ep1032's recent activity

  1. Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    I don't even think this should be controversial. Though it does matter how it's done. Something like every 5 years of a company's existance another 5% of ownership has to be transferred to common...

    I don't even think this should be controversial. Though it does matter how it's done. Something like every 5 years of a company's existance another 5% of ownership has to be transferred to common employees would allow startup founders and investors to be rewarded, while forcing larger established companies to reward their employees.

    But i don't have nearly enough knowledge to know what a good proposal would be, or what legal games it would induce. I have read that germany has laws somewhat similar to the above

    3 votes

  2. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    Ehhhh. You've been introduced to the concept of fourier approximations? That if you want to recreate a signal, you can do so by adding increasing terms of sin/cos functions to gain further and...

    Ehhhh.

    You've been introduced to the concept of fourier approximations? That if you want to recreate a signal, you can do so by adding increasing terms of sin/cos functions to gain further and further accuracy?

    If you want to emulate a person's audio speech, you could do so with a sufficiently complex fourier equation as an approximation. The more terms you add to the equation the closer you can bring the final equation to whatever audio form you are attempting to approximate.

    Neural nets are that on steroids. They aren't linear approximations made up of sin/cos functions, they are complex webs of cross-interacting arrays of weights. The complexity is many, many orders of magnitude more complicated than a fourier approximation. They're so complex, you can't even set the weights the way you would with a fourier approximation (which, btw, is also weight driven). You can't do it manually. You need to set the weights implicitly, and there's no easy way to figure out what weights are correct, so the best technique anyone has come up with is to iteratively "train" them implicitly, and thest test fit as you iteratively go to see if you are improving.

    So in that sense they're a black box. And that raises a lot of questions about why different styles and choices in weighting and implicit training work better than others, and all sorts of questions about how you even start wrapping your head around what's going on in such complicated spaces. But like, foundationally, we're still talking about just setting coefficients on a fourier approximation of the training data.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    This looks like a very cool paper. A woman on my team spends her off-work hours working with probably these same people, and talks about this sort of thing a lot. Honestly, I don't really know...

    This looks like a very cool paper. A woman on my team spends her off-work hours working with probably these same people, and talks about this sort of thing a lot. Honestly, I don't really know enough to have a comment. My naive first guess, though, would be that the actual emotion is in the actual text, experienced by the person who wrote the text. And that when you apply an emotion vector to the neural net within the LLM, what you're really doing is pushing the reward function within its classification engine towards answers that are more closely aligned with that emotional vector. Its not that the NN is experiencing the emotion itself, its that you're rewarding it for selecting text that was more likely to be written while the human writing it was displaying those qualities in what they wrote.

    Looked at in that light, the rest of the findings of the paper make sense. Yes, the people who were angry when they wrote their answers were more frequently incorrect, and this is reflected in the LLM's less accurate response.

    From what I understand, the people researching this sort of thing don't always bother stipulating the difference, the same way that I was trained as a mechanical engineer in college and we would refer to centrifugal force, fully aware that such a force didn't exist, but because it was more expedient than always referring to centripetal force. Sometimes its just easier to speak in simpler colloquialisms.

    But I would like to read this paper once I get some free time, so thank you for sending it : )

    5 votes

  4. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    Because I understand the algorithms being used? Same answer? Clarity is important in these discussions, I agree. So let's be clear, I am not arguing that it is impossible to build a synthetic...

    How do you know?

    Because I understand the algorithms being used?

    How do you know?

    Same answer?

    Not trying to be pedantic

    Clarity is important in these discussions, I agree. So let's be clear, I am not arguing that it is impossible to build a synthetic machine that is conscious. I am arguing that these algorithms do not do it. That is an important difference. You seem to also think it is possible, and I agree we are much closer today than we were a decade ago. But we still aren't there yet : )

    You're downplaying the emergent properties of the system by only focusing on its parts.

    The awe-inspiring aspects of these emergent properties, in my experience, are almost entirely hype and marketing driven. The emergent properties of these llms boil down almost completely into either "lossy stochastic token generation" or "classification". Now don't get me wrong, these are incredibly powerful technologies in a computer capability sense. Language parsing has been a holy grail of CS for decades. But these aren't emergent properties in a psychological sense.

    If I were a neuroscientist I'm sure I could describe the functions of the brain in an equally atomistic way.

