SnapDragon
2d ago
This is about as far from a mainstream view as the Democrats' crazy gender ideologies. It is not a message that appeals to the average voter.
SnapDragon
3d ago
Right, that's what "unfalsifiable" means. And an inability to question whether you might have been wrong, no matter the evidence, does not make you Nate Silver. It makes you one of the ignorant teeming masses.
SnapDragon
6d ago
This seems to be a very common LW take. As somewhat of a doomer myself, I find myself agreeing. For being intrinsically unfalsifiable, the prediction record of the doomers seems not bad so far.
Well, sure, that's the nice thing about unfalsifiability. I don't think there's any set of evidence short of the actual AI singularity that would cause a doomer to sit back and think "huh, guess I was wrong about AI risk". LLMs understand us well and default to annoyingly friendly? Ignored. An LLM notices it's being tested and tries to look up the answers once? THEY WILL KILL US ALL.
(Note that I'm not referring to the Huggingface incident, which I do think is genuinely concerning, and counts as evidence in favour of the doomer position.)
The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.
Yeah, there's some egg on my face here, because just a couple of weeks ago I posted this:
LLMs don't just understand strawberries, they understand us. If we ask an LLM for a paperclip factory, it's well aware that we don't want it to tile the universe with paperclips.
I don't know the exact ExploitGym setup and prompt, but I have read an account that the test involved being given an exploit and told to make use of it, and that solutions not using the exploit would not be considered valid. In that scenario, it does seem reasonable that the LLM should be aware that hacking an outside company was not intended. So this is evidence that maybe I'm too optimistic when I say that LLMs will not interpret our instructions in disastrous ways.
There's still a massive difference between hacking a company's servers and "kill all humans", mind you, which should not be ignored. It is certainly conceivable that LLMs, with their fuzzy stochastic intelligence, could misbehave in small ways but not large ones. Still, I do need to admit that my post didn't age well.
A good summary (and de-escalation), thanks, and it does fit with a lot of what I recall (except for the family-friendly part - they released some mature games, too). Progress really was crazy for a time, with companies leapfrogging each other left and right. I guess what really started this argument was when I said that "Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes", which I should probably walk back a bit, because @SkoomaDentist is technically correct that they weren't the first to release VGA or FMV adventure games. But they released some of the best-looking ones of these eras (some of the standouts I remember include KQ1, KQ4, SQ4, Willy Beamish, Gabriel Knight, KQ6, and Phantasmagoria). Their artists were anything but incompetent.
SnapDragon
9d ago
(If you know you know and if you don't you may not be qualified to judge the topic in the first place).
Oh, believe me, I very much know, and your elitism is hilariously cringe. "I coded in mode 13h, you ignorant plebes wouldn't understand what good graphics are."
Going to ignore your technobabble (though the screenshots are fun), because it's irrelevant if there were no actual games being produced looking like that. Thanks for at least moving on to some examples, which (of course) look nothing like the first half of your post. I'll give you Defender of the Crown (though you picked a static screenshot - the action screenshots don't look that good), which does outclass anything Sierra had until KQ4. Falcon and A-10 Tank Killer? Meh. As for Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, I agree wholeheartedly. They were also a company that was pushing graphics standards in games - I did mention Monkey Island, after all, and I sadly missed out on Indiana Jones and Loom. Of course, when Sierra caught up, it also produced absolutely gorgeous games like Gabriel Knight and King's Quest VI.
So I'm genuinely putting some effort in here, trying to parse through your tech snobbery and find some interpretation that matches the reality I experienced. I think your point is that the games industry as a whole wasn't using graphics hardware to its absolute fullest in the same way that the demoscene would (a few years later). And I can agree with that! It's pretty amazing what you can get old tech to do with modern knowledge (and no need to attach it to a playable game); hell, there are C64 demos that blow my mind.
It doesn't change that Sierra was at the forefront of graphics in the games industry, and you're absolutely wrong that it's because the artists were stupid and lazy. Tools didn't exist, market pressures did. Art, design, and playability (and being able to support what you sneeringly called "the lowest common denominator") mattered more than raw graphics (this was the era when the underpowered NES was dominant, after all). Sorry, but if you were there in the 1980s you wouldn't have upended the industry with your brilliance, any more than you would have been a king in the 1300s. It was a different world and you're not smarter than everybody who was living in it. Even if you did code in assembly (gasp)!
SnapDragon
10d ago
Same with "genocide". People are using that word because they want me to react to it in the same way I'd react to a modern Holocaust. But I will only do that if you show that it's a central example, not a tortured definition being applied in misleading ways to try to emotionally trick me. Either properly define your terms so that they both a) apply to Israel and b) demand an appropriate level of outrage, or stop using the word "genocide" and expecting shocked gasps.
