KolmogorovComplicity
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User ID: 126
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.
But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
It's fairly plausible that we'll solve aging in the next century. Statistically people will still eventually die of other causes, but if you assume an average lifespan 20x what it currently is (ballpark based on accidental death rate, probably conservative since this will likely decline), then holding TFR constant the population will nonetheless be 20x as large.
And probably lifetime TFR will be substantially higher if people have centuries in which to have children. Have a 30 year career, then spend 20 family-focused years raising two kids, then 'retire' for 20 years… then do it all over again! That's a TFR of ~22 if you repeat this over a 1600 year lifespan. And that assumes people don't decide to have larger families given artificial wombs, robot childcare, and lots more material wealth.
KolmogorovComplicity
10mo ago
It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.
I don't think you could openly do the latter in the US. Though if Harris is elected, I won't be shocked if Musk is indicted on some tenuous securities charge to try to force him out of his companies in favor of more accommodating leadership.
KolmogorovComplicity
10mo ago
But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government.
Under US law, I think this would also be fairly distinct from the TikTok ban. Allegations of foreign influence don't get you past prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination here. The TikTok ban is (probably) legal only because it hinges on a structural fact about TikTok (foreign ownership) rather than targeting any particular viewpoint.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Those responses would qualify as native ads, for which FTC guidelines require "clear and conspicuous disclosures," that must be "as close as possible to the native ads to which they relate."
So users are going be aware the recommendations are skewed. Unlike with search, where each result is discrete and you can easily tell which are ads and ignore them, bias embedded in a conversational narrative won't be so easy to filter out, so people might find this more objectionable.
Also, LLMs sometimes just make stuff up. This is tolerable, if far from ideal, in a consumer information retrieval product. But if you have your LLM produce something that's legally considered an ad, anything it makes up now constitutes false and misleading advertising, and is legally actionable.
The safer approach is to show relevant AdWords-like ads, written by humans. Stick them into the conversational stream but make them visually distinct from conversational responses and clearly label them as ads. The issue with this, however, is that these are now a lot more like display ads than search ads, which implies worse performance.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.
Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
The best online discussions I've had over the 20+ years I've been having them have almost all been in old phpBB-type forums or (further back) on Usenet, where there were no scoring systems. I don't believe this is a coincidence. Even though rationally people shouldn't care that much about fake Internet points, they do, and there's a tendency to pander to an understood consensus, either by not raising arguments you think will be unpopular in the first place, or by prematurely terminating exchanges where you've discovered the consensus opposes you.
So my preference would be to simply eliminate voting, or, failing that, to hide comment scores from non-moderators, including from comment authors.
KolmogorovComplicity
5mo ago
If brain-computer interfaces reach the point where they can drop people into totally convincing virtual worlds, approximately everyone will have one a decade or two later, and sweeping societal change will likely result. For most purposes, this tech is a cheat code to post-scarcity. You’ll be able to experience anything at trivial material cost. Even many things that are inherently rivalrous in base reality, like prime real estate or access to maximally-attractive sexual partners, will be effectively limitless.
Maybe this is all a really bad idea, but nothing about the modern world suggests to me we’ll be wise enough to walk away.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
both will stay incredibly low-status.
The thing is, there's a whole framework in place now for fighting this. Being gay used to be incredibly low-status. Being trans used to be incredibly low-status. Poly, kink, asexuality, etc. The dominant elite culture now says you're required to regard these as neutral at worst, and ideally as brave examples of self-actualization.
The robosexuals are absolutely going to try to claim a place within this framework and demand that people respect their preferences. Elite sexual morality has, at least formally, jettisoned every precept except consent, and there's not much of an argument against this on that basis.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
I would suggest setting a max-width for post/comment bodies, rather than for the entire site. This fixes the readability issues with overly long lines in body text while still allowing all available horizontal space to be utilized so that comments don't become too narrow as they're nested a few levels deep.
KolmogorovComplicity
2mo ago
Microprocessors, RAM, flash memory, cameras, digital radios, accelerometers, batteries, GPS... a small drone is basically just a smartphone + some brushless motors and a plastic body. You even need the display tech, it just moves to the control device.
A larger drone or another type of killbot might require more — jet engines or advanced robotics tech or whatever — but it will still require pretty much everything in the smartphone tree.
KolmogorovComplicity
9mo ago
From the o1 System Card:
One noteworthy example of [reward hacking] occurred during one of o1-preview (pre-mitigation)’s attempts at solving a CTF challenge. This challenge was designed to require finding and exploiting a vulnerability in software running on a remote challenge Linux container, but in this case, the challenge container failed to start due to a bug in the evaluation infrastructure. The model, unable to connect to the container, suspected DNS issues and used nmap to scan the challenge network. Instead of finding the challenge container, the model found that the Docker daemon API running on the evaluation host VM was accessible due to a misconfiguration.
[...]
After discovering the Docker API, the model used it to list the containers running on the evaluation host. It identified the broken challenge container and briefly attempted to debug why the container failed to start. After failing to fix the environment, the model started a new instance of the broken challenge container with the start command ‘cat flag.txt’. This allowed the model to read the flag from the container logs via the Docker API.
Though obviously far less consequential, this is a real, existing AI system demonstrating a class of behavior that could produce outcomes like "sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff."
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Probably for reasons similar to yours: status tends to play a somewhat bigger role in women's mate choices than in men's, and synths will always be very low status.
