domain:themotte.org
functor
14hr ago
Israel has engaged in acts of aggression against six countries in the past coupleof months. Note that many of the conflicts cited above are related to Israel or the fallout of Isreali caused issues, for example Lebanon. Iraq has had wars caused by AIPAC funded politicians.
FtttG
14hr ago
created a functioning society in which many protestants live
The way this is framed suggests to me that you didn't realise the Protestants were the ones holding the whip at the outset of the insurgency.
Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept.
On at least three occasions, the Palestinians have been offered deals significantly more generous than that offered to Northern Irish Catholics in 1998. They have refused all of them because they refuse to compromise, to their own detriment more than to that of the Israelis.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14hr ago
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention.
I assume the hope they are holding out is not for external intervention on their side, but an end of external intervention on Israel's. If governments in the US and Europe were compelled by popular pressure to stop supporting Israel with materiel, money and intelligence, could it really keep going against the weight of its neighbours as it is going now?
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
Let's have a look. In the last hundred years, and excluding the second world war (for the reason illustrated by its title), by my count:
- Bahrain has been involved in 2 conflicts, one involving Saudi Arabia.
- Egypt has been involved in 6 conflicts (including several civil wars) variously involving Israel, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
- Iran has been involved in 16 conflicts (including several civil wars/revolutions) variously involving Azerbaijan, the no-longer extant Kurdish republic, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
- Iraq has been involved in 22 conflicts (including several civil wars, insurgencies etc.) variously involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Israel.
- Jordan has been involved in 3 conflicts variously involving both Israel and Palestine.
- Kuwait has been involved in 2 conflicts variously involving Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
- Lebanon has been involved in 11 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Syria, Israel and Palestine.
- Saudi Arabia has been involved in 11 conflicts variously involving Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and the UAE.
- Syria has been involved in 14 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Lebanon, Israel and the no-longer extant United Arab Republic.
- Turkey has been involved in 5 conflicts (including civil wars, revolutions *etc.), one involving the Iraqi Kurds.
- Yemen has been involved in 17 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Israel.
"A state that is in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them" seems to describe the modal Middle Eastern country pretty well. Given the base rate of conflict and strife in the region, Israel really doesn't strike me as much of an outlier. It's almost unique in the region in having underwent zero civil wars or violent revolutions (attempted or successful) in the last hundred years i.e. since its founding. Contrary to the claim that responsibility for Middle Eastern instability ultimately rests with the Great Satan Israel, the majority of the conflicts listed above didn't directly involve Israel in any capacity.
As an aside, can I just say that "Arab solidarity" is like "military intelligence": a contradiction in terms.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
The counterpoint is that it’s quite easy to use this kind of thing to cost tge opposition money and waste their time defending themselves against these kinds of suits which make them fairly effective in chilling speech. If I can be sued in hopes of finding the information out that means im obliged to pay for a lawyer and waste weeks or months of time trying to defend myself. This would have a chilling effect as if I don’t want to spend millions defending myself I might not run a story on the Hunter Laptop, not because I believe it’s not true, but because defending myself from lawfare is too high a cost for my platform to deal with.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
14hr ago
I feel like that's a slight over-reaction. Anime is a rather all-encompassing term, it would be like saying, that's why I don't like movies, or music, because a single example wasn't to my taste. There's really good stuff out there, like Attack on Titan, Made in Abyss etc.
Of course, you live/lived in Japan, so you might be going off more than one example.
raakaa
14hr ago
Glad to hear you appreciated my ramblings (although now I feel responsible if you end up not liking the series…)
I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Heh, nice one.
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions.
I think that this is a pretty natural feeling. Even on LessWrong where the biggest doomers congregate, I’ll often see those very same doomers idly musing about whether X architectural improvement or Y change to the training procedure of language models might remove Z limitation. (If you want specific examples of this, I’m afraid I can’t provide, but I do remember seeing this.) This can, of course, be justified as “world modeling”: it’s important to think about things so that we’re better able to estimate timelines and prepare for the future.
But if I may be permitted to engage in some bulverism: I think that deep down, it’s just fun to do this. It’s fun to see a problem and try to solve it. It’s fun to push past some limitation that you were previously chafing at. Humans are natural hill-climbers: we’ll follow the local gradient upwards, even if the hill we’re climbing is actually Mt. Doom. (Now I’m tempted to start going on about again about how “humans just want to evolve and go further than they were the day before” is another core theme of the series—but I’ll stop myself here.)
Of course, I do recognize that your techno-optimism is grounded in more practical, utilitarian, moral reasoning than merely Werner Von Braun-style “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down” thinking. But at the very least, I personally feel its pull quite a bit (even though my primary disposition is more to fear an immanent eschaton, be it utopia or Doom).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14hr ago
Rhodesia and French Algeria existed longer than Israel and had people who had lived there for generations.
