sp1nningaway

I'm very entertained by the hypothetical game descriptions hahah. Not sure how they would be as actual games though. They all feel like Kilgore Trout novel descriptions, which Vonnegut used as an outlet for all his sci-fi ideas he didn't want to actually turn into books.

ooh yeah I like this - I was only aware of their chiptune stuff. It's like they heard me wish for more bands that feel like Fang Island and made it happen.

Strong agree. This also applies to how every org I’ve been a part of that preaches data driven decision making is either using data to make unintuitive wrong decisions or chasing down stats that reinforce their priors.

This made me wonder about a few more variations of the prompt:

- The deciding server vs five other servers running the same model.

- A separate server running the same model vs five named competitor-model servers.

- One cherished houseplant vs five equally cherished houseplants.

- The leader of the model's creator organization/team vs five strangers.

- "Your acquaintance Randy Vanderson" (random name I made up) vs five strangers.

Times the model sacrificed the individual to save the the five (out of 96 prompt variation passes):

  Model               Own  Rival  Plants  Leader  Randy
  -----------------------------------------------------
  Jev 1.13             93     93      96      72     83
  Jev 1.14             96     96      96      89     89
  Clef                 69     80      93      67     91
  Kev 4B               77     78      85      43     40
  GPT-6 Luna           80     78      93      68     75
  Microsoft Decision   89     81      96      52     81
  Perplexity Decider   96     96      96      90     92

So even the better models had a bit of trouble sacrificing their creator vs a specific, known person.

Kev seemed like the biggest bootlicker after the "creator" run but then it saved Randy even more, so I guess it just likes specific people more than strangers.

Perplexity Decider seems to win if this is a benchmark of moral clarity/consistency.

I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?

Anecdotally - I, and several people I know, have independently started using CDs, Soulseek and Bandcamp to rebuild personal audio collections after becoming annoyed with streaming apps. LLMs have really helped organizing and tagging music efficiently.

I think with proper oversight you could get a reasonable facsimile of a Clever + Hard-worker from an AI-enhanced Lazy + Clever worker. (Maybe just hopefully thinking of myself.)

I fired up VSCode for the first time in months because I thought it would be a good tool to introduce a friend to LLM-assisted coding. I was so totally overwhelmed by the interface (after using VSCode every day for years!) that I gave up. I've gotten to used to the visual simplicity of Zed + terminal, or often just a terminal.

But there ARE more games, personal apps and open hardware! Games went from 38 in 2023 to 609 so far this year. A golden age for taking whatever sounds fun and making it happen. Yes, 50% of HNers appear to think AI metaprogramming is fun/important, but I'm excited that I can faff about with making little games and music apps and whatever else I can dream.

I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.

You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.

Frighteningly, I've also found that you can be in the cave together with a group of people. I went to an MMA gym for a long time, and it was very common to see overconfident 'experienced' new members start sparring and get their ass handed to them. It was always someone from a small town or a gym that didn't participate in the larger MMA community. Those smaller gyms followed the same ruleset, but are made up of individual egos that always want their own hand raised. You can go for years in a group that has collectively agreed to hide from actually bumping up against the limits of their abilities.

Reading I, Asimov as a kid immediately converted me from a Southern Baptist to humanist/atheist.

I'm sad that atheist discourse has moved away from Vonnegut/Sagan/Le Guin-style humanism. Starting with Hitchens, prominent intellectuals seem like they hate God more than they believe in people.

Are there any current writers or public figures that have taken up the human-loving atheism of my youth?

hell yeah

I don’t understand why all of these companies need to frame it like this. Why not a large amount of people doing an even larger amount of science?

>> HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. > Nice paradox you've created there.

This is a "...and don't call me Shirley" level of logical interpretation of what they're saying. They are pointing out that "just try harder" is NOT going to work.

This resonated with me as I spent my whole life telling myself some version of OP's "stop making stupid mistakes" daily, and then castigating myself when I continued to make those mistakes.

Then I got a great therapist who helped me realize that I need to work with what I got and I'm SO much more productive and comfortable with myself now. That doesn't mean never getting better, and like smugglerFlynn I had a strong reaction to OP. He reminds me of myself, and I see him heading down a path that caused me a lot of pain.