From the Wikipedia page for King's Quest I:
Sierra continued to release King's Quest for other home computer systems over the next few years, such as MS-DOS for IBM PCs, the Atari ST, Amiga, Macintosh, and the Apple IIGS, adding support for newer graphics standards like EGA.
Not to mention that the screenshots you linked are distinctly labeled CGA and EGA (and include the comment "Very impressive graphics for its time")...
And VGA was absolutely not common in 1988 (it wasn't even invented until 1987, and it certainly took longer than one year to become highly adopted). The first VGA game I ever played was The Secret of Monkey Island, which was released in 1990. Wing Commander and King's Quest V, other major VGA releases, were also in late 1990. It's insane that you're linking to a screenshot of a 1998 game (when friggin' Pentiums were already obsolete) as an example of "what was possible" on a 286. You also can't compare even the contemporary demoscene (let alone modern retro demos) to game graphics of the time - it wasn't until Id Software's era that games started to catch up technically. Note that this had nothing to do with artists being "incapable of using custom palettes".
I'm guessing you're younger than me and didn't grow up in this era, which is why you're muddling the timeline so badly...? It was a different world. What was technically possible had little to do with what games actually looked like. (Note that game logic was also a significant part of the CPU's load, cutting into anything you could do with graphics.) During my childhood, Sierra games were the best looking games I ever had access to. If you want to argue this further, please give even one example of a contemporary game that looked better.
(Can't comment on the sound side. I was not an audiophile.)
SnapDragon
10d ago
I suppose I'll have to take your word for it that they were totally definitely for sure seriously discussing stopping giving a utility to the Palestinians, and then didn't stop giving the utility to the Palestinians. Those jerks. You did lead me to a fun Wikipedia page talking about water in the Palestinian territories. After the mandatory Israel-blaming, there's this buried gem:
In all 25 municipalities in the Gaza strip, water provision is the responsibility of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU). However, the utility is still in the process of being set up and exercise its legal tasks. The intended procedure is that the municipalities receive technical assistance by the CMWU and gradually transfer their staff and assets to it. According to the World Bank, this model led to some improvements like faster repair of leakage and economies of scale. However, the plan is far from being fully implemented. The model experienced serious problems which are mainly caused by the unstable political conditions in the Gaza strip since 2008, including differences between municipalities governed by Hamas and Fatah, so that some municipalities refused to transfer their assets and staff to CMWU.
So, the Palestinians have spent 18 years not handling basic services because of their dysfunctional government. But if the Israelis stop covering the slack, it's "genocide" I guess.
SnapDragon
11d ago
Huh? I don't think this is right. Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes. Even King's Quest I (their breakout hit) was released in EGA on MS-DOS systems in the mid-80s, so I'm actually not sure what game with "CGA-level graphics" you're referring to.
SnapDragon
11d ago
So, your argument is that they totally definitely for sure WANT to kill all the Palestinians. (I suppose that before Oct. 7 2023 they just had other things on their mind, like controlling global finance.) With that as a given, the fact that they HAVEN'T is only explained by being so darn incompetent. The Israeli tanks and missiles are being stopped from razing every city to the ground by ___ (please fill in the blank here, presumably with something other than "being a civilized Western nation").
SnapDragon
12d ago
I mean, we don't live in the best or the worst of all worlds. There are some genuinely beautiful, selfless relationships out there. But not everyone gets one. My cynicism applies only to me and my future prospects (or lack thereof).
SnapDragon
13d ago
I've made it a hard limit that the next GF has to be 'financially aware" if not thrifty. i.e. they actually consider the cost of things, consider repair vs. replace, and don't assume the most expensive option is always the best.
Seems reasonable. Though, try not to get a new GF that just has a slightly different set of horrible traits! "This time I'm putting my foot down, arson is a hard no." Nobody's perfect, but as long as you're willing to consider "alone" as a viable option, it really does let you be more selective.
Getting $500k in the hole is an outcome I'd truly want to avoid, though. I think I would pull the chute when the costs hit $100k.
Yeah, most people would (and should). I've made a lot of bad choices.
SnapDragon
13d ago
Indeed, Canada went whole hog on marijuana legalization, but sex work is still quite illegal (and thus dangerous). Straight-up prostitution is probably TOO transactional for me, but I don't outright reject the comparison.
Having a partner can also be very very expensive. I'm easily $500k+ in the hole from paying all my ex-girlfriend's costs, who refused to get a job for 15+ years. (I'm extremely low-status in the dating market. I finally got out of the relationship, so at least I'm alone and miserable rather than paying through the nose and miserable.)