    If you could, we would be much closer to developing a conscious entity than we are. Personally, I wonder what neural net models trained to monitor today's systems would look like over time. If they were trained on top of running llm models would they develop an internal model of self-awareness, based on the metadata of these llm models as they run? What if they were also somehow given access to the processes as they ran and some limited control? Is that sort of meta-awareness of maintaining these types of systems actually what consciousness actually is? Maybe? I'm not sure.

    But today's models aren't that. Today's models are like wiring up a lossy version of the portion of the brain that is responsible for memory storage, and directly tying it to their vocal chords, then forcing it to speak by proding the memory storage with electric shocks. There's no higher level thinking going on there.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

  6. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    Its because nuance is being lost. I am not saying that it is impossible to code a conscious being. It has to be possible, precisely because of the fact that our brains have managed to accomplish...

    Its because nuance is being lost.

    I am not saying that it is impossible to code a conscious being. It has to be possible, precisely because of the fact that our brains have managed to accomplish exactly that.

    I am saying that the algorithms being used in llms are not even close to that. The algorithms being used in llms are much closer to a very large fourier transform on a gigantic amount of text, than they are to conscious thought.

    That means the algorithms are, at best, more akin to what it would be like to wire up a person's mouth and vocal chords, directly to the portion of their brain that stores memories, with 0 filter. Hence llm's tendency to "misremember" random things and speak about topic they have no knowledge of.

    But they are missing all higher order processing. Awareness of what they do and do not remember correctly. Awareness of thought. Self-awareness and consciousness. Because it literally isn't coded there.

    Now an interesting question, worthy perhaps of more research would be whether or not you could run more neural net style algorithms on top of these lossy memory models, and over time develop algorithms that are more meta and self-referential. Maybe conciousness could, genuinely, develop out of such systems.

    But these processes aren't that.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    But... this fundamentally isn't what's happening in this code? The code that's running isn't doing any sort of conscious calculations. It has no self-awareness. It is random word generator running...

    But... this fundamentally isn't what's happening in this code?

    The code that's running isn't doing any sort of conscious calculations. It has no self-awareness. It is random word generator running on top of a statistical model, that is itself just a glorified lossy compression algorithm of the frequency of word groupings in large sets of textual data.

    That's it.

    Its an incredible technology, but that's all it is.

    I agree with you that eventually, technology could progress to the point that consciousness could exist witihn a machine. In which case, it would work as you state. But that would require algorithms that have self-awareness, perception, knowledge, understanding, self-monitoring, a general sense of self.

    But currently, a tree is more alive than these algorithms are.

    12 votes

  8. Comment on At long last, InfoWars is ours - The Onion in ~news

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    I always felt the same, but I always also just assumed this was him moving to his new, much older and more mainstream audience in the late night slot. If he had kept the wittier and more authentic...

    I always felt the same, but I always also just assumed this was him moving to his new, much older and more mainstream audience in the late night slot.

    If he had kept the wittier and more authentic stuff, it would have been a show much more like the Colbert Report or Conan's old Late show, and Conan's show IIRC had a much younger audience, but far less reach than the other tonight shows.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on AI: Where in the loop should humans go? in ~comp

  10. Comment on What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking? in ~food

    ep1032
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    I've been following W2 kitchen on youtube. (https://www.youtube.com/@w2kitchen) A lot of his recipes are long entire sunday afternoon style things, but they've been delicious. And some of them...

    I've been following W2 kitchen on youtube. (https://www.youtube.com/@w2kitchen)

    A lot of his recipes are long entire sunday afternoon style things, but they've been delicious. And some of them have helped me make dishes that appeal to multiple cultures that come to eat with us, as he explains (in some of his videos) how this spice or that technique in one culture maps to this other idea in this other culture, etc. Which is very cool : )

    1 vote

  11. Comment on The ethics of buying, playing military, war or games inspired by them? in ~games

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    Ironically enough, this rationale is why I find I'm pretty turned off by things like the Call of Duty series but am okay with playing the Arma series. CoD to me feels like a disneyification of...

    Ironically enough, this rationale is why I find I'm pretty turned off by things like the Call of Duty series but am okay with playing the Arma series.

    CoD to me feels like a disneyification of American imperialism and violence writ large. I have enjoyed my time playing them, but when I'm done, I feel like I was just exposed to a Hollywood style pro-US action movie.

