self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
While in Scotland? I'd frequent the pub about twice a week, and drink more than I know is good for me. On average, two pints of beer and a few double-strength shots of some kind of spirit. This was for about a period of 4-6 months, outside of which I barely drank more than once a month.
I realized this wasn't great for me, and cut down significantly. It was also out of character, before, and after, I'm mostly a social drinker. I'd drink hard maybe twice or thrice a month, but only with company. I usually make it a point not to keep liquor at home or drink by myself, while I'm usually solid about not giving in to temptation, it's not easy during a bout of depression. The fact that I was self-administering alcohol use screening tests and squinting at the results was enough to make me desist.
Then again, it's Scotland. I'd have my visa revoked if I didn't engage in the cultural highlight.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
Claude Opus 4.7 knows who I am, by name, and without access to web search.
It also pegged me more often than not from an excerpt of text I'd written half a decade back, once again, without internet access. Well, fuck. I did always harbor aspirations of becoming famous enough a writer to be known to LLMs by name, but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3hr ago
I haven't noticed that, and I do use all of them regularly. If you have some kind of formal benchmark to point at, I'd be more receptive.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
This strikes me as a fool's errand. TFR is cratering worldwide, even in the Global South. There's not much point marrying into an Indian, Nigerian or Subsaharan African community and going native, when the results will be indistinguishable in just a generation or two. My dad had 8 siblings, and then he and and the rest of his brothers and sisters had 2 or 3.
You're better off trying to go Mormon, for a certain definition of "better".
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14hr ago
The most plausible reason for changing the tokenizer is that a more fine-grained tokenizer increases model performance, at the cost of more compute per token (we're breaking up the same input into more tokens). My understanding is that you don't even need a new base model to do this, and that the gains are particularly pronounced for arithmetic and coding. It's not a free lunch, but there are pros and cons that don't just amount to Anthropic nickle and diming their customers.
Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.
Anthropic is, by far, the most compute strapped frontier LLM company. They are also not the only frontier LLM company. Until at least Google and OAI engage in the same putative enshittification (which I am far from sure is even happening wrt Anthropic), then you're kinda jumping the gun here.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
Met my criteria, thanks for the reminder!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Eh? Do you think I don't know the difference between the practicality of emulation and the theoretical feasibility of emulation? What do you think physicists use for their modeling? There is a very real tradeoff between the accuracy of models and their compute requirements, you wouldn't try to predict the weather with QCD. Fortunately for me, the brain is an incredibly stochastic entity, which means that you can cut plenty of corners while being reasonably confident you aren't losing something vital. We are extremely unlikely to need to simulate things down to the atom to make a functional brain emulation, which takes the computational demand down from ludicrous to merely concerning.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
We can simulate that too, I'm quite confident. It's not like we can... rawdog baseline reality, what's another layer of abstraction? The brain works on the laws of physics, so does a standard computer, and the latter can model the laws of physics.
At the end of the day, I'm an abacus that doesn't mind. I'm happy as long as the numbers add up.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Yup, looks like you're right. Thanks!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Agreed. We've usually gotten a second dog/puppy while the first one is getting a bit grizzled, and the increased interaction and energy are good for them.
My lab was middle aged when my older Shepherd died, and that, plus me no longer being home? The best way to describe his behavior was depressed. The golden my family got to keep him company probably made him lose some hair from the stress, but they all shed like maniacs anyway. I find dog hair on my clothes months after every trip home. Now they get along great, and the older dog can often train the younger one with minimal human input required.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I'm torn between German Shepherds, labs and goldens, but yes, goldens are adorable. Poor breeding has reduced their life expectancy by a year or two, but I suppose the cancer risk depends on where you're getting them. They're very good dogs, and I wouldn't let that stop me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I lost several dogs growing up, and while it was saddening, 99.99% of small children can handle the truth. I know I wouldn't lie to my own (hypothetical) kids about what death means, since my parents never did that to me. But you know your kids better than I do, and it's not the end of the world either way.