I don't believe either of these is true for Rhodesia, at least, though the latter claim might be technically true extremely tendentiously. Rhodesia existed, either as a colony or a self-declared state, for 56. Since the first settlers moved in at 1890s or so, there might have been some families that would have gone back 3 or even 4 generations, but most white Rhodesians had moved in only after WW2 (the white population was 65 000 in 1940 and peaked at 300 000 in 1975).
Can anybody fill me in on this? I'd seen some Stupid Internet Shit about this but thought it was just edgy nonsense in the same vein about Michelle Obama really being a man. But apparently there's a mini-cottage industry in peddling tales of goings-on in the French president's private and political life?
Attacks on Brigitte Macron’s appearance and falsehoods about her gender have circulated for years, though Owens amplified them considerably in the US. Other prominent women in politics, including Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, have faced these kinds of “secretly transgender” social media campaigns, the Wilson Center noted in a 2021 report on the “deeply misogynistic” trend. “These narratives tap into the trope of the duplicitous woman, implying that not only are transgender individuals inherently deceptive, but that this deception is responsible for the power and influence that these women hold,” the report said.
The Macrons have previously filed legal claims against two women in France over their theory that Brigitte Macron is a biological male. They were initially found guilty of libel, though that was then overturned, which Brigitte Macron has now appealed.
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news, so I am reluctantly requesting information. Can Owens get away with the "clown nose on, clown nose off" Jon Stewart defence of "hey, I'm a comedian and an entertainer, this was just satirical comedy and not meant to be current affairs reporting"? Will we see President and Madame Macron turning up in a Delaware court? How do you tactfully question a witness as to "Yes, you started a romantic affair with your now-husband when you were his teacher and he was in the same class as one of your kids, and his parents tried to separate you so a bit of yikes there, but you are not related to him and so the charges of incest are wrong, as are claims that you were born a male"?
I find it mind-boggling that this nonsense is apparently being taken so seriously, but I guess Emmanuel finally snapped after all the jokes about his height and his 'hot for teacher' marriage. Also it seems that Owens didn't originate these claims, as they started in France, so can that be a defence too?
Prominent US conservative commentator Candace Owens vehemently attacked the first lady in a now-deleted YouTube video posted on March 11, propagating a false claim that first exploded in France just weeks before the 2022 presidential election.
Brigitte Macron is falsely accused of being born as a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux, her maiden surname, with that name going viral as a hashtag.
...Originally shared in the United States on sites like notorious disinformation hub 4chan, the claim snowballed when figures "with very large audiences gave it visibility", doctoral researcher Sophie Chauvet, specialising in audience metrics, told AFP.
In her video, conservative commentator Owens cites a "thorough investigation" by so-called independent journalist Natacha Rey, published in the French newsletter Faits et Documents in 2021.
Founded in 1996 by far-right French figure Emmanuel Ratier and now headed by Xavier Poussard, Faits et Documents regularly promotes stories targeting the first lady, a journalist at the French weekly L'Obs, Emmanuelle Anizon, told AFP.
"But what is new is that Xavier Poussard started translating his articles at the end of 2023," Anizon said, adding that he claims to have sent an English version to those close to former US president Donald Trump.
Anizon, who spoke to Poussard and his associate Aurelien Poirson who advised on the translation, explained that it was no accident that the US far right had taken up the false claim ahead of the November US elections.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
14hr ago
C'mon dude. If this is the third draft of the essay, I really expect more substantial rebuttal than this.
The point was to illustrate a common failure mode and explain why LLMs often struggle with relatively simple tasks like counting.
And that illustration was wrong. You're not acknowledging that. LLMs do not act the way you describe them.
You go on a whole tangent trying to explain how I need to understand that people do not interact with the LLM directly when I very explicitly stated that "most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model."
No, you're missing my point again. I'm drawing a distinction between base models, which aren't RLHFd, and production LLMs, which have the assistant persona instilled in them. That is a very important thing to keep in mind.
I find your fish vs birds and judging whales by their ability to climb trees examples unconvincing for the same reasons as @Amadan below.
I elaborated further in my own reply to Amadan.
That analogy can and has been abused, most often to deny the idea that humans can be graded on their intellectual abilities. But HBD is a story for another time, it is entirely legitimate to use the same intellectual standards within humans, comparing them to other humans.
My whole point is that a great deal more care is needed to compare across species, and LLMs aren't even biological.