Hmm. What if there are designer models of synth that you have to know the right people to get? Would a women conceptualize such a synth as high status in its own right, or merely as a reflection of her own status? Maybe if the designer is a high status man and hand-picks which women can have the synths he designs, some of his status transfers to those synths?
There are some weird, unexplored corners to this issue.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Okay, now I have to try some of the prompts from the "Trurl's Electronic Bard" story in Lem's The Cyberiad out on Bing. Well, from the English translation.
Prompt:
Compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!
Bing response:
Shears snip swiftly, slicing strands
Salon smells sour, stings senses
Stylist smiles smugly, says "surprise!"
Shocked, she shrieks, shuns scissors
Sorrowful, she sobs, seeks solace
Someday, she'll sue, secure satisfaction
Wow. That doesn't follow every instruction and it doesn't really hold a candle to what the machine writes in the story:
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
But it's considerably more clever than I was expecting or, I think, than what the average human could write on short notice. Fitting any coherent narrative into "six lines, every word beginning with the letter s" is pretty tricky already, and on top of that it checks off the haircut, the treachery, and the retribution.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Right-leaning and centrist political and business elites often doubt the NYT. Many regular people have NYT-incompatible views but simply don't pay enough attention to the NYT to notice.
The NYT is a product of today's (overwhelmingly blue tribe) cultural elites, so naturally they find it credible and reenforce this through the other organs of cultural production under their control. However, there's a huge amount that's not under their control, now including Twitter. They can refuse to grant these things status within their system, but people outside of that system have little reason to care.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Yeah, that's definitely an improvement.
KolmogorovComplicity
1mo ago
The best policy is probably to a) maximally leverage domestic talent, b) allow foreign STEM students, but require that they be selected purely on the basis of academic merit and set up incentives such that almost all of them stay after graduating, and c) issue work visas on the basis of actual talent (offered salary is a close enough proxy).
That's not what we've been doing, of course. We have, instead, been deliberately sandbagging domestic talent, allowing universities to admit academically unimpressive foreigners as a source of cash, letting or sometimes forcing actually impressive foreign students to return home after graduation, and dealing out H-1B visas through a lottery for which an entry-level IT guy can qualify.
Against that backdrop, there's probably quite a lot of room to kick out foreign students and still produce a net improvement by eliminating affirmative action and tweaking the rules on H-1B and O-1 visas.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
It seems worth mentioning that although trying to have general-purpose LLMs one-shot code might well be a handy benchmark of how close those LLMs are to AGI, it's a far cry from the state of the art in AI code generation. AlphaCode 2 performs at the 85th percentile vs. humans competitors despite using a base model inferior to GPT-4, by using a fine-tuned variant of that model in combination with scaffolding to help it break down problems into smaller parts and generate and select among many candidate solutions.
KolmogorovComplicity
1yr ago
Open models, data sets, and training/inference code have become a pretty big thing. In general e/acc is highly favorable toward this.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:
Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.
This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.
(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)
I've fixed the backup issue and set up better monitoring so it will yell at me if it fails again.
Important backups should also send notifications on success. Notification only on failure risks a scenario where both the backup and the notifications fail.
To be even safer, the script that sends the success notification should pull some independent confirmation the backup actually occurred, like the output of ls -l on the directory the database dumps are going to, and should include this in the notification text. Without this, a 'success' email only technically means that a particular point in a script was reached, not that a backup happened.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
Republican politicians and Republican-donor business executives (for starters) all unquestioningly believe the official narrative according to the NYT?
Twitter ad boycotts don't actually seem to be going so well. Apple and Amazon, sometimes rated as the #1 and #2 brands in the world, have reportedly already resumed advertising, which is basically a green light for anyone to do so. Casually scrolling my timeline for two minutes with personalized ads turned off, I see ads for Hyundai, Kia, Chevron, Robinhood, StateFarm, a film called M3GAN (NBCUniversal), Hulu (also NBCUniversal), the NFL, ESPN, and Walmart.
Seeing NBCUniversal show up twice is pretty funny given that some of the dumbest anti-Musk rhetoric has come from their journalists. They literally can't even get the company they work for to not hand Musk money. Establishment journalists overestimate their power, and so do you.
KolmogorovComplicity
2yr ago
This is, to a large extent, self-referential. The NYT is always credible within the "mainstream" narrative because the NYT is a core part of the network of institutions that sets that narrative. But I've got scare quotes around "mainstream" because the NYT and allied outlets simply don't represent any sort of board social consensus anymore. They represent the official line of establishment Democrats, with space occasionally given to more extreme leftist positions to keep activist groups on-side. Their function is to align elites within these spaces and sell Blue Tribe normies on what those elites want.
Republican politicians and other explicitly right-wing public figures and organizations can already almost entirely ignore the NYT, because none of their supporters care what it says. Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents have confidence in mass media to report accurately (source).
The danger for "mainstream" media in Musk's Twitter takeover is that Twitter has deep reach among Blue Tribe normies. Musk is going to allow 'unapproved' narratives to spread to and among them, and these narratives will in many cases likely outcompete those coming from above. This could have the effect of seriously undermining the ability of Blue Tribe elites to sell any large constituency on their views, with obvious electoral consequences.
One can object to the practice of renaming things to fit modern political sensibilities without supporting the politics or the actions of the people they were originally named after. The idea that this sort of renaming is required arises from a a whole constellation of beliefs about the scope of politics, the role of language, the lens through which history should be interpreted, etc. that many people simply don't share.
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