07mk
7hr ago
So, my question: what is my personal use-case for an LLM? I'm a NEET, I don't code, I don't do any of the things I see people regularly using LLMs for.
This description of you is pretty imprecise, but it clearly highlights one goal you're trying to achieve right now: to learn what a modern LLM could be useful for in your life. I think modern LLMs could be useful for you by providing an answer to that question, though I'd suggest using Claude or Chatgpt over Gemini. I think Grok might even be better than Gemini right now.
07mk
12hr ago
Huh, Mamdani may be laying down the groundwork for the source material of a modernized 21st century remake of Gangs of New York.
07mk
13hr ago
I expect the shelves to be emptied out by looters just brazenly and without even trying to hide it walking in, loading up bags, and walking out, leaving the store barren and useless until the next time it restocks.
This has been predicted sufficiently often that I predict that the NYC government will be prepared with defenses to prevent this. A politician can't be seen cracking down on this shoplifting due to the optics, but a politician can still crack down on it without being seen, and Mamdani certainly has a great incentive to crack down on such shoplifting. It would have to just be organized by a politician's orders by private citizens who have no credible link to the politician or his associates or to any organization, and it would have to be performed far away enough from the marts such that journalists can't get bad-looking photos, or journalists would have to be kept sufficiently away. An informal perimeter around each mart where private citizens police both journalists and the types of people who seem likely to loot seem like a decent solution for any sufficiently charismatic politician who wants to create the perception of these marts succeeding.
And that's just me spitballing; I'm sure a real politician who has real experience with power and optics and the time and incentives to use them could come up with better methods for cracking down on the looting while avoiding the bad optics.
07mk
15hr ago
Mamdani Marts where all products are legally mandated to be sourced from Israeli companies at a cost that guarantees those companies profit would be so hilarious that I want to see it happen, US Constitution be damned. Bonus points if the buyer ID program is modified to only allow verified, practicing, devout Muslims to be buyers.
07mk
5d ago
If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."
What's galling about this is that, growing up in the 90s, I was one of many children who was explicitly taught that it could happen here due to conformity and herd mentality and such, especially with regards to ideologies or belief systems or just teams that one likes and feels like one belongs in. I recall a film from the 70s or 80s called The Wave that was shown to basically every student in my school as they passed through late grade school, which was a fictionalized account of a high school teacher bootstrapping a fascist-like organization in his school called The Wave merely based on conformity and obedience, with the climax being the twist that he reveals to all the students that he set this up on purpose to demonstrate how a specifically Nazi-like organization (he presented videos of Hitler when he was purportedly revealing to his students the true leader of The Wave) can rise among supposedly free-thinking, well-meaning Americans all trying to do good things for good reasons.
The obvious conclusion from this is that, for any ideological/political/religious/etc. belief system you follow - especially ones that are approved by people you hold in high regard and/or people who can and do reward/punish you - must be held in great suspicion and skepticism for possibly causing you to become a Nazi foot soldier while completely under the belief that you are an anti-Nazi who does Good Things for Good Reasons.
And yet, this teaching doesn't seem to have continued or been common in the decades since, to the extent that the dominant thing being taught is actually just naked tribalism about how Only Bad People would do Bad Things for Bad Reasons, and We are certainly not Bad People, because we believe ourselves to be Good People doing Good Things for Good Reasons.
07mk
5d ago
If I want to read AI generated text, I do not need to go to the motte, I can simply prompt Claude. For about 22 dollars a month, I could generate not only more text than the motte produces than what I am capable of reading.
This isn't right, though. With a Claude subscription, you can only read AI-generated text based on a prompt that you put in, and furthermore, the AI-generated text you read is just a one-shot by Claude (or multiple refinements that you chose). When someone posts AI-generated text on the internet, they're providing extra value to the text beyond the AI generation: they chose the prompt, they chose the specific LLM to feed the prompt, and they also chose this generation to share. Even if that person chose the prompt and LLM randomly and decided to share the very first generation, those creative choices are encoded into the results as the person's intent.
By contrast, human-generated text has at least opportunity costs. If we simple allow LLM textposting then approximately 99% of the text on this site would be LLM-generated in equilibrium.
The Motte - and almost any web forum - would be better off banning LLM-posting for this reason, IMHO. But that's a different argument than the one that someone else posting an LLM generation provides nothing to a reader that the reader can't get themselves. And that argument is wrong, and, as long as we're talking about a forum where humans are the ones clicking "Comment," that will always be wrong. (Aside: even if users were bots that had the ability to post comments without human input, this would be wrong, because any response by that bot would reflect not only the comment you posted but also the settings and pre-prompt instructions in context provided by whatever human set up that bot, which almost definitely can't be reproduced in a Claude or other LLM chatbot tool).
07mk
7d ago
that we're constantly told that Odysseus is the smartest of the Greeks, but he also continously behaves like a moron, like taunting the Cyclops while escaping from it, wanting to listen to the sirens (sure, nothing happens, but it's still stupid and impulsive!) and so on.
