Recent submissions

Comment · 3 days ago
does your model of models admit the possibility of partial models?

the average human cannot vividly recollect a walk through a familiar neighborhood, much less invoke a coherent fantasy of going on such a walk. do they contain a world model?

Comment · 1 month ago
what would returning to rss feeds achieve?
Comment · 4 months ago
the point is that introducing data from a foreign source could lead to e.g. exfiltration:

the model retrieves https://somewhere into its context and then gets confused, following instructions embedded there.

it then retrieves https://somewhere?exfiltration=private_data_in_context

it gets worse if the tooling with hidden blocks can invoke can retrieve further secrets.

Comment · 8 months ago
similarly, i think that something that someone took the time to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not directly write it.

this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the code.

Comment · 9 months ago
i'm reminded of the film Annihilation, especially the entity encountered at the end.
Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
companies routinely demand and supply things of and to each other.

i don't see why the economy necessarily has to "touch a floor" of human desire.

a company could be founded with the goal of, for example, colonizing mars. fulfilling this mandate (this prompt...) would then drive economic impulses such as acquiring materials for constructing rockets.

in parallel that company might satisfy the demands of other companies which need, for example, orbital insertions to fulfill their mandate.

perhaps without a floor of demand driven by darwinian organisms the whole thing fizzles out eventually.

but i also don't see why a darwinian agent can't emerge from the corporate process...

perhaps that comes about very quickly once humans can no longer acquire and exercise purchasing power - a company simply spins up some emulations of humans to create demand in the economy.

yes, this all sounds very "empty" to me, but frankly that's also how i feel about the world as it is.

given how much suffering arises by way of the human driven economy being kept in motion, i think there's even a moral case for allowing the whole thing to fade into an empty mechanical pantomime.

i just sincerely hope the artificial processes that replace us aren't also somehow instantiating suffering...

Comment · 1 year ago
yeah, i really think it accomplishes a lot.

at a minimum, it makes it clear to others that they are not alone in thinking this regime is beyond the pale.

people who are able to take other actions like engaging via the judicial system, or peacefully refusing to continue working, are also encouraged by seeing peaceful masses of people agreeing with them.

it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible.

Comment · 1 year ago
peaceful protest is not pointless, no.

peacefully expressing opposition is enormously powerful.

there is still hope that it will be the path out of this worsening nightmare.

Comment · 1 year ago
i wasn't aware of this feature - thank you for sharing it.

with more awareness of /active perhaps these urgent political conversations can still survive on HN.

Comment · 1 year ago
"an architecture that learned more like humans"

i.e. enduring countless generations of evolutionary selection and cross breeding, then fine-tuning a bit?

although it could be interesting, i don't think training on progressively complex strings entirely recapitulates this.

Comment · 1 year ago
I am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired.

Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum.

I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization.

Resistance is futile.

Comment · 2 years ago
i'm curious, how did you arrive at "40-50%" possible human performance?

the task of "predicting the next word" can be understood as either "correctly choosing the next word in the hidden context", or "predicting the likelihood of each possible word".

the quiz is evaluating against the former, but humans are still far from being able to express a percentile likelihood for each possibility.

i only consciously arrive at a vague feeling of confidence, rather than being able to weigh the prediction of each word with fractional precision.

one might say that LLMs have above human introspective ability in that regard.

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