Jiro
9m 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
9m ago
I should have put that in quotes. I'm not that much of a wordcel apologist, even if I'm a wordcel.
TowardsPanna
10m 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
10m 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
12m 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
13m 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
15m 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
16m 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
17m 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
20m 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
26m 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
27m 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
28m 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
30m 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
32m 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.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
37m ago
I'll take your word for it. My eyes glaze over when I read this posts. Now that you mention it, he certainly does strike me as a Hananianite or a Hanania-lite. As someone with libertarian sympathies, I wish I had better representation.
Getting excited about A Play About David Mamet Writing About Harvey Weinstein, in which "Mamet is poisoned, castrated and murdered with his own playwriting award": https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/mathilde-dratwa-david-mamet-harvey-weinstein-play-1236317797/ My play about this play about the famed playwright will settle all of this. In all seriousness, I am struck by the interview at the link, in which the younger playwright Dratwa seems much more upset with Mamet than with Weinstein, and for the crime of lasting success in her field (admittedly long past his prime, by all accounts). Addendum: I guess this is a temptation facing everyone in the arts: you might go into it thinking you have something to say about society, or humanity, but you’ll probably spend all day thinking about art, so guess where you’ll find inspiration? Film, which seens to have been Dratwa's previous field, seems especially bad for this -- just filthy with "movies about the magic of movies."
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
38m ago
Not saying the post was good. The "someone on Twitter" bit is annoying, because you can't even check if they actually said that, if his interpretation matches that of other people, etc. I'm just saying it doesn't break the bare links rule, or wouldn't even if there was a link.
HereAndGone
43m ago
"Rings of Power" got into trouble for exactly this. I'd give Queen-Regent Míriel a pass (we don't know in canon anything about her mother's family or who her mother was, and there were good Haradrim/Easterlings who interacted with the Edain, so it's not impossible that her maternal family were persons of colour) but the Hobbits, sorry, Harfoots and Stoors, were just too much. A lot of jokes about "and is the final season going to end with they get to the Shire and then there's a mass genocide where only the white Hobbits survive?" since this is meant to be prequel to the LoTR movies and that is established canon that the Hobbits are all white.
I'm waiting for season three to see how they write themselves out of all the corners they've written themselves into, but I wonder will we ever get that season three in the end?
For years, the story of AI progress has been one of moving goalposts. First, it was chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, and people said, fine, chess is a well defined game of search and calculation, not true intelligence. Then it was Go, which has a state space so vast it requires "intuition." AlphaGo prevailed in 2016, and the skeptics said, alright, but these are still just board games with clear rules and win conditions. "True" intelligence is about ambiguity, creativity, and language. Then came the large language models, and the critique shifted again: they are just "stochastic parrots," excellent mimics who remix their training data without any real understanding. They can write a sonnet or a blog post, but they cannot perform multi step, abstract reasoning.
I present an existence proof:
OpenAI just claimed that a model of theirs qualifies for gold in the IMO:
To be clear, this isn't a production-ready model. It's going to be kept internal, because it's clearly unfinished. Looking at its output makes it obvious why that's the case, it's akin to hearing the muttering of a wild-haired maths professor as he's hacking away at a chalkboard. The aesthetics are easily excused, because the sums don't need one.
The more mathematically minded might enjoy going through the actual proofs. This unnamed model (which is not GPT-5) solved 5/6 of the problems correctly, under the same constraints as a human sitting the exam-
two 4.5 hour exam sessions, no tools or internet, reading the official problem statements, and writing natural language proofs.
As much as AI skeptics and naysayers might wish otherwise, progress hasn't slowed. It certainly hasn't stalled outright. If a "stochastic parrot" is solving the IMO, I'm just going to shut up, and let it multiply on my behalf. If you're worse than a parrot, then have the good grace to feel ashamed about it.
The most potent argument against AI understanding has been its reliance on simple reward signals. In reinforcement learning for games, the reward is obvious: you won, or you lost. But how do you provide a reward signal for a multi page mathematical proof? The space of possible proofs is infinite, and most of them are wrong in subtle ways. Wei notes that their progress required moving beyond "the RL paradigm of clear cut, verifiable rewards."
How did they manage that? Do I look like I know? It's all secret-sauce. The recent breakthroughs in reasoning models like o1 and onwards relied heavily on "RLVR", which stands for reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. At its core, RLVR is a training method that refines AI models by giving them clear, objective feedback on their performance. Unlike Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which relies on subjective human preferences to guide the model, RLVR uses an automated "verifier" to tell the model whether its output is demonstrably correct. Presumably, Wei means something different here, instead of simply scaling up RLVR.
It's also important to note that previous SOTA, DeepMind's AlphaGeometry, a specialized system, had previously achieved a silver-medal level performance and was within spitting distance of gold. A significant milestone in its own right, but OpenAI's result comes from a general-purpose reasoning model. GPT-5 won't be as good at maths, either because it's being trained to be more general at the cost of sacrificing narrow capabilities, or because this model is too unwieldy to serve at a profit. I'll bet the farm on it being used to distill more mainstream models, and the most important fact is that it exists at all.
HereAndGone
51m ago
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
No_one
53m ago
One of the weirdest things I noticed is that the best chess player in the family (he was in top 20 nation wide(small country tho) in his prime, I think) is so scatter-brained that car maintenance and dealing with paperwork was something his wife did.
He has legendary skills at messing up anything computer related.
HereAndGone
56m ago
I suppose, as normally used, it's "short term gains mean long term losses". Being enticed away by something that sounds good, to the point you ignore all other intervention, then you end up losing everything.
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.
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