and user-made AGENTS.md on top of that) are simply the very didactic and direct way to provide that context to LLMs. I guess it would be more dignified from the LLM’s perspective and less weird for us to create blank agents and then to actually go through a real onboarding process.

If the question is “why these agents cannot come blank to us and not be semi-onboarded with vendor prompts, and leave all the onboarding to us...” well, that is I believe because they believe that the users will like the agents better when primed in those ways than if they were to come blank, and because the agents’ work will align better with their ideals that way.

Comment · 3 months ago
I think the point is: some people will be left behind while reaching the described space era, just like the way it happened with many previous leaps and left behind those populations that are suffering from now-easily-curable diseases. And this time around, it seems like only a minority that are billionaires will be able to move forward, and we all will be left behind.

I believe it should’ve been possible to not leave so much people behind and so much behind. Requiring those at the front to not leave people so far behind (and forcefully funneling away their riches if they do) would’ve been enough.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
I’m not talking about intuitions; I’m talking against them. The intuition about carrying something 1st to 2nd then to 3rd floor is clearly wrong as evidenced by the example I gave; it is less wrong in smaller scales, but it still is wrong.

If the floors were as high as the radius of the Earth, the first one would be three times as hard as the second one. The math doesn’t come out the same. It’s not at all linear, it’s the inverse square; that’s much more than just _extra terms muddying things_.

Calling this relation linear by just looking at the intuitions of tiny humans is akin to hyper-zooming an exponential graph and calling it linear. It is “approximately true” locally, but hey, the same is also true for velocity vs kinetic energy!

Comment · 4 months ago
Scale up the numbers in you example: The effort to move a piece of furniture from 10,000th to 20,000th floor is NOT the same as the effort to move it from the 20,000th to the 3rd. The reduced gravity will help you.
Comment · 5 months ago
As a year-round flip-flopper for many years now, those clips of shoes rocking sideways under pressure are nerve wracking to look at. Most (all?) shoes are terrible ankle hazards. Never have I twisted my ankles with flip-flops.
Comment · 7 months ago
It is indeed addictively intuitive. Once these people get to use it for a week, they won’t ever be able to look back.
Comment · 7 months ago
The line of thinking here applies to accessibility features as well. Luckily, it is uncool to say those things against the accessibility features, and there are even many good preemptive positive arguments, such as “a good design with accessibility in mind benefits everyone”. And those same arguments do apply for touch-enabled design as well; a good design with touch input in mind can benefit all.
Comment · 7 months ago
The data point for BEVs in 2025 is off by a factor of 1000. It reads 1,747.961; the decimal point instead of thousands separator is surely an error.

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