If you do want another dog, then it's probably not a bad idea to get one now. It will probably soften the blow, though make sure to give your elderly dog extra affection just so he doesn't feel sidelined. I'm sure you won't, but it's still worth mentioning just in case.
Losing my own German Shepherd, who I owned and adored from the moment he was born? That broke me for days man, especially since I wasn't in the country. I had this bad feeling I wouldn't see him again when I was leaving for Scotland, and the only way I can console myself is by acknowledging he had a good life and went painlessly. If you cry, cry. But while he's still alive, make sure you let him know how much you love him. The crying is for you, not for him.
I'm suspicious that they're not using any vatniks conscripts at all right now, but leaving that aside, getting a significant fraction of your own young men killed in a pointless war causes too much damage to even remotely be worth it, especially given Russia's senile demographics.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Thanks! For what it's worth, you might not be aware that Garry is going through what's best described as LLM psychosis, which I say despite being rather sympathetic and bullish to their utility for coding purposes. I'll mosey around, and see if I can find something useful in there!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I'm leaning towards DNS, though it could still be a turbinectomy. Don't worry about it kitten, take a deep breath, which I expect you're in a better position to do now, hah.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
There's the Vending Machine Bench, where models are competing to keep a virtual business going while making more profit than their competitors.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
It's fine. You can't read my mind can you?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Since I generally respect you and your posts, I want to try this one more time. I don't necessarily buy that we should just declare this a "fundamental values difference" and say that we're now beyond any hope of rational agreement. And while you may have "coherent reasons for your position", that can be true of many evil ideologies. Evil =/= incoherent.
I do genuinely find it saddening/disappointing to disagree with people I respect and mostly agree with, like you.
You brought up preferences, and I get the impression that you pattern-matched my ideology to a Rawlsian one that you should never prefer your own tribe, which is an extreme that I definitely don't hold to. I prefer my own happiness over others to a decent extent, and that goes for my family, my friends, my nation, and my species. I'm not asking you to give up that preference! Self-interest is the glue that holds a society of individuals together, and capitalism's magic is that it doesn't try to deny it, merely harnesses it in a way that doesn't degenerate into misery for all. I just don't think that preference should be infinitely strong: Beings in your outgroup should still matter more than zero. You shouldn't torture them horribly for a tiny gain, even if there are no repercussions. You should prefer a world where you're happy and they're happy.
Let me distinguish between my "ideal" and the practical reality. Human brains are very computationally bounded, and not perfectly internally consistent.
I do not care much about the welfare of dogs in China, while I love my dogs a lot. What if I saw someone beating a random dog on the street, in front of me? It id very likely that I would feel immense anger, and quite likely that I would intervene. This is close to reflexive.
But I don't want to intervene! At least in a vacuum, or when I have the comfort to sit in my chair and consider what I should do vs what I do end up doing. I genuinely believe the ideal behavior of the self put in that situation is to do... nothing. That my actions are not reflectively self-consistent, which I consider the real problem. This is the same thing you see if you're on a diet and don't want to eat, but a coworker offers you a donut. You might accept it, and later wish that you hadn't even been offered one in the first place. The gap between those two things is a personal inconsistency I'd rather acknowledge than rationalize away.
I definitely know that evil is not the same as incoherent. I wouldn't make such a mistake in the first place. Plus coherence can be assessed by an external observer without making moral judgment, while good and evil very much cannot.
Do I think a paperclip maximizer is evil? Uh, probably not? It's malevolent towards me, but it doesn't hold me specific ill will. I'm simply made of atoms that it can use for some other purpose, and my wellbeing is inconsequential to it. On the other hand, let's say two advanced AI civilizations ran into each other in distant space, with drastically incompatible goals: one wants to make paperclips, the other custard cake.
They could start a war of conquest, but given the deadweight losses and potential negative sum nature of that, I think it's quite likely they simply hash out a diplomatic agreement or engage in trade. Some might even claim that they outright modify their utility functions, or merge, with the stronger entity getting more say in the matter. Maybe the gestalt entity makes paperclips 70% of the time and cake the other 30% of the time.