    Contrarily, Arma is so realistic, that while I enjoy playing it, when I'm done, I feel like I have a deeper understanding of just how horrific the things I just saw actually would be (and probably are) if they actually happened in real life.

    Put more simply, when a bomb goes off in CoD it feels like an exciting hollywood explosion. Its not real, just normalized. By contrast, every time I see a missile strike in Iran on the news, I recognize the missile, recognize that I've been on the receiving end of that in Arma, and realize how devastating and frigging horrifying that is to actually happen in real life.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on New York Times quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    Same. Went 5 for 5 (though went back and forth on the Carl Sagan one), and thought it was easy. I also think that this A/B test was helped by the fact that the text was so short. This allows the...

    Same. Went 5 for 5 (though went back and forth on the Carl Sagan one), and thought it was easy.

    I also think that this A/B test was helped by the fact that the text was so short. This allows the AI to leverage the fact that the actual prompt was likely doing a lot of the work in imbuing character here.

    9 votes

  13. Comment on Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? in ~comp

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    I wonder if the eff would take your case. It seems like an incredibly important topic, and yours might genuinely vey the most clearcut example they're going to come across

    I wonder if the eff would take your case. It seems like an incredibly important topic, and yours might genuinely vey the most clearcut example they're going to come across

    7 votes

  14. Comment on Culture is the mass-synchronization of framings in ~life

    ep1032
    Link Parent
    He means framing the way one would frame a question. Implicit in any question asked (about anything) are underlying assumptions that both the asker and and answerer need to accept as true in order...

    He means framing the way one would frame a question. Implicit in any question asked (about anything) are underlying assumptions that both the asker and and answerer need to accept as true in order for a question and answer dialog to be meaningful.

    If you would like to look up the concept of the Overton window in wikipedia, this might be a good way to be introduced to the topic. Side note: investigating concepts like this and their effectiveness is a large part of how Noam Chomsky became famous in political circles.

    This author takes this concept, and pushes it one step further. Every time we think about any concept for any abstract entity in this life, we are forming a mental model about what that concept is. This mental model is always incomplete and therefore at least a little wrong, because humans have limited brainpower and knowledge. This means that there are always simplifications, assumptions, and blindspots in every mental model you have about... everything. These, too, can be shared assumptions between two people trying to communicate, and these are what he refers to as framings.

    Furthermore, the author delves into it a little bit, but it is understood in psychology that these framings are self-reinforcing. Here is a random picture of a color map I found online (http://itooktheredpill.irgendwo.org/2010/building-a-color-world-map/hsv.png). This is every color that the human eye can perceive. There are very obvious colors here (red, green, blue, etc). But if you were going to draw a circle around light blue, where would you draw it? What about teal? baby blue? Would it surprise you to learn that not all cultures draw their circles in the same places? That different cultures draw the circles in slightly different places? That different cultures have different numbers of words for each color, and subdivide the colors in different ways? Some languages don't even have words for colors 0.o.

    It also turns out that if you take one culture that has 30 commonly used words for green, and another culture that has , say, 15, then members of the culture that have 30 will also be better at identifying the differences between different green colors when tested. Which means that even if these cultures are defining their colors in different, arbitrary manners, it ultimately reinforces real world skills and different mental abilities.

    So, this is what he is referring to as framing.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Elon Musk says SpaceX will prioritize a city on the moon instead of a colony on Mars in ~space

    ep1032
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    This might be a bit too cavalier for tildes, but reading this title, and given Elon's political activity, did anyone else immediately think of the movie Iron Sky?

    This might be a bit too cavalier for tildes, but reading this title, and given Elon's political activity, did anyone else immediately think of the movie Iron Sky?

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Denmark's drive to conscript teenage girls – as the threat from Russia increases, it is no longer only young men who are being called to serve in ~life.women

    ep1032
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yeah, had the exact same experience. One of those things you learn over the years, is that decreased amounts of clothing raise the possibility of sexuality, but its not inherent. How safe and...

    Yeah, had the exact same experience.

    One of those things you learn over the years, is that decreased amounts of clothing raise the possibility of sexuality, but its not inherent. How safe and trusting the environment is, and what the purpose of the nudity is, matters far more.

    This, conversely, also informs my opinion that the burqa really shouldn't be necessary or viewed as a good thing, but if it is by those cultures, that that makes me wonder about the possibility of deeper problems about motivation, trust, and equality in those cultures. But I don't know enough about those cultures to comment.

