doglatine
10mo ago
Hanania is far and away my favourite US politics blogger right now. This piece somehow managed to be both hilarious and insightful. He manages to describe Republican primary voters in a way that should to any rational reader code as contemptuous and disparaging, and yet he comes across like he's giving a purely descriptive analysis. Potentially the American Dominic Cummings?
doglatine
11mo ago
Remind me about this if I haven’t replied or posted next week! Not ignoring your nice question at all but will need to find 30 mins to do it justice.
doglatine
1mo ago
100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
doglatine
7mo ago
I mean there’s this whole thing.
doglatine
11mo ago
With traditional Christian-values inspired conservatism, yes. But most conservatives here are of the Nietzschean post-Christian kind, which is much less fussy about the sanctity of life and much more comfortable with humans differing in intrinsic value. And yet even people in the second camp have to make the proper prostrations to liberal pieties.
doglatine
17d ago
Yeah, I’ve seen some wild liveleak stuff in the past but the scene with the dog was enough to make me decide my brain really doesn’t need this content in it.
doglatine
2mo ago
I don’t think it’s an insuperable problem. A difficult one to be sure, but academic incentive structures are a lot more mutable than a bunch of other social problems if you have the political will. There’s also the fact that the current blind review journal-based publishing system is on borrowed time thanks to advances in LLMs, so we’ll need to do a fair amount of innovating/rebuilding in the next decade anyway.
doglatine
8mo ago
I’m glad anyone got it! Very much an imperfect analogy but it felt right somehow. /u/zeke5123 has the core of it — that Vivek will end up using Trump as a figurehead to advance his own ends and ambition. Maybe I’m overestimating Vivek and/or underestimating Trump, but for all his animal cunning, I still see some confused generous boomer in Donald, whereas Vivek is all 2nd gen migrant ambition and ruthlessness. There’s also the fact that Puzzle is vastly more virtuous than either of them, but as I say, it was mostly a vibes-based analogy.
doglatine
6mo ago
FWIW I like your answer a lot and I don’t think preventing violence against Israel would be unattainable for a Gazan leader with a strong enough power base. I’m thinking here of Kadyrov in Chechnya. You’d want to start by finding a smart powerful and mercenary figure within Hamas. Give them enough money to build up their power base, bribe minor players, have major rivals killed. Give them weapons and allow them to build a Praetorian Guard of elite Hamas fighters who live like kings and get all the chicks. Develop very strict internal messaging norms around Israel and violence — general calls for a unified Palestine one day are fine, but no direct exhortations to violence. Make it so that anyone who fucks with you ends up dead, and anyone who works with you gets money and women.
This shouldn’t be politically impossible. Everyone is responsive to multiple social incentives and these in turn can be influenced with money. It will just take a lot of time, money, and finding the right people.
doglatine
7mo ago
doglatine
11mo ago
100% agree. That's what really impressed me when I heard the story. It made it go from the kind of system that could lead to feuding to something like justice by-social-consensus.
doglatine
11mo ago
Bing Chat largely doesn't have this problem; the citations it provides are genuine, if somewhat shallow. Likewise, DeepMind's Sparrow is supposedly extremely good at sourcing everything it says. While the jury is still out on the matter to some extent, I am firmly of the opinion that hallucination can be fixed by appropriate use of RLHF/RLAIF and other fine-tuning mechanisms. The core of ChatGPT's problem is that it's a general purpose dialogue agent, optimised nearly as much for storytelling as for truth and accuracy. Once we move to more special-purpose language models appropriately optimised on accuracy in a given field, hallucination will be much less of a big deal.
doglatine
1mo ago
Fascinating; I seem to see quite a lot of small Ford Focuses, Fiestas, and Mondeos here in the UK.
doglatine
3mo ago
Couldn’t Abbot announce that state law enforcement would prevent federal agents from making arrests of guardsmen in that case? Obviously it would be an escalation but seems like there’s a whole ladder here with progressively more extreme rungs for both players.
doglatine
3mo ago
Before I even clicked, I knew this would either be NileRed or Action Lab 🤣
doglatine
4mo ago
The UK is particularly bad here. At this point I’m no longer shocked by how much American friends make compared to British friends in similar jobs, often 2-3 times as much.
doglatine
7mo ago
Yep, it’s a GPT-2.5 level base model combined with genuinely useful/interesting proprietary plug-ins (eg, decent autobiographical memory functions, ability to send texts unprompted, etc.). Right now no-one has bothered to hook up a decent base model to a good romance simulator overlay/plug-in system. Now that LLaMA 2 is out there I imagine it’s only a matter of time. It’s a multi-billion dollar business for whoever gets it right.
doglatine
11mo ago
I had exactly the opposite take — first book okay, second book good, third book excellent.Liu can’t write characters or plausible motives for shit, but his ideas are absolutely wild. Book 1 is mostly badly written characters doing stuff. Book 2 is badly written characters doing stuff with a great reveal at the end. Book 3 is Liu coming up with insane genius explanations for string theory, matter-antimatter asymmetry, entropy, etc..
doglatine
4mo ago
My understanding is also that any airline that was perceived as doing anything other than maximally cooperating with immigration authorities in a given country would probably be denied landing slots in future.
doglatine
7mo ago
That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.
doglatine
7mo ago
If Rubiales is guilty of anything here (besides plausibly being coked off his face), it’s of a failure to “read the room” and adapt to the etiquette of high status individuals in his communities. In some cultures, he’d be quite appropriately excoriated simply for shaking hands with any of the female players. In others, an affectionate mouth-to-mouth kiss would be appropriate between him and all the male players.
As it is, social forces have been rapidly moving towards a new set of norms that emphasise female bodily autonomy to the exclusion of unsolicited signs of warmth and affection. Rubiales was going slow in the fast lane of cultural change, and got rear-ended for his slowness, stupidity, or arrogance.
Not an expert on this by any means but I have seen some encouraging results on in vivo (as opposed to in utero or in vitro) gene editing. Here's a sample paper discussing the state of the field. There's also a further question whether in vivo gene editing for intelligence would produce the kind of behavioural impacts we care about; as far as I know, that's an open uncertainty.
More options
Context Copy link