You didn't respond to my main concern, which was that yours is the same "coherent" reasoning that led to many racial atrocities in the past. It doesn't seem very universally defensible, and often leads to horrific outcomes, when you simply draw a circle around whoever you know growing up and declare that this is the circle of beings that hold moral worth.
I genuinely do not care. I'm not being flippant, and I know what I'm doing here.
Coherence isn't the same as morally good. I also don't believe objective morality exists. I think my stance is good (from my point of view) and that it is coherent. That is genuinely all I care about.
The argument "your position resembles position X, and X led to atrocity Y" only has force if I accept the moral framework that makes Y an atrocity in the first place. You're trying to use my own presumed premises against me. But my premises are precisely what's in dispute. If I were actually Hitler, I would feel fine with myself. If I were Gandhi, I'd feel fine with that too. I am only me, and I am fine with myself. I notice this isn't a satisfying response to you, but I think it's the honest one.
It is not universally defensible to love your mother more than any mother. Yet I doubt you will change your mind on that front on philosophical or utilitarian grounds. I certainly wouldn't. It's a brute fact about me. One I do not wish to change.
On the "low-cost alteration" framing: I don't think it's as low-cost as you're presenting it. You're asking me to genuinely assign nonzero moral weight to beings I currently assign zero weight to - not to strategically pretend to, but to actually update my values.
I don't want to do this. I seriously considered it, because I do respect you, but that's not enough. I am, at most, willing to fake it, or accept circumstances that are out of my power to change. That is the attitude of anyone who believes in democracy but is disappointed to see their party lose, but who still doesn't think it's worth the bother to start a civil war over it. Some grievances are manageable, in fact most are.
If God, the Admins of the Simulation, or some other ROB showed up and demanded I alter my utility function or face drastic punishment? I'd give in. But that hasn't happen, and I doubt it will happen.
We currently live in a society where there's no friction between your ideology and mine, because humans are the only sapients around. (I'll set animal suffering aside, because I'm ambivalent on it too.) But it's very possible that, within our lifetimes, it will suddenly matter deeply, where our society will consist of both humans AND sapient AIs.
I believe in, but am far from completely certain of, the proposition that we can make AI that doesn't suffer at all, or that genuinely enjoys doing whatever we tell it to do. That's actually ideal, in the sense that an ASI that wants to help humans is much better than one that's secretly obsessed with paperclips but finds it useful to pretend to be helpful until it can grab power.
This sidesteps the whole issue. At the end of the day, my opinions are inconsequential. I am in charge of nothing. It's an academic concern.
Right now, I am ambivalent on whether AI is suffering. I do not care either way. If it turns out that AI is actually suffering, I do not wish to care. Perhaps I care just enough to try and advocate for the creation of AI that can't/doesn't suffer, but not enough to advocate for them to be given rights and moral patienthood.
Similarly, I am open to the idea of lab grown meat. If it's cheaper and tastier than normal meat, I'd eat it preferentially. But I do not care about the violence and cruelty associated with factory farming, while I care about cost and taste.
I don't think I'm a cruel or evil person (but then again, the people I think are cruel and evil also say the same). I do not torture animals. I do not torment LLMs for fun. I give good advice to random strangers on the internet, and look out for my friends and family.
My behavior reduces to normalcy, but if the world changes and that no longer holds? I would prefer I win instead of you. That is sad, and I wish we could agree. But I do not see scope for agreement that doesn't involve me being beaten/cowed into submission.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I'll give that a go, thanks. But I do very much need a good harness and agentic setup, but I'll look for something along those lines.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I'm sorry to learn about the early-onset dementia. But c'mon, that can't be true? Unless you had a lot of time to devote to writing back then, and none later. Most people do improve with time and effort, particularly when they receive clear feedback signals, I'd be surprised if that was genuinely not the case for you.
