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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Robots with non-local power are only useful in factory settings. We also have them.

I don't agree. I'm a robot with non-local power myself, in a sense – I need to use a network-connected smartphone to navigate an unfamiliar environment. This is the general human condition now. Suppose Optimus has an always-on Starlink connection. Does it matter if it's "not entirely here"? I guess it matters for the robot revolution part, because Elon will have a way to shut it down (if he cares). But practically, it seems to be the inevitable compromise.

but a brief look makes me think this is exactly the sort of thing that RL game playing is good at, and learning general game-playing strategies in training would generalize pretty well to this

This genre of dismissals is fair enough but getting vacuous. What doesn't "RL game playing", at enough scale and diversity, generalize well to? ARC-3 was supposed to measure genuine cognitive fluidity. There is a number of papers showing that reasoning RLVR, even extremely impoverished (literally GSM8K/HumanEval maxxing, like in first generation R1), generalizes to very distant tasks like creative writing, because they involve similar reasoning primitives/motifs (backtracking, self-checking, enumerating options etc). We've actually first seen this principle with, like, InstructGPT, pretraining on more code + RL on code = smarter model across the board, because code entrains some helpful cognitive patterns. RLVR on more complex multimodal tasks will generalize better.

because Elon will have a way to shut it down (if he cares).

"We would just pull the plug" was always cope (shut down all the existing giant botnets and then tell me how easy it was), but satellites with no plugs may be especially hard to deal with if rooted.

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