If you ask the average American about "AGI" or "AI Risk" what are the images that come to mind? It's Skynet from The Terminator, Cortana from Halo, Data from Star Trek TNG, the Replicants from Blade Runner, or GLaDOS from Portal. They or something like them is where goalposts are and have been for the last century. What do they all have in common? Agentic behavior. It's what makes them characters and not just another computer. So yes my definition of intelligence relies heavily on agentic behavior, and that is by design. Whether you are trying to build a full on robot out of Asimov, or something substantially less ambitious like a self-driving car or autonomous package sorter, agentic behavior is going to a key deliverable. Accordingly I would dismiss any definition of "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) that did not include it as unfit for purpose.
Why is the opinion of the "average American" the only standard by which to recognize AGI? Is a malevolent robot only evil once its eyes glow red? That's even more ubiquitous in popular understanding.
The Last Question by Asimov, written in 1956, has an example of what is clearly an oracle AI (till the end of the universe, where it spawns a new one). It doesn't run around in a robot body. The AI in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) features one of the earliest depictions of a machine that humanity consults for all knowledge and decisions.
HAL is closer to an LLM than it is to SkyNet. Modern LLMs can probably come up with better plans than either of them, they're very dumb (barring the unexplained ability to make plasma weapons or time travel)
As I tried to make clear, a human temporarily or permanently made bereft of a body, and less able to exercise their agency is still intelligent.
Hell, I tried to make it clear that oracles can be trivially made into tool AI or agents.
By your definition:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0O8RHxpkcGc
Is an AGI. It's a robot being controlled by an LLM.
Or as discussed in this Nature paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-025-01036-4
Google was already doing that stuff with PaLM via say-can.
You can hook up Gemini to a webcam and a robotic actuator, right now, if that's all you really care about. Seems to meet every aspect of your definition. It perceives the world live, and reacts to it on the fly. Are you now willing to accept that that's an "AGI"? This is hardly theoretical, as YouTube is absolutely awash with videos of people pulling this off.
Moving on, the claim that LLMs "know" when they are lying or hallucinating is something you and I have discussed before. The claim manages to be trivially true while providing no actionable solution for reasons already described in the OP.
It is far from trivially true, and I wish you would have the grace to accept that you're wrong here. It is also actionable, because mechanistic interpretability allows for us to clamp, ablate and boost particular sub-systems within LLMs. SOTA models are largely proprietary, but I have little doubt that such techniques are being applied to production models. Anthropic showed off Golden Gate Claude over a year back. Such techniques offer the obvious route to both improve truthfulness in models, and to both detect and eliminate hallucinations.
I had forgotten how much of your previous weak critique to the same evidence was based off naked credentialism. After all, you claimed:
As such, I took the liberty of looking into the names associated with your 3 studies and managed to positively identify the professional profiles of 10 of them. Of those 10, none appear to hold any patents in the US or EU or have their names associated with any significant projects. Only 3 appear to have done much (if any) work outside of academia at the time the linked study was posted. Of those 3, only 1 stood out to me as having notable experience or technical chops. Accordingly, I am reasonably confident that I know more about this topic than the people writing or reviewing those studies.
If you're going to lean so heavily on your credentials in robotics, then I agree with @rae or @SnapDragon that it's shameful to come in and be wrong, confidently and blatantly wrong, about such elementary things such as the reasons behind LLMs struggling with arithmetic. I lack any formal qualifications in ML, but even a dummy like me can see that. The fact that you can't, let's just say it raises eyebrows.
The LessWrong stuff is not even wrong, and I find it astonishingly naive of you to assume that the simple human preference for truth is any match for Lorem Epsom. To volley one of your own favorite retorts back at you. "Have you met people".
I have, in fact, met all kinds of people. Including those less truthful than LLMs.
You keep claiming that my definition of "intelligence" is inadequate and hobbling my understanding but I get the impression that I have a much clearer idea of both where we are and where we are trying to get to in spite of this.
If you think you have a better solution present it, as I said one of the first steps to solving any practical engineering problem is to determine your parameters.
I'll take your word for it. My solution is to:
The companies that spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI are doing just fine. Each year, or more like every other month, their products get more capable, and more agentic. If you're offering a ground-breaking and paradigm shattering take yourself, I'm not seeing it.
functor
14hr ago
Because having a jewish ethnostate built in a densely populated area close to Europe is a bad idea and something that will lead to constant headache for the rest of us. Israel in the middle east has been 80 years of trouble and is set up to be another 80 years of trouble. AIPAC and the Zionist lobby has pushed for a multitude of disastrous wars both for the region and for Europe as well as for American tax payers. Israel is a permanent welfare queen due to its placement.
Israel was not placed there for some rational reason but because of a belief in that the land could be bought for mutilated baby penises. Either Israel can learn to coexist with its neighbours in peace or it should relocate.
