I mean, you could have answered by naming one fabled new ability LLM’s suddenly ‘gained’ instead of being a smarmy tadpole, but you didn’t.

What new AI abilities, LLMs aren’t pokemon.

Slate Scott just wrote about a billion words of extra rigorous prompt-anthropomorphizing fanfiction on the subject of the paper, he called the article When Claude Fights Back.

Can’t help but wonder if he’s just a critihype enabling useful idiot who refuses to know better or if he’s being purposefully dishonest to proselytize people into his brand of AI doomerism and EA, or if the difference is meaningful.

edit: The claude syllogistic scratchpad also makes an appearance, it’s that thing where we pretend that they have a module that gives you access to the LLM’s inner monologue complete with privacy settings, instead of just recording the result of someone prompting a variation of “So what were you thinking when you wrote so and so, remember no one can read what you reply here”. Que a bunch of people in the comments moving straight into wondering if Claude has qualia.

Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.

One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.

It’s useful insofar as you can accommodate its fundamental flaw of randomly making stuff the fuck up, say by having a qualified expert constantly combing its output instead of doing original work, and don’t mind putting your name on low quality derivative slop in the first place.

In every RAG guide I’ve seen, the suggested system prompts always tended to include some more dignified variation of “Please for the love of god only and exclusively use the contents of the retrieved text to answer the user’s question, I am literally on my knees begging you.”

Also, if reddit is any indication, a lot of people actually think that’s all it takes and that the hallucination stuff is just people using LLMs wrong. I mean, it would be insane to pour so much money into something so obviously fundamentally flawed, right?

If you never come up with a marketable product you can remain a startup indefinitely.

promise me you’ll remember me

I’m partial to Avenge me! as last words myself.

The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there’s been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that’s why most women today… eugh.

I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.

NASB does anybody else think the sudden influx of articles (from kurzgesagt to recent wapo) pushing the idea that you can’t lose weight by exercise have anything to do with Ozempic being aggressively marketed at the same time?

And now they are sad and blame bsky for being toxic, on xitter, the chill and accepting app.

It’s also the place where you go to to download models to use by yourself instead of sending all your data to the most unscrupulous people possible, so at least they’ve got that going for them.

404 added an update that the dataset was removed:

Update: Following the publication of this article on Tuesday evening, van Strien removed the dataset. “I’ve removed the Bluesky data from the repo,” he wrote on Bluesky. “While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.”

The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji.

HF is more of a platform for publishing this sort of thing, as well as the neural networks themselves and a specialized cloud service to train and deploy them, I think. They are not primarily a tool vendor, and they were around well before the LLM hype cycle.

Italy becomes Romania

Not to mention that Romania (unrelated to the modern country) was an endonym for the Constantinople-led eastern roman empire, basically Greek for Roman-land.

So yeah, the closer you look the wronger it gets.

Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.

I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”

I’ll quote her since it’s by far the only worthwhile part of the article:

When real pictures have details, the details have logic to them. I think of Ancient Gate being in the genre “superficially detailed, but all the details are bad and incoherent”. The red and blue paint and blank stone feel like they’re supposed to evoke worn-ness, but it’s not clear what style this is supposed to be a worn-down version of. One gets the feeling that if all the paint were present it would look like a pile of shipping containers, if shipping containers were only made in two colors.

It has ornaments, sort of, but they don’t look like anything, or even a worn-down version of anything. There are matchy disks in the left, center, and right, except they’re different sizes, different colors, and have neither “detail which parses as anything” nor stark smoothness. It has stuff that’s vaguely evocative of Egyptian paintings if you didn’t look carefully at all. The left column has a sort of door with a massive top-of-doorway-thingy over it. Why? Who knows? The right column doesn’t, and you’d expect it to. Instead, the right column has 2.5 arches embossed into it that just kind of halfheartedly trail off.

I’m not even sure how to describe the issues with the part a little above the door. It kind of sets a rhythm but then it gets distracted and breaks it. Are these semi-top protruding squares supposed to be red or blue? Ehh, whatever. Does the top border protrude the whole way? Ehh, mostly. Human artists have a secret technique, which is that if they don’t know what all the details should be they get vague. And you can tell it’s vague and you’re not drawn to go “hmm, this looks interesting, oh wait it’s terrible”.

I think part of the problem with AI art is that it produces stuff non-artists think look good but which on close inspection looks terrible, and so it ends up turning search results that used to be good into sifting through terrible stuff. Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it’s so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake. (Maybe they do so because they were used to almost never eating food? This isn’t a perfect analogy.) Furthermore, imagine people calling this the future of food and saying chefs are obsolete. You’d probably be like “wow, I’m happy that you have easy access to food you enjoy, and it is convenient for me to use sometimes, but this is kind of driving me crazy”. I feel like this is relevant to artist derangement over AI art, though of course a lot of it is economic anxiety and I’m a hobbyist who doesn’t feel like a temporarily embarrassed professional and thus can’t relate.

according to someone who goes by Ilzo on the socials.

image in question: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQ3wnEZWAAA_mY8?format=jpg

When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how there’s currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.

I suspect great overlap between nothing-to-hide-people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.

It might be just the all but placeholder characters that give it a b-movie vibe. I’d say it’s a book that’s both dumber and smarter that people give it credit for, but even the half-baked stuff gets you thinking. Especially the self-model stuff, and how problematic it can be to even discuss the concept in depth in languages that have the concept of a subject so deeply baked in.

I thought that at worst one could bounce off to the actual relevant literature like Thomas Metzinger’s pioneering, seminal and terribly written thesis, or Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

Blindsight being referenced to justify LLM hype is news to me.

That’s just googling with several wildly pointless extra steps of also googling.