skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv
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Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv
skybrian Link ParentRawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a...Rawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a flop, that seems unlikely to have much effect on her?
You can make your own choices, but I think it’s mostly for personal satisfaction.
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Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv
skybrian Link ParentHow does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying...How does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying the actors and writers and the army of other people who are needed, how much of that would go to Rawling?
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Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with. The question is what model of emotions it...I assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with.
The question is what model of emotions it might have derived and what that might do for other behaviors.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
skybrian LinkStill working on my personal link sharing website, off and on. I added a way to pin tags to the sidebar on the front page. (They are just buttons on mobile unless you switch to landscape mode.)...Still working on my personal link sharing website, off and on. I added a way to pin tags to the sidebar on the front page. (They are just buttons on mobile unless you switch to landscape mode.)
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Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentYes, it's pretty wild. I think that bit is pretty speculative. The only evidence they have of "emotion" is the output, so perhaps they really did fix it? Mechanistic interpretability research...Yes, it's pretty wild. I think that bit is pretty speculative. The only evidence they have of "emotion" is the output, so perhaps they really did fix it? Mechanistic interpretability research might find something, though?
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Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
Investigating this, we found that:
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Gemma and Gemini models reliably produce distress-like responses under repeated rejection. All other models tested produce them at rates below 1%, compared to 35% for Gemma 27B Instruct.
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These behaviours are amplified in Gemma’s post-training. Post-training increases depressive behaviours in Gemma, but decreases them in both Qwen and OLMo models.
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A small DPO intervention near-eliminates the behaviour in our evaluations. Direct preference optimisation on a narrow dataset of just 280 math preference pairs reduced high-frustration responses in Gemma 27B from 35% to 0.3%.
We think that LLM emotions, internal or expressed, are worth paying attention to. Most concretely, Gemini's depressive spirals are a reliability problem: a model that abandons tasks or takes destructive action mid-crisis is straightforwardly less reliable. More speculatively, if emotion-like states come to function as coherent drivers of behaviour, they could lead to alignment failures: models may act to avoid or change emotional states, as humans do in their training data. Finally, if there is any chance these states correspond to something like genuine experience, this seems worth acting on even from a position of deep uncertainty.
Here, we present simple evaluations that track depressive behaviours, and show that, in a narrow sense, they can be 'fixed'. In the paper, we also present finetuning ablations and interpretability results that indicate that the fix reduces internal representations of negative emotions, not just external expression. However, we emphasize that post-hoc emotional suppression is a problematic strategy. In more capable models, training against emotional outputs risks hiding the expression without addressing whatever underlying state is driving it. It also remains genuinely unclear what emotional profile we should actually want models to have - and this seems unlikely to be 'none at all'.
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Gemma needs help
21 votes -
Comment on The Candlemakers' Petition by Frédéric Bastiat (1845) in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkThis web server has encryption turned off for some reason. That's pretty rare these days.This web server has encryption turned off for some reason. That's pretty rare these days.
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Comment on cq: Stack Overflow for agents in ~tech
skybrian LinkIt's a tempting target for bots spreading misinformation. They have countermeasures, but keeping quality up seems hard.It's a tempting target for bots spreading misinformation. They have countermeasures, but keeping quality up seems hard.
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Comment on Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children in ~society
skybrian Link ParentYes, that's pretty much what war is. Add to that, you will be killed if you make a mistake, or perhaps at random. (See Ukraine.) Still, it's possible to do better.Yes, that's pretty much what war is. Add to that, you will be killed if you make a mistake, or perhaps at random. (See Ukraine.)
Still, it's possible to do better.
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Comment on Gold eyes worst month against oil since 1973; mining stocks slump most since 2008 in ~finance
skybrian LinkEverything will look bad compared to oil when the price of oil just spiked. It doesn’t seem like a good baseline to divide by.Everything will look bad compared to oil when the price of oil just spiked. It doesn’t seem like a good baseline to divide by.
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Comment on Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children in ~society
skybrian Link ParentMy guess is that the accuracy of US bombing has probably gotten better, while at the same time our standards have risen so that we are less tolerant of mistakes. Rising standards doesn't seem like...My guess is that the accuracy of US bombing has probably gotten better, while at the same time our standards have risen so that we are less tolerant of mistakes. Rising standards doesn't seem like a bad thing?
Sadly, leadership quality has become considerably worse.
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Comment on Lyme disease vaccine shows 70 percent efficacy, Pfizer says in ~health
skybrian Link ParentI meant that more in a general sense of "we'll see what actually happens."I meant that more in a general sense of "we'll see what actually happens."
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Comment on Lyme disease vaccine shows 70 percent efficacy, Pfizer says in ~health
skybrian Link ParentSo it sounds like the evidence isn’t good enough to say it’s proven, but so far it seems promising?The results of the trial, which tested the vaccine against a placebo in 9,400 people ages 5 and up, have not yet been published or peer reviewed. Pfizer said in its statement that its late-stage clinical trial just missed a statistical cutoff for success, because there were fewer than expected cases of Lyme disease in the trial.
So it sounds like the evidence isn’t good enough to say it’s proven, but so far it seems promising?
