zephen

Remind me again why I should buy an internet-connected refrigerator?

They recruited people to pretend like they had various issues, and then recorded their interactions with the LLMs.

Someone who's been paid a couple of quid to pretend to have a medical condition can easily miss things, and is unlikely to be anywhere near as invested in drilling down to the correct solution as someone who's really suffering.

Another outcome from the study was that the LLMs could do better with the right people driving them. That's not news.

> You didn’t have a thyroid issue and you spent thousands more on tests the doctor was right that you didn’t need.

Uhhhh, even in the US, we're not talking "thousands" here.

> So… a telephone psychic?

Look, at one level, you can think of LLMs as search with a sometimes useful probability engine sitting on top of it.

As someone who had multiple doctors do their damnedest to kill me on multiple occasions, I was very grateful to have google search back in the day, and you bet your bottom dollar I use LLMs to help me with health issues today. They are often better than most doctors.

Does that put me at risk of doing something stupid? Only if I don't do further due diligence.

And yet, there's a C compiler (fil-c) that doesn't allow that.

I don't claim to know the nuance of what you're trying to address with this.

Wouldn't it be simpler to simply protect a bitcoin private key with the encryption that you are challenging people to break?

Off the top of my head, the only downside I can see is that someone could drain the wallet without publishing the key, but people like to brag, so it seems unlikely to be a problem in practice.

> If you think trusted computing is a defense against nation-state attackers, we inhabit totally different realities.

I have no idea how or why you would think I think this, since what I wrote was exactly the opposite of this, e.g. "It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection" and "It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security."

In any case, if you think that every piece of information that ordinary humans want to protect is worth it for nation-states to waste their million-dollar attacks on, we inhabit totally different realities.

And yet, there are many pieces of information that ordinary humans want to protect that many nation states would easily throw thousands of dollars at.

In other words, the fundamentals behind security are the same as it ever was.

> This is dismissive and glib.

As is your comment.

> And it's the wrong lesson.

It's only the wrong lesson if you believe that making it more difficult for governments to seize and decrypt their own citizens' mobile phones with impunity is not a valid goal.

> the security model for trusted hardware is intrinsically flawed.

It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection.

The fact that some math-based protections may be theoretically better than physical protections does not obviate the utility of physical protections, whether we are discussing computers or phones, or houses or cars.

It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security. Even your putative perfect cryptographic security still relies on the physical security of the plant holding the keys.

> I smell LinkedIn-flavoured-humble-brag.

Smell whatever you want; it's a free country.

The "machines like me" is not a humble brag. It's an observed phenomenon, not just by me.

The "I'm different in how I react to them" probably doesn't put me at odds with the entire population, but certainly puts me at odds with a lot of individuals I have witnessed.

If you read my other comments, you'd see me contrasting myself with people who get angry with machines. I don't do that.

For whatever reason, I reserve anger for sentient beings who I believe are trying to fuck with me. That has its own set of problems, but I never have the problem of destroying inanimate objects in anger.

> So… you think yourself “different”

Yes.

> while acting like everyone else does

That's the point. I know for a fact that not everybody acts like me, never mind having the same facility with machines as I do.

I'd be happy doing it 99.99% of the time myself, but I don't want to form the habit to think it's a good thing to do.

> That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives.

Well, it may have been an overstatement, but not by much. Look, I have anger issues, but I never get angry at things because they are never trying to hurt me, and nothing good can come of it. I could probably fix most remote control issues (e.g. bad battery contact), but not after it's been smashed.

I also tend to feel the same way about, e.g., a rabid dog or vermin. Get rid of them, but not in anger.

I know I'm weird.

I remember watching my brother get frustrated with a dysfunctional remote control. He threw it forcefully enough at a stone fireplace to shatter it.

From my perspective, that, in and of itself, is a mild form of anthropomorphism — trying to inflict pain on the object.

> That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do

But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?

I do the same.

But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).

This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.

My daughter is a pediatrician and just gave a talk on mental health problems (including suicides) brought on by the sort of personality that succumbs to this.

I find it interesting. For most of my life, I have gotten on well with (well-designed) machines. I'm the sort of guy who, when they bring me in to show me what's broken, it works in front of me.

Maybe I get on with well-designed machines better than people. Because people are never well-designed. So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy. But I never confuse any of my machines for people.