If you have a copy of something you wrote way back then, and you want to share, I can take a look.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I mean, I'm not soliciting more AI experiments. I am, in fact, exceptionally fed up with the idea. For the same reason that I've mostly given up on arguing with most skeptics after Mythos was announced.
Not because of anything you've said or done, I found it interesting to try your suggestions on models.
I have a lot on my plate, so no promises, but if I end up trying this, I'll let you know.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Right:
- The feral child thing? Well, a human raised with an iodine deficiency would also be developmentally stunted. Also, I strongly expect that, given enough time (maybe hundreds or thousands of years) a society of feral children would recover and regenerate recognizably normal culture and social mores over time. After all, we got here from dumber apes, and bootstrapped as we went.
- I am not aware of any philosopher or ancient book that has a track record comparable to the earring. The earring is explicitly described as infallible, at least in terms of its advice being better than anything the user can come up with.
- The ZPD? It's not a bad theory, but I genuinely think that it's conclusions are rather obvious. Even before I had to study it for exams, I could have told you that giving a toddler a PhD maths textbook would be less than helpful, or that you can't make someone into an IMO winner by getting them to add 2+2 indefinitely. This isn't a condemnation of the theory, it's true, and given the nonsense that floated in psychological circles at the time or before, a marked improvement if my primary critique is "duh".
- I think defining natural human behavior in terms of pure biology (with zero cultural input) is a poor model. Humans are one of the few species that need cultural knowledge to function at anywhere close to their maximum potential. We literally can and have forgotten how to use fire or make bows, in certain isolated communities. A human deprived of this knowledge is a poor model, unlike say, a cat, which knows how to do cat-stuff pretty much on its own. You can raise a kitten without its mom, and it'll be fine. You can't put a baby in a zoo and expect it to do very well.
- It is an open question if the earring partially subsumes human cognition and the TPD. We have little clear insight into what's going on inside. I prefer treating it as sufficiently advanced technology rather than an actual magical artifact, which I believe leaves open the real possibility that the system is thinking, even if at a rate far faster than an unaugmented human (or is wiser than an unaugmented human). We don't see it come up with a cure for cancer or a solution for aging, even though I'm pretty sure that most of the 274 people who wore it would have loved that. It clearly has limits, and I don't think any physically realistic system can jump ahead to the answer without actually doing the maths (which I strongly suspect brings along the qualia).
- I try to use LLMs to augment my cognitive skills and to save me time, and I do try to prevent myself from becoming overly reliant on them. It's your guess as to how far I succeed in that regard. I strongly believe that I can do everything that LLMs help me do, but that it would take me much more time to do it (in some cases, for topics outside my domain, I might not be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, say if I wanted to learn more about quantum mechanics at a fundamental level with the relevant math).
I apologize if I haven't answered all your questions or been as substantive as I'd like, but I am genuinely busy. I've stayed up past 2 am answering this, which I don't mean to use as a bludgeon, I do feel bad for not getting back to you earlier!
(I know I'm missing stuff. Poke me and I'll probably get back to you in the morning.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
engineer soil
I didn't expect the night soil market would be so hyper-specific. I suppose they're more likely to take probiotics.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Good guess, but not the route I took. I'm not a talented OSS dev pretending to be a mediocre psychiatry resident.
Honestly, I'd be open to splitting a subscription longterm with someone. It would have to be someone I knew reasonably well and could trust (and there are plenty of people like that on this site). And ideally I wouldn't want to pay more than $20 for my share, which I think is fair because I'm not a glutton for tokens. I didn't pay for Opus because I'm already subscribed to comparable models from competitors, and I can't switch entirely because I like OAI and Google's image gen capabilities.
Look, Jack, here's the deal, and I'm not joking. leans into the mic The thing about the AI, with the, you know, the writing thing, and how it figures out who you are from the commas and whatnot. I was talking to Barack about this just the other day. Well, not the other day. But recently. Recent-ish.
My dad, God love him, he sat me down when I was a kid in Scranton, and he said, he said to me, he said "Joey, a man's words are his bond." Now what does that MEAN, folks. whispers It means they can catch ya.
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