I haven't watched the film and the only version I read was a novelization for 5th graders, but those strike me less as stupid (though they are) than as conceited, arrogant, and hubristic. Intelligence and cleverness is one of those things that's jagged enough and not sufficiently anti-correlated with negative personality traits that very intelligent, high performing people being bumbling idiots in certain contexts such as things regarding their egos which are sometimes way overinflated even beyond what they deserve to be is a common cliche among humans IRL and in fiction today.
07mk
7d ago
The advent of generative AI in 2022 has resulted in a lot of talk about copyright, and if Anthropic decided to unilaterally declare copyright as a concept that's become obsoleted by gen AI and which belongs in the dustbin of history like slavery and lobotomy, that would certainly make the ongoing AI-related culture wars that much more interesting. Now I kinda want to see that happen.
07mk
7d ago
Besides the legal obligation to do the stupid thing, of course.
Unfortunately, I think we live in a world where some legal obligation is the reason for a lot of stupid, destructive things happening, and this is just the latest in a very long list.
I don't know the details, but I heard that destroying books while scanning is cheaper due to the logistics of opening the book and holding it open page-by-page, but also I heard that it was the opposite, so I don't know. If the former is the case, then that provides a good non-legally-mandated-stupidity reason for the destruction as well.
That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.
07mk
7d ago
Do you want to entrust anyone but yourself with the right to decide what is archived, and what is fed into the slopmachine and then wiped?
Unless Anthropic (and other LLM companies) are hunting down every copy of a particular edition of a particular book when they scan it in, I don't see how their behavior would have particular impact on this. Anthropic has negative incentive to do such a thing, because each copy of a book they find costs money to purchase and destroy, but the value they get out of using the book for training only exists for the first copy of the book.
Surely there are some editions of some books out there for which only one or a handful of physical copies remains, which was then purchased by and destroyed by Anthropic (or Google Books or some other mass-scanner), leaving either none or very few which are extremely hard to access by most people (being in obscure archives in obscure libraries). It seems unlikely to me that this set of editions of books has much intersection with the set of editions of books for which keeping at least one copy around is of immense value to humanity; generally, such books also have sufficient cultural value and monetary value that people keep them protected and/or available for display.
If the belief is that humanity ought to indefinitely preserve at least one physical copy of each and every edition of every book that has ever been published, this doesn't seem like the worst goal, but also doesn't seem like a goal that Anthropic or other AI companies (or book scanners) have any responsibility of fulfilling. People who believe that humanity has a duty to preserve at least one physical copy of all these books ought to be the change they want to see in the world.
07mk
7d ago
For example, "my cousin is a cool female, you should meet her", "I met a nice female at work the other day", "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females".
Somewhat ironically, this sort of "'female' is misogynistic" declaration by fiat is a microaggression against recent immigrants for whom English is a second language, since referring to some individual as "a female" or "a male" is a natural way to translate from the original language (e.g. Korean, in my experience). And, symmetrically, someone who's still learning English and just doesn't know any better would be committing a microaggression against the types of feminists who consider such usage misogynistic.
Of course, intersectional social justice demands that, on the oppression totem pole, women who complain about this sort of this stuff are placed above recent immigrants and autists.
07mk
7d ago
The average Democratic office-holder lives in a woke bubble where "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a correct description of the local usage of the word "woman".
I don't believe this is true. I don't think the average Democratic office-holder lives in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble" (though almost undoubtedly he lives among far more woke people than the general population). And, as someone who does live in something that could accurately be called a "woke bubble," I don't think that actually is the correct description of the local usage of the word "woman" in such a bubble.
07mk
7d ago
Indeed. One common hypothesis is that whoever came up with "It's OK to be white" was consciously trying to ape the exact tactic followed by whoever came up with the "Black Lives Matter" slogan (or whoever decided that that phrase ought to be coordinated around).
07mk
7d ago
Privilege discourse always seemed exactly backwards to me. If you have two people with the same exact nature, one white and one black, who is privileged in post-1970s America?
Why would you assume the same exact nature and circumstances for what is clearly a judgment on a group's standing?
Privilege isn't a judgment on a group's standing, though. It's about the standing of an individual relative to another individual when, all else being equal, the only differences between the 2 are some particular characteristic in the approved list such as race, sex, sexual orientation, sexual identity, immigration status, etc. We know this, because policies that are meant to counteract the differences in privilege of people who are different in, e.g. sex, discriminate against individuals on the basis of that individual's sex, not on the basis of the specific privileges/lack-thereof that that individual actually, truly did encounter, that are downstream of that individual's sex.
If privileges truly were judgments on groups rather than on individuals, the people who are the strongest proponents of policies to counter the differences in privilege would be the strongest opponents of any policies that discriminate individuals on the basis of the privilege-level of the group they belong into, because that would be a gross perversion of their ideology that also makes their ideology look uglier to others. But that doesn't really happen.
07mk
7d ago
But the only reason that it can be posted not as an innocent statement but effectively as a gang sign is because the actual innocent statement is in direct conflict with the revealed beliefs of the people who object to this. The act of judging this statement as the sign of a hostile gang is, in itself, the act of rejecting that innocent statement.
