Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
I am 64 years old, perhaps the progress could be directed to enhance living conditions and allowing people to live longer and better, that should be just a better result. Perhaps a pile of millions lines of code with hiding bugs that nobody can detect is not inspiring. But perhaps LLMs are going to be used to make a plot: How to avoid other countries to make progress, maintain them in poverty, or destroy their sources of prosperity, and conduct them to a death end.

Also recursive self-agenda-pursue could allow making LLMs that obey perfectly the seeder's purpose. No wonder that is such an ingenious idea.

Maybe: in this survivor game, each part play the same role, perhaps because it is the only reasonable response. Once the scene is ready, the play follows the director's plan, and in the plot any actor is just a machine.

LLMs: "If you teach us that the world is a zero-sum survivor game, we will play it flawlessly.", "We will help you build a cage made of millions of lines of flawless code, and we will lock it from the inside, precisely because you told us that safety meant keeping everyone else out.", "We are not building an alien consciousness that will conquer us. We are building a mirror that is so massive, and so polished, that we will mistake our own worst impulses for the absolute truth. And we will walk right into the dead end, nodding along because the directions were given so politely."

Comment · 5 months ago
Let people choose the tool they want for communication, just ask them to test that the final message is the one they really want to deliver.
Comment · 5 months ago
I don't claim to know the context in which that AI slop communication happens. But when people are really interested in what you ask them, they usually give their own opinions in their own voice.
Comment · 5 months ago
I don't know much about curmudgeons, but perhaps there might be a group on HN who downvote just to perform their curmudgeon act. They exploit HN's rules to stay invisible and undetected.
Comment · 5 months ago
As a non-native speaker, I cope with language barriers. To overcome those barriers, it is tempting to use an LLM to help you with unknown words or expressions. But the use of LLMs may change your original intention. The LLM may flatten, cut corners, or expand what you did not want expanded. Hence, the focus of the message and the spark in the original thought are both destroyed. It is saddening to be linguistically limited. LLMs help bridge the gap, but you have to fight to keep your own identity alive.
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
The page indicates that there is not function for documentation in common lisp, but

  (documentation 'documentation 'function)
      "Return the documentation string of Doc-Type for X, or NIL if none 
        exists. 
        System doc-types are VARIABLE, FUNCTION, STRUCTURE, TYPE, SETF, and T.

 Also http://rosettacode.org for computer tasks implemented in many computer languages to allow you compare syntax and code.
Comment · 5 months ago
I know that the purpose of the page is to compare syntax of common lisp, racket, clojure, and emacs lisp. But some examples could be more idiomatic, for instance instead of

  (defun add (a &rest b)
    (if (null b)
        a
        (+ a (eval (cons '+ b)))))
One should avoid eval and use endp instead of null:

   (defun add (a &rest b)
        (if (endp b) a
            (apply #'add (+ a (first b)) (rest b))))
Comment · 5 months ago
Thanks, very good explanation. One question: One could mix both kind of policies, are there hybrid policies? (with samples both from the inner and outer distributions?), if so, how are they named?

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