What's funny is that I wouldn't even have minded a trophy-wife situation where I at least got decent sex out of the deal. I know suggesting that makes me the worst kind of misogynist. We're supposed to pretend that relationships aren't transactional. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/communication-2
SnapDragon
15d ago
Look, I'm experiencing qualia! Look, there was one, right there! Honest!!
SnapDragon
18d ago
For the record, I was enjoying reading both your and @DaseindustriesLtd's takes!
SnapDragon
18d ago
I'm still a little agnostic on alignment, but I agree that LLMs are decent evidence that it's easier than we thought. After all, the predicted comprehension gap was almost completely wrong. Let's never forget that Yud formally claimed that it was impossible to tell an AI how to pick up a strawberry without destroying the world. LLMs don't just understand strawberries, they understand us. If we ask an LLM for a paperclip factory, it's well aware that we don't want it to tile the universe with paperclips.
So, fine, maybe at some point it'll somehow mesa-optimally get trained into a fuck-those-guys-i'll-make-all-the-paperclips-i-want attitude. But this hardly seems like an inevitability.
My P(doom) isn't nothing, but IMO the most likely outcome is just the most boring one: superintelligence doesn't turn out to be cheap no matter what clever optimizations you (or a self-optimizing AI) come up with. If the logarithmic AI curve continues, maybe we'll end up with some models that are smarter than Einstein running in billion-dollar datacenters attached to fusion plants. And that's certainly enough to change the world in some scary unprecedented ways, but not enough for all of humanity to be crushed like ants.
SnapDragon
18d ago
It’s likely that they know less about the inner life of women than the average rugby player whose name is literally Chad.
Let alone the upside of having a penis. I was a speedrunner once. And while I certainly had no desire to be castrated, that sick voice in my head has certainly wondered, at times, whether it would have made me better off.
SnapDragon
18d ago
Do we really need like 3 top-level trans posts a week? And keep in mind this is coming from a horrible anti-trans bigot like me; I can only imagine how tiring this is for the other side. A biography of one random streamer doesn't seem postworthy. (When Asmongold or Hasan Piker goes trans, then you can @ me.)
SnapDragon
19d ago
I think I sounded more judgmental than I needed to be. This is very culture-dependent, obviously, so there's nothing "inherently" ridiculous about tattoos or piercings. And maybe all of your milieu think it's perfectly normal. Hell, in rationalist/autistic subcultures, even acting like a woman with a masculine build and voice might not stand out overmuch (though it gives me the willies). But the post I was replying to was talking about getting jobs with normies, and they will absolutely think these things are ridiculous.
(Also, like @5434a said, if you and your friend group are doing it just to reject norms and stand out, well, having more trouble getting a job/partner is the entirely-predictable cost you pay for "rejecting norms" and "standing out".)
SnapDragon
19d ago
If you don't pass, you will be judged for it, and will likely get less/worse jobs and worse dating prospects as a result.
The same is true if you cover yourself with tattoos, or get a billion piercings and blue half-shaved hair. The reason this happens isn't because you're trans, it's because you look ridiculous. It used to be trivially understood that, in polite society, you should put some effort into making yourself presentable. It's doing trans people a disservice to pretend that this norm shouldn't apply to them (when it always will - it's human nature).
SnapDragon
22d ago
Yeah, all 39 of them. Is that what's supposed to carry the company?
In technology, the gap between "0" and "39" is a hell of a lot larger than the gap between "39" and "tens of thousands"...
SnapDragon
23d ago
Isn’t that what Heaven is suppose to be? Ruled by a dictator but nice things?
A dictator who also occasionally sends people to Eternal Tortureland.
SnapDragon
24d ago
You're making a logical error. @magicalkittycat isn't saying this as a fact; it's being used to show that "therefore other life is likely" does not necessarily follow from "therefore life can exist". It's a disproof of a simple fallacious argument.
I don't think it's quite as bad as that. I'll use "she" in person for someone who, in my judgement, is clearly committed to being transgender. (And I reserve the right for this to be my judgement call.) It doesn't mean I "believe they're a woman", just that it's low-cost for me to be polite. The Democrats may have gone way, way, way too far on gender ideology (especially the coercive parts), but if some people want to be treated as women, why not do so? In most real-life situations it's not actually a big deal. And you don't need to bring the culture war with you everywhere.
Calling everyone "they" just sets my teeth on edge. It's not a fence-sitting position - it's very much in line with leftist ideology, forcing us all to unlearn that men and women exist.
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