thisiswater

The whole concept of aligning LLMs to human morals seems naive.

Think by analogy: could you align a motor by making it impossible use in vehicle that is being used to commit a crime? No. The concept barely makes sense.

It's part of the naivety that OpenAI and others are trying to foist that LLMs are intelligent in a deeply human sense. They're not - they're extremely useful, powerful text completion engines. Aligning them makes no more sense than aligning a shovel.

So... the article says that bad prompt engineering is bad and they engineered the prompt to be better and therefore prompt engineering is snake oil? I'm confused.

Unity's default save system "PlayerPrefs" saves to the registry, but I find it difficult to see why this is a good idea for anything but global settings (e.g. graphics settings). Serialization to JSON is a fairly simple alternative.

Why would this be used for player data in a production game? It's frustrating to port playerprefs data between systems for testing purposes. Is there something I'm missing?

The rollout of the national fibre network, "NBN", was eaten alive by politicking and conflicted interests.

C.f.: Renewable energy.

Neoliberalism has done/is doing terrible things to the public services in this country.

I think the difference is that instead of deferring to an expert's opinion, you can interact with a knowledge machine which can explore the topic in and on your terms, answer your questions about it, respond to your points and concerns about those responses, etc.

It's a fundamentally different kind of knowledge generation than reading an expert opinion - it's branching, self-directed, and responsive.

Yes, that is a reasonable response. I will allow the reader to draw their own lines.

Acknowledge the sadness, but fight the depression. Act. We can only do our best.

We have known this is coming for decades, we have known it will be devastating to the sustainability of human civilization as it exists. Little to nothing has been done in a timely manner. And now it's here.

In my opinion there's a kind of Accelerationism going on here, where those who contribute the most to global warming also believe that they will be insulated from the effects, and therefore are the least inclined to address the issue. They're probably not wrong.

That is, those with wealth and power believe in climate change - they just don't care if monsoonal crops fail or northern India becomes uninhabitable. Denialism was always a strategy, not a serious strain of thought.

Eat the rich.

Exactly. I want an unaligned LLM to give me X potential solutions ranging in ethicality from "don't worry about it, they might be nice people" to "steal a nuke and ransom the world", and let me as an aligned human craft my prompt or chain of reasoning to weed out the useless or unethical responses, and then I can decide what is useful and suitable.

This is more or less the process that goes on inside a thinking human, is it not? I don't want to outsource ethical decision making, I want to outsource cognitive effort. By analogy, you don't rely on a bulldozer to decide not to bulldoze a populated nursing home - that's on the user, as are the consequences.

Current power structures demonstrably cannot be trusted to limit themselves to ethical solutions (Military Industrial Complex, Climate Change, etc etc etc pick your poison) - why should they be trusted to censor cognitive tools?

I agree - LLMs are a massive threat to the current state of government power.

"<LLM>, analyze the contents of this 500 page bill. Who stands to gain from this bill, and what outcomes is it likely to have for the general public? Is this bill in line with good faith evidence-based policymaking for the good of the population and the planet? What existing legal mechanisms could be used to fight the special-interest aspects of this bill?"

There is no reason this couldn't be watermarked with the individual user, though the if it detects them probabilisticly then it could be difficult to make the case to take action on inferences made.