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Comment on Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
After Google abandoned the Maven contract in 2018, Palantir took it over. In 2020, the XVIII Airborne Corps began testing the system in an exercise called “Scarlet Dragon,” which started as a tabletop wargaming exercise in a windowless basement at Fort Bragg.12 Its commander, Lieutenant General Michael Erik Kurilla, wanted to build what he called the first “AI-enabled Corps” in the Army.13 The goal was to test whether the system could give a small team the targeting capacity of a full theater operation. Over the next five years, Scarlet Dragon grew through more than ten iterations into a joint live-fire exercise spanning multiple states, with “forward-deployed engineers” from Palantir and other contractors embedded alongside soldiers.14 Each iteration was meant to provide an answer to the same question: how fast could the system move from detection to decision. The benchmark was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where roughly two thousand people worked the targeting process for the entire theater.15 During Scarlet Dragon, twenty soldiers using Maven handled the same volume of work. By 2024, the stated goal was a thousand targeting decisions in an hour. That is 3.6 seconds per decision, or from the individual “targeteer’s” perspective, one decision every 72 seconds.
The Maven Smart System is the platform that came out of those exercises, and it, not Claude, is what is being used to produce “target packages” in Iran. There are real limits to what a civilian like myself can know about this system, and what follows is based on publicly-available information, assembled from Palantir product demos, conferences, as well as instructional material produced for military users. But we can know quite a bit. The interface looks like a tacticool, dark mode send-up of enterprise software paired with the features of geospatial application like ArcGIS. What the operator sees are either maps with GIS-like overlays or a screen organized like a project management board. There are columns representing stages of the targeting process, with individual targets moving across them from left to right, as in a Kanban board.
Before Maven, operators worked across eight or nine separate systems simultaneously, pulling data from one, cross-referencing in another, manually moving detections between platforms to build a targeting case. Maven consolidated and orchestrated all of these behind a single interface. Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, called it an “abstraction layer,” a common term in software engineering, meaning a system which hides the complexity underneath it.16 Humans run the targeting and the ML systems underneath produce confidence intervals. Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system evaluates factors and presents ranked options for which platform and munition to assign, what the military calls a Course of Action. The officer selects from the ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution.
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Clausewitz had a word for everything the optimization leaves out. He called it “friction,” the accumulation of uncertainty, error, and contradiction that ensures no operation goes as planned. But friction is also where judgment forms. Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is. The staying is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called what unfolds when you refused to notice a “war on paper,” a plan that proceeds without resistance because everything that connected it to the world it was supposed to act on has been taken out.28
Air power is uniquely vulnerable to this. The pilot never sees what the bomb hits. The analyst works from imagery, coordinates, databases. The entire enterprise is mediated by representations of the target, not the target itself, which means the gap between the package and the world can widen without anyone in the process feeling it. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the operation that Scarlet Dragon would later use as its benchmark, was a case in point. Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon’s chief of high-value targeting during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ran the fastest targeting cycle the US had operated to that point. He recommended fifty leadership strikes. The bombs were precise. The intelligence behind them was not. None of the fifty killed its intended target. Two weeks after the invasion, Garlasco left the Pentagon for Human Rights Watch, went to Iraq, and stood in the crater of a strike he had targeted himself. “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.”29 The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
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Organizations that run on formal procedure need someone inside the process to interpret the rules, notice exceptions, recognize when the categories no longer fit the case. But the procedural form cannot admit this. If the organization concedes that its outcomes depend on the discretion of the people executing it, then the procedure is not a procedure but a suggestion, and the authority the organization derives from appearing rule-governed collapses. So the judgment has to happen, and it has to look like something else. It has to look like following the procedure rather than interpreting it. I’ve come to think of this as the “bureaucratic double bind,” the organization cannot function without the judgment, and it cannot acknowledge the judgment without undermining itself and being seen as “political.” One solution to this problem is replace the judgment with a number. Theodore Porter, in Trust in Numbers (1995), argued that organizations adopt quantitative rules not because numbers are more accurate but because they are more defensible.36 Judgment is politically vulnerable. Rules are not. The procedure exists to make discretion disappear, or seem to. The system’s actual flexibility lives entirely in this unacknowledged interpretive work, which means it can be removed by anyone who mistakes it for inefficiency.
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Kill chain - on the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children
23 votes -
Comment on Lyme disease vaccine shows 70 percent efficacy, Pfizer says in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Four doses of an experimental vaccine to protect against Lyme disease reduced the number of tick-borne infections by more than 70 percent, according to Pfizer and Valneva, the pharmaceutical companies developing the shot.
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Pfizer said in a statement the companies are “confident in the vaccine’s potential” and plan to submit the data to regulatory authorities seeking approval. If successful, it could become the only Lyme disease vaccine available for people — although it would not be the first.
A previous Lyme disease vaccine, called LYMErix, was approved in 1998. But it became controversial because of reports of adverse events following vaccination, and it was pulled from the market four years later due to poor sales.
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The results of the trial, which tested the vaccine against a placebo in 9,400 people ages 5 and up, have not yet been published or peer reviewed. Pfizer said in its statement that its late-stage clinical trial just missed a statistical cutoff for success, because there were fewer than expected cases of Lyme disease in the trial.
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Lyme disease vaccine shows 70 percent efficacy, Pfizer says
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Comment on Android to debut "advanced flow" for sideloading unverified applications in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThey could do that already if they wanted to using the built-in malware protection: The new system is a countermeasure against malware that’s actively evading that protection, but the...They could do that already if they wanted to using the built-in malware protection:
Every day, Google Play Protect automatically scans all of the apps on Android phones
The new system is a countermeasure against malware that’s actively evading that protection, but the cat-and-mouse game is already happening.
You can say it's simple and maybe it is symbolically, but I was asking about the financial connection, and nobody seems to know the answer. Saying it's simple or direct doesn't mean it necessarily is.
This is just a guess, but it seems likely that by now she makes plenty from other investments that have nothing to do with the Harry Potter franchise? Any good financial advisor would recommend investing profits in a diversified portfolio. So that's potentially another level of indirection, which likely means the funding for whatever hate groups she wants to fund doesn't have much to do with the success of the TV show, unfortunately.