jptlnk

I cook almost every day and I would use this feature. I also think it's kind of silly for people to be so upset about what (feels to me) to just be mostly useful.

At times like these I cant help but think of Principal Skinner. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!

hear hear. imo the constitution should be read as eyes open tradeoffs. the 4th amendment is an clear one and this is a great case for it: its not that flock couldnt theoretically reduce crime. it that the reduction isnt worth giving up the power to the government to do so.

I agree that the state is irresponsible here - if it's bad enough to be a huge deal when an agent does it, it's a huge deal.

With that said, I do think there's an important distinction here, which is that we (hopefully) get to _choose_ if the systems we build will pursue this kind of behavior.

I think most people would agree that a big point of social training (school, parenting, etc) is to inculcate a sense of what's acceptable and not in society. Here it seems like we're letting the agents that we've created create havoc and then we're providing a smoke screen by blaming the victim.

IMO this is a 'for whom does the bell toll' kind of collective moment and we shouldn't be laundering this kind of agentic behavior.

I'm skeptical of any claim that AI can't be conscious, but I am given to this point of view as well.

I always get the feeling that these claims are an attempt to "avoid suffering by fiat". If it can't suffer, you aren't causing suffering.

A somewhat more interesting frame (IMO) is to interrogate how much suffering we're willing to tolerate to achieve our objectives. We implicitly make these decisions all the time when it comes to something as simple as what to have for lunch.

And in a (very hypothetical) world where we found ourselves in the position of having an eloquent conversation with a vat of smallpox, I think it's probably still the right thing to pasteurize it.

Genuine counterpoint:

If a human says "I am in pain", is it just stringing together words or is it feeling pain?

If you take that seriously it's quite a tough question to unwind. See e.g. Dennett's heterophenomenology conversations.

It's probably not 10MB, but famously the groundwork to prove the statement 1+1=2 is nearly 400 pages in to principia mathematica. That's not even proving 1+1=2, it's just the set-theoretic proofs you need to EVENTUALLY get there.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the existence of an objective "consciousness" property is a hotly debated question philosophically. Many great thinkers have written and discussed this question at length, and as of now the jury is very much out.

If I may, I think that's actually part of the point, and (at least for me) part of the lesson.

I read him as saying that part of the miracle to him is that he has experienced something that makes him realize that it's a lot harder than it sounds to be loving and kind with no (or few) conditions, and to open your home and life to a stranger.

For me, a lesson of this piece is actually the juxtaposition of the relative ease of -accepting- help and the strange difficulty of -offering- help. It's worth reflecting on, and imo much more relatable.

I'm reminded of a friend who talks about primary and secondary wants. He wants to eat a burger, but he wants to want to eat a salad. Maybe KK wants to want to help people, and the challenge for him is connecting the dots.

I don't think it's obvious but in my own experiments with this it's things like permissions that can get a little hairy. It's all doable and IMO preferable to have an agent-as-daemon. aider is kind of like this.

What's 'this', do you mean the command pattern being described? If so, yes - I've used it to great effect, if the code around it is designed properly. It's even amenable to evals if you can write the LLM call as a function that operates on some state:

  (document, input) -> command  
  (document, command) -> document'  
  # assert something about document' relative to document

Without imputing any actual intention to the author, I agree with your points on tone. It feels focused on optics, not outcomes.

It's one thing to say that you want to get things done. It's another to say you want to be _seen_ as someone who gets things done.

Again, I don't intend to mind read here, and I think the author actually has some really good data gathering ideas. But the language definitely smacks of political motivation, which some folks (myself included) find off-putting.

hey hn, I'm the lead engineer on this project. This was a super fun feature to build, and was incredibly challenging at a technical level.

Lots of fun stuff to figure out, from wrangling structured data, working around limited context sizes, and figuring out how to even write down sensible metrics to determine how well the models are doing.

AMA!