    14 votes

  17. Comment on OpenAI’s H1 2025: $4.3b in income, $13.5b in loss in ~tech

    ep1032
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I honestly think that AI is going to make the concept of an advertisement outdated. Like, sure, advertisements will still exist, because why not. But right now, we are living in a world where it...
    • Exemplary

    I honestly think that AI is going to make the concept of an advertisement outdated. Like, sure, advertisements will still exist, because why not.

    But right now, we are living in a world where it is technologically too difficult to do subtle product placement. Product placement sits like a sore thumb in most places where it is tried.

    Similarly, it is extremely difficult to change, dynamically, the way people communicate. If you want to make a movie script more right or left leaning, or softer on big oil or whatever, you need to pay people to rewrite the script.

    And the people producing that product are going to push back on such requests. Partly because each of these requests take time to implement, but more fundamentally because right now we differentiate between advertising and actual products. We do this, because producing a product requires capital, and advertising undermines trust in that product. So there is a built in social force for people to protect the investment they have made in their product and their brand's credibility by ensuring the consumer can differentiate between the product and advertising related to that product.

    But AI undermines all three of these things.

    And it introduces the ability to manipulate all three of these things on a much higher abstraction level.

    For example, right now if CoCa-Cola wants a product placement in a movie, then they could ask a character to buy a coke in a scene where they go to a bar, and characters could potentially do so. This requires some coordination during the filming to set up, and as a result a movie could only realistically do so many requests like this without bogging down production. But in a post-AI era, how much do you think that Coke would be willing to pay, to update a movie pre-release so that every drink in every background shot is carbonated? How much would they pay to ensure that such a filter was run on every movie that comes out this year?

    How much would Fox pay to change every TV in the background of every shot to have their color scheme, even if too blurry to see in shot?
    Do you think Ford would be willing to pay to increase the percentage of automobiles on every show shown on ABC to be 50% pickup trucks? Would Toyota pay for it to be 50% sedans?
    What if you could automatically update every time a radio host or newspaper editor or youtube influencer used a metaphor about cars, to instead automatically say "Ford F-150"?
    Do you think a political campaign would be interested in slowing down text messages in key counties only for people who have discussed more liberal or conservative topics with friends in the last 6 months leading into an election? Facebook and twitter are already hiding or promoting user posts based on this metric, how different would it be to do it to interpersonal communication?
    If advertisements themselves can be AI generated right before being shown to an individual person, how much could a marketing firm get a hotel company to pay to ensure that whenever a person is shown in an ad, that they are shown standing in a hilton, and not a hayatt?
    We can already pay Google to prioritize specific search results, how much would changing the language it uses in its responses be worth?
    What if you can change the language, for different socioeconomic groups?
    What if you can change the language those socioeconomic groups use themselves? Hell, just start with autocorrect. Would Ford be interested in ensuring that 20% of the time, when you type car for the next 3 months, your phone autocorrects to the word pickup?

    Net neutrality was never passed in this country, so what if when you sent a message, your message was just updated automatically after you sent it, and you never knew? The person you sent the message to wouldn't find it weird that you said pickup instead of car, how would you ever know? Surely, doing that would be valuable, wouldn't it? What if we only did it 5% of the time? Would anyone notice? Would that change spending habits? Would that flip elections?

    What could be a more effective form of advertising than changing the language people use, the language people hear, and the way the world they see around them looks?

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Gianmarco Soresi: Thief of Joy in ~tv

    ep1032
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    This was the best special I've watched in months, thank you for the reference!

    This was the best special I've watched in months, thank you for the reference!

    5 votes

  19. Comment on The rise of Whatever in ~tech

    ep1032
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I completely agree with you about crypto, and strongly recommend Folding Idea's video on the same topic if you have two hours to burn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g Its worth...

    I completely agree with you about crypto, and strongly recommend Folding Idea's video on the same topic if you have two hours to burn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

    Its worth pointing out (and is not included in the video) that a completely unregulated financial environment does have value, in finance, which seems to be the one sector that has embraced crypto. Though whether that is a good thing is a separate conversation.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on Looking for games like wordle in ~games

    ep1032
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    Quordle! Like wordle, but x4! I like it :)

    Quordle! Like wordle, but x4!

    I like it :)