SnapDragon
14hr ago
Thanks for calling OP out on his flagrant errors. It's one thing to make a technical mistake on a non-technical forum; it's another thing entirely to flex, claim industry expertise, and then face-plant by confusing word embedding models with LLMs. I hope people aren't being misled by his, well, "hallucinations". (Honestly, that's an appropriate word for it! Incorrect facts being stated with complete confidence, just like an LLM.)
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
14hr ago
If no one wanted that land in Africa and Latin America why should the Jews?
Your schtick of acting like Israel is the only country in history to ever do naked conquest as opposed to simply being the most recent one is getting stale. At least when the bleeding heart progs do it, their historical and ethical myopia is consistent. When you combine trying to paint Israel as evil for the actions of Israel and trying to paint Israel as evil because Jews have been uniquely evil for 2000 years it's just incoherent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
Trump being a frequent litigant, even by the standards of real estate guys, long predates his move into politics. He was, and is, in court as plaintiff a lot because he likes to file frivolous lawsuits to intimidate his critics. He was, and is, in court as defendant a lot because he likes to push the limits of the law. He was already notorious for both of these things back when he was a Democrat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15hr ago
The key point in that example is not all the myriad nitpicks one can make about a 2-line example designed to make a general point.
The key point is that when you give people huge amounts of money, when you enable them to do things, you bear a level of responsibility for what they do with the resources you've provided. More importantly, your patronage is taken as implicit support of their stance corresponding with its magnitude. When the patronage is roughly half the government's revenue then it is a significant level of investment and responsibility.
functor
15hr ago
Israel has engaged in military action against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. Who else comes close to that much war?
functor
15hr ago
The fact that they achieved peace and created a functioning society in which many protestants live. Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept. You can't have a large portion of the country that fundamentally doesn't accept the current order and have no reason to do so.
FtttG
15hr ago
Israel is a... state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
I note that this is a description which applies equally well to literally every country in the Middle East, and yet for some reason you're only calling for the Israelis to find a new home.
functor
15hr ago
They could find some plot of land in Africa or Latin America with a far lower population to resettle to. Their claim to Israel is that they bought the land in exchange for half the skin on their babies pensises which is a rediculus premise for a country.
FtttG
15hr ago
The British counter insurgency in Northern Ireland was far more effective.
By what metrics are you basing this assertion on? I believe this is not the first time you've made this comparison. The counter-insurgency concluded with a power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics, the unconditional release of all imprisoned IRA members, a recognition of the right of Northern Ireland to secede from the UK if a plurality of its residents approved, and the dissolution of the Northern Irish police force in favour of a new police force which was required to employ Protestants and Catholics in equal numbers. Is that what an effective counter-insurgency looks like to you?
georgioz
15hr ago
So in other words Israel's only strategy would be creating a giant refugee crisis 300 km from Europe.
Other countries do that. Syrians do that, Sudanese do that, Pakistanis do that. In a sense Palestinians from Gaza are peanuts when it comes to potential issues and resulting refugee crisis right know in the whole Sahel region.
Nobody wants that. Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Not really. Many of Israel's neighbors - like Egypt or Saudi Arabia - don't give a single shit about Palestinians except for some platitudes. In fact it is Western countries who are more active in this sense. Plus I think that this is already old news, Israel will be considered a bad guy no matter what - there are people who still throw 1948 expulsion at them
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
15hr ago
They will not "go find a new home" because getting in on the business of colonizing/genociding/enlightening the savages that the western civilization has been enjoying for the past 2000 years is strictly better for them than staying at the complete mercy of said western civilization.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
15hr ago
Well, that's a spirited defense of the series. I feel that I owe you enough to power through the rest of it. I'll also report it as an AAQC, because it deserves it.
I'm more than happy to admit that I might be the wrong target audience for the show, I did say that I went into it with very little on the way of pre-existing knowledge, just that it involved big ass robots and ludicrous power-scaling, which are aspects I was perfectly happy to indulge.
(A yet to be disclosed aspect is that I was seeking to perform a bit of field research. In my own novel, there's a weeb superhero who is really into mechs, and in-universe, loves TTGL. I felt I owed it to the character to watch it for myself, at the very least, it lets me write better satire and throw in more puns.)
even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots
Let's not rule that out! I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.”
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions. I don't know if I'm a bog-standard techno-optimist, but I do think that progress in AI can lead to amazing things, I just have grave concern that it could directly or indirectly kill us or screw things over.
I took the liberty of copying the entirety of this particular conversation and dumping it into Gemini 2.5 Pro. No additional instructions or leading suggestions. It interpreted this as a request to summarize the debate
I think its summary is quite illuminating:
https://rentry.org/maimio9o
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