domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1m ago
In so far as it was about specific things you were not allowed to say on Reddit, I think race was secondary to transgender issues. The trannyjanny situation was out of hand. (Not sure if it still is - I only use mostly politics free subreddits nowadays).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2m ago
To an extent, they're forced to be! In a lot of mushy-mushy realms like literature, if you ask ten people to choose the "best", you'll get eleven different and mutually exclusive answers. And there's no objective way to grade between them. The closest would be RLHF, which has obvious weaknesses.
(Is JK Rowling the best living writer because she made the most money off her books? That would be a rather contentious claim. So we don't even know what to optimize for there)
I believe the hope is that there's strong expectation that there's some degree of cross-pollination, that making these models great at code, maths or physics will pay dividends elsewhere. Seems true to me, but I'm no expert.
Jiro
4m ago
Unlike back on reddit where being abrasive was explicitly allowed.
(The moderators had said that you can't be antagonistic, but darwin admitted to being abrasive. So they had to warp the rules to say "being abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things, so see, darwin didn't admit to anything banworthy".)
TowardsPanna
5m ago
Sounds like a fun place for a young person! Shame it leaves you with a longing for the people instead of any lasting connection though.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6m ago
The Turing Test explicitly allows for just about any query under the sun.
I don't deny that some moving of goal-posts is justified. AI intelligence is far more spiky than their human counterparts, and a lot of unexpected weaknesses exist alongside clear strengths. If, in hindsight, the metrics did not correspond to the skills we imagined, it is fair to challenge said metrics. I might promise to buy a car that does >x MPG of diesel, but if you then give me a car that's only there because it uses petrol, then I don't want your car. Worse, it might require a solid rocket booster and fall apart when it gets to its destination. Words can be imprecise.
There exists no human alive that has as much crystalline intelligence or general knowledge as even an outdated model like GPT-3, maybe even 2. Expectations existed that an AI with such grossly encompassing awareness of facts would be as smart as a polymath human. This did not turn out to be the case. We have models that are superhuman in some regards, while being clearly subhuman in others, being beaten by small children in some cases.
They are still, as far as I'm concerned, clearly intelligent. Not intelligent in exactly the same way as humans, but approaching or exceeding peer status despite their alien nature. To deny this is to be remarkably myopic.
We have models that can:
- Compose music.
- Win the IMO
- Control robots in physical environments .... blah blah blah
The space of capabilities they lack is itself becoming increasingly lacking. If such an entity isn't intelligent, then neither am I, because I couldn't solve the IMO or play chess at 1800 Elo like GPT 3.5. If I still am somehow "intelligent" despite such flaws, then so are LLMs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8m ago
This always struck me as one of those accusations
It was a brag, not an accusation. After he boasted on TV about hanging out in the dressing rooms at Miss Teen USA, a bunch of Miss Teen USA contestants came forward to say that he had indeed ogled them in the dressing rooms, and Trump changed tack and said that he had been joking and they were all lying.
I assume that a man who brags about hanging out in teen girls' dressing rooms thinks that that kind of behaviour is socially acceptable. And I think most men who thought it was socially acceptable would do it. So I find it more likely than not that Trump did hang out in the dressing rooms at Miss Teen USA.
Corvos
8m ago
True, but what I mean is that LLMs have been moving AWAY from fluid verbal intelligence and back towards the comfort zone of code and maths IMO.
I value the kind of writing ability and ‘everyday intelligence’ that the models indicated and Claude 3.7 had but I don’t think that’s the direction they’re moving in.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14m ago
Dude, for someone who has outright made up so many things about me and what I have said when I have not, it's rich you calling me a liar. (Yes, I know you have me blocked, but I also you know you'll see this message anyway when you look for messages while logged out.)
I know what your original account was on reddit. You switched to a new one, came here with yet another one, and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.
You can feel how you feel, but my moderation of you has been, if anything, more charitable than what other mods would have been.
Jiro
19m ago
For years, the story of AI progress has been one of moving goalposts.
This is like saying that a Turing test is moving goalposts because the interrogator can suddenly decide in the middle of the test to ask the AI a new question that he hasn't talked about before and that the AI and its programmer has had no chance to prepare for. Except on a much bigger, slower, scale.
AI progress is moving goalposts because people are better able to figure out what they need to demand from the AI after seeing how it performs on previous demands rather than before.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
19m ago
I should have put that in quotes. I'm not that much of a wordcel apologist, even if I'm a wordcel.
TowardsPanna
20m ago
That sounds like someone who went savant-like in for one thing at the expense of many other things he should have learned.
Makes me wonder if some types of activities that require focus have transfer effects while others don't. Meditation has improved my focus on anything and everything. Perhaps practicing chess does not.
HereAndGone
20m ago
She should have taken the second option, but I think it's a case of "there is no there there"*, Harris just did not have policies of her own (on a national scale at least). So a mix of being pushed not to change horses in mid-stream (don't drop Biden's policies) and not genuinely having anything to replace them (as mentioned by others, very very late in her campaign before her campaign page put up any tangible polices, unlike Hillary who had pages upon pages of policies for all sizes and all comers).
Was it unwinnable? Hard to say: we've seen that as Harris ran her campaign (and her staffers who really should have their feet held to the fire over this - that podcast has way too much whining over 'we had no time, it was so unfair Trump's campaign had all that money and time, things just happened and there was nothing we could have done') it wasn't winnable. She did get handed the rough end of the stick with Biden's campaign collapsing too late to do anything to prepare a better one of her own, and her failed run in 2019 left way too many hostages to fortune. But she did go on to make unforced errors, and her campaign staff for social media ran a terrible campaign, just awful.