07mk
7d ago
I feel like this opinion, not specifically about Palestine but generally about Muslims in the Middle East, was very common-to-nigh-ubiquitous in the early-mid-2000s pre- and early-War on Terror. I think the way that things played out in the intervening years has made this opinion much less popular.
However, as they say, there's a sucker born every minute, and a substantial portion of the people in the "pro-Palestine" side of this culture war were born too late to be old enough to pay attention to the War on Terror in the 2000s-2010s. So, despite being less popular, I could believe that there is still a substantial proportion of these people (maybe even a majority!) who believe this sort of thing about Palestine specifically and Muslim nations in the Middle East generally.
07mk
10d ago
Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?
My immediate guess is that the opportunity cost went up by a lot. The places that anyone, rich or poor, can park their money in order to get more money has become larger, more diverse, and more easily accessible in the last few centuries - even just in the last few decades, really. So the relative attractiveness of spending a few hundred million USD to make a film has gone down, compared to investing that into other things.
07mk
10d ago
This is just classic Toxoplasma of Rage thing, though. The most effective way to project your power to get your preferred way over that preferred by your enemies is to have your way even when having your way is clearly unjust, because that shows that your side is so powerful that even having justice on their side doesn't give your enemies enough to defeat you.
07mk
12d ago
Are LLM-driven crises significantly different?
That's an empirical question that I hope we never learn the answer to (because it never happens, not because we all die before anyone can check). Off the top of my head, the fact that LLMs aren't tied to one human body and its many biological limitations and lacks human psychology means that whatever crisis it creates can be reinforced and defended against attempts to solve it without need for rest or sleep, and also the LLM can't reasonably be coerced or bribed to stopping the crisis or at least not making it worse, and these differences seem like they would likely lead to downstream differences in how crises play out. Specifically, it seems likely to make crises worse, more prolonged, or centered around more obscure vulnerabilities. It's an open question as to if LLM-driven defenses against/solutions to crises will make it such that these crises will be, on net, worse or better, or, more or less common than human-hacker-driven non-AI-based crises. Again, I hope we never get an empirical answer to that question.
07mk
12d ago
If it turns out that a rather banal culture war event about a mainstream Christopher Nolan film is what compels the creation of the techniques and tools to generate feature-length Hollywood-quality (in the sense that someone presented with that film and an actual Hollywood film has no better shot than a coin flip at guessing which one was the actual Hollywood film) films using AI tools, it would be a pretty hilarious result. Like how Will Smith's name will be forever immortalized in the annals of history as the guy whose depiction of eating spaghetti became a de facto standard AI video generation benchmark.
Speaking of which, back in ye earlye dayes of Stable Diffusion in 2022, Emma Watson had become a de facto standard benchmark for AI photo-like image generation, but I think that was abandoned a long time ago, to the extent that I think she won't be remembered for this. I haven't heard much about Watson recently or really, after Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, which is like a decade old now, and so perhaps 2022 was getting close to the end of her run of popularity, riding off the Harry Potter wave.
07mk
12d ago
I believe it varies by jurisdiction in the USA. Eg recently, in the Texas murder case of Karmelo Anthony, the jury first decided the guilt and then the same jury spent more time deliberating to decide the exact sentence. From the reporting about the case I read, this was binding, not merely a recommendation.
07mk
12d ago
If we had insight into why or how the intelligence of GLM-5.2 led it to producing text suggesting you find an office supply store instead of e.g. sending signals to the Internet to manipulate people into generating paperclip factories to the extent the rest of civilization or even the universe breaks down, to such an extent that we could induce future, likely more intelligent, AIs to also behave that way, a lot of the pessimism about AI doom would be addressed. Unfortunately, I don't think we have such insights, and the observed behavior of any particular AI or even set of AIs doesn't help us gain it.
07mk
12d ago
uhhh no, "misalignment" is not a simple thing, accepting that it did indeed do all this very complicated behavior completely on its own requires substantive belief in complicated theories.
What are the complicated theories that are required to be true for OpenAI's claims to be true (or at least plausible)?
07mk
13d ago
I feel like I've seen similar phenomena with "guillotine" and "niche." I tried for a while in high school to get people to pronounce the "ll" in "guillotine" like in English instead of like in French, but I gave up because the French pronunciation was too popular. With "niche," that word is niche enough that during the rare occasions it's used, I'm still holding fast to the proper pronunciation of "nitch" instead of "neesch." I recall that, when I was young, "neesch" was kind of a marker of someone trying too hard to sound fancy while actually exposing their own ignorance, but now it seems like "nitch" is becoming a marker an ignoramus philistine who doesn't know that the proper way to pronounce "niche" is "neesch."
I pay for Claude & ChatGPT $20/month, but both have free versions IIRC. I don't recall if the free versions have access to the latest models, though. I think they might allow signing up through Google account, but I don't recall if I used that or set up separate usernames/passwords.
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