*Ironically, a remark about Oakland by Gertrude Stein who grew up there and later returned to visit.
Corvos
22m ago
True intelligence is about ambiguity, creativity, and language.
To be fair, LLMs have been moving away from this towards coding, engineering and maths because their success is easier to judge and rewards for RL-produced reasoning are easier to define.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
24m ago
The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected.
Yes, but for how long? Look at the changes in at least British politics — how long before Islamic parties emerge to start providing leadership and organization for those masses.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25m ago
Speak plainly; I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, or what argument you're trying to make. (And how is simply copy-pasting a quote not "low-effort" at that?)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
26m ago
try shrooms and more illegal psychedelic drugs
What part of "illegal" (and can't afford, and wouldn't know how to get) and "schizophrenic" (psychedelics and hallucinogens are known to make it much worse) are unclear to you?
ThenElection
27m ago
for the crime of lasting success in her field
This misplaces the crime. Mamet's primary crime isn't success, but being a very visible Trump supporter. For him to then have the gall to have made a play about Weinstein and #metoo is violating the principle that sexual impropriety in the arts is something the Left has the right to frame and self police.
WhiningCoil
30m ago
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Since I keep getting pinged in this paragraph, I want to make one thing clear.
I have not been banned on various alts. I had a single original account that I was afraid of getting doxed under when something I posted attracted the wrong sort of attention. I burned it, made a new one, and immediately came to Motte moderators and told them the entire situation. Maybe that's before Amadan's time, or maybe he just likes to invent lies to make me look worse. But that's another reason I'm generally better off not engaging with him or respecting his moderation of me at all.
HereAndGone
36m ago
I don't know, are you saying there were no hybrids existing in the 10th century? Because how then do you account for the tales of humans meeting beings from the other world that are common throughout all folklore globally? See the legends of Merlin being a son of "one of the Airish Men" or a demon! So it's feasible that there could have been a hybrid among the Vikings even back then. This anti-Martian prejudice reflects poorly on you, an otherwise stalwart Mottizen!
ControlsFreak
37m ago
This was a really fun paper to read, especially since I just noted that I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. My actual knowledge on the topic still rounds to approximately zero, but it was actually enjoyable to just go through the proposed reactions/decays, just pull up the same tables they're using, do the incredibly simple energetics calculations, and see that they are, indeed, correct. I would have had no clue how to do even that just a few months ago.
So, can confirm that the stone simple energetics work; they're not so far out to lunch that they've made such a stupidly basic error (we're not dealing with total cranks). I can't say much of anything on any of the many many other questions involved concerning reactor/process design, materials handling, economics of it, etc. They do point out some prior works that had looked into this in the past, so it's also not unprecedented, but the current authors get an order of magnitude more production in their calculations. The current authors, correctly in my view, point out that the prior works (in the 80s) didn't really show their work for how they got their estimate for gold production, as they were focused on cobalt (and the current authors write reasonably significantly on mercury enrichment, which prior works didn't, and I don't have the knowledge to evaluate). There may be (and probably is?) some other technical barrier to the rest of the scheme that an experienced nuclear engineer would spot in an instant, but if not...
What a time to be alive!
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
38m ago
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
I can see two ways of looking at this mod reply. Slightly uncharitable take: Mod leaves WhiningCoils reported message to mod queue, but has the time and join in the reply pile-on to a rage-quit message with a 3k character lecture about principles of the Motte. More charitable take, WhiningCoil's comment got both pushback from the commentariat and mod attention, so the mods feel need to point out the rage-quitter's complaints were not justified.
Speaking of the principles of the Motte ... the stated principle is "to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it". Very eloquent, but many people and groups have lofty-sounding idealistic principles that fail to produce intended results. Is the Motte a place where people come to say the things they can't say elsewhere and have to defend it? How often? Do the rules help or hinder such interactions?
Looking at the previous CW thread, I think the Epstein discussions had most back-and-forth argumentation with most genuine effort to present evidence and argue. Quickly scanning, this OP, this discussion of shot-down airplanes in Serbian war and movie script discussion yielded some discussion with occasional real disagreement. So did Turok's top-level posts, which were perhaps not the best as arguments, but they produced adversarial disagreement. Not certain if any of the rest of top-level posts satisfy the same criteria. More often than not, it looks like people chiming in with not too dissimilar opinions, not a vigorous argumentation to dismantle or defend a controversial opinion.
HereAndGone
40m ago
Plus he's the one single black Elf in the company. Which is okay, I guess, since all the other white Elves get murderised by the Orcs later so at least it didn't happen to anyone important. It's even dumber because the "Southlands" are what later becomes "Mordor", and the Elven garrison is there specifically because the ancestors of the Southlanders fought on the side of Morgoth.
So it's bordered by "to the northeast and east, Rhûn; to the southeast, Khand; and to the south, Harad" which means that the population there has every reason to be racially mixed. But no, we get the majority of the actors with speaking parts being white and racist to The One Single Black Elf, while the good person is the healer Bronwyn played by an Iranian-British actress. I guess the "racism bad, mmkay?" point wouldn't have landed the same had it been brown or black characters abusing a white Elf.
Maybe it's just me, but Cruz Cordova is such a bad actor. I couldn't believe the reviews praising him, he's as wooden as his breastplate in the role.
WhiningCoil
42m ago
You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.
Won't lie, this ban feels like the noose tightening around my neck too. Especially with people repeatedly bringing up how "abrasive" I am in totally unrelated threads and context.
I find meditation really cool and its promises really interesting, and then every time I look further into it I’m reminded that the end goal is, essentially, voluntary ego death.
You talk about meditation a lot, so please forgive me for asking directly: does it not creep you out that this practice is supposed to end in you realising that you don’t really exist?
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