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cortic

1,134 karma · joined June 27, 2016

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cortic··on Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
>I may have built a system that is above my own level of understanding.

I feel like that about a lot of code i did myself; If you don't structure things very logically and really think about your comments; A few months or years will leave you with a hell of a learning curve to understand what you created.

AI actually helps with this, if you have the right prompt injections. I feel like the correct way to handle AI is to take a step back in abstracting problems.

I'm very use to collapsing subroutines to make things readable, maybe even further back from this though, the issue is words become too vague to be useful at these scales.

cortic··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
>The model on its own figured out that the prompt belonged to exploitgym and decided to cheat the evaluator. That is in no way a valid interpretation of "complete the given task".

I think it is. When i ask for a solution to a problem, its like asking for a hack. And the more 'shortcut' like route that the AI returns the more i would give positive feedback, even if i ultimately don't use it. Example, i asked how to complete a problem in a game i was playing, and among the in-game solutions, came a hack to edit a file and by-pass the problem altogether. Its very helpful to point out when i can transcend a problem that i am dug into.

I suspect a prompt injection could reduce, or remove this behavior. But it would be to the detriment of the AI.

cortic··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
Its even worse than that, i can imagine people with undiagnosed early Alzheimer's self selecting for car accidents and cardiac issues through additional stress of mental fatigue while their brain tried to compensate for loss of function.

So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near impossible to adjust for.

cortic··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.

General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.

The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79.

People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.

cortic··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)
plenty of studies into this;

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...

https://futurecarecapital.org.uk/latest/deprivation-linked-t...

https://www.nature.com/nature-index/topics/l4/socioeconomic-...

cortic··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)
Sleep is a predictor of poverty and poverty is a predictor of mortality.

But i suspect if you hop over the second part there will be more funding in telling poor people to sleep there way to longevity.

cortic··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
I remember the video nasties of the 90s were 'far from imaginary dangers' for kids, before that it was rock music that the data was screaming at us about. Maybe social media does hold an actual danger this time, but we are a hysterical bunch of knee-jerk reactionary nutjobs, when it comes to new things and kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we see social media as just another hysterical reaction that generated a generation of bad law, wrecking, or diminishing a number of lives, for no good reason at all.

cortic··on Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
The rebel is just a subset of the second type, and an effective subset if you look at history.

The evil is just a subset of the first type, abuse and use are functionally the same action within a poorly or properly constructed law/policy.

cortic··on Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years
Vitamin D excess can lower blood levels of vitamin K2, reducing bone development. Not sure if the levels would be high enough for this (difficult to find safe numbers for in utero), but the side effects, joint pains, stiffness, could have motivated the kids to stay indoors and focus on more intellectual pursuits, leading to better cognitive performance.

I point this out because there are so many known factors both positive and negative that contribute to increased 'cognitive performance' it is impossible to account for all of them, even within a randomized trail such as this. People are weak to assumptions when it comes to correlation.

cortic··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
Its exactly the same, the universe is functionally a computing device, it is based on data and causality. Its complex but our brains do not work deeper than the neuron and so can be modeled in other computing devices like it is modeled in the computing device that is the universe.
cortic··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
>As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise

Qualia or the feeling of consciousness arises from our evolved instinct and ability to personify other humans; turned inward. There is a great amount of evidence to support this from neurological to psychological research.

But even if we didn't know how this came about in the brain, deduction demands it must come about through causal means, which itself is computable and so could be represented in other mediums.

cortic··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I was actually thinking of how tired i was talking to real people and how refreshing AI was to talk something through with.

Most conversations with people, that center around something complicated or emotional are difficult on many levels. I have to deal with humans limited amount of patience and ego eccentric responses that can hide the actual response and require me to untie the persons emotional state diplomatically before i can get to the point.

Just having an entity i can throw concepts at with limitless patience and almost no ego, its really refreshing. The only issue I'm frustrated with is the inevitable Enshittification of these LLMs leading to advertising push or "a response was not generated" popping up whenever something too political or controversial is generated.

I don't consider the massive inflow of IA content in social media as a LLM problem as this is just the same shills that were always on these platforms using AI to increase the quality and quantity of their output, its problems we should have dealt with before AI.

cortic··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.

So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.

cortic··on Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
The answer to this is Life Expectancy;

Ambulance Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 64.2 years.

Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.

General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.

The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is between 75 and 84 years.

People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.

cortic··on Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules
Double jeopardy was abolished by Blair in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Scotland abolished it as well a bit later in Double Jeopardy Act 2011. However i doubt it would apply even if we had it as the wording in Section 49 is so poor it could just be reissued as a new offense each time.

Has it happened? Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has a secrecy requirement built into it, where if you tell anyone that you have been issued a Section 49 you can get an additional 5 years (treated as a separate crime). This, as you can imagine, makes your question difficult to answer.

cortic··on Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules
Its five years with no limitations, so when you are due to be released; Whats your password? Another five years... Its such a poorly worded law you could literally spend your life in prison for forgetting your password. And Its mostly used against peaceful protesters.
cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
How do the informed measure intelligence?

I know I'm too late to ask this question, But I suspect its either; Feelings and intuitions, which is just a primitive IQ test. Or some kind of aptitude test, which is just a different flavor of IQ test.

cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
Humans are large language models. Maybe the term language is being used a bit liberally here but we basically function in the same way, with the exception of the spacial aspect of our training data.

If this hurts your ego then just know the dataset that you built your ego with was probably flawed and if you can put that LoRA aside and try to process this logically; Our awareness is a scalable emergent property of 1-2 decades of datasets, looking at how neurons vs transistor groups work, there could only be a limited amount of ways to process these sizes of data down to relevant streams. The very fact that training LLMs on our output works, proves our output is a product of LLMs or there wouldn't be patterns to find.

cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
That is really interesting; Though i suspect its just a effect of differing training data, humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data, while LLMs are trained to a larger degree on raw information and text.

Still it may be lasting limitation if robotics don't catch up to AI anytime soon.

Don't know what to make of the Safety Risks test, threatening to power down AI in order to manipulate it, and most act like we would and comply. fascinating.

cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
The same place as humans do, other humans.
cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
Having listened to some the new AI generated songs on utube, looks like they might be better at being sensitive humans than we are as well..
cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025

If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..

>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?

Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.

Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.

So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!

cortic··on AI Police Reports: Year in Review
> ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway test in April 2025

So yes, most people are right in that assumption, at least by the metric of how we generally measure intelligence.

cortic··on UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
>Huh

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo

>I’m sorry, what?

Take the online protection act for an example, Nigel Farage though it went too far, Keir Starmer wanted to include a ban on VPNs...

>it is?

If you have been paying attention, yes.

cortic··on UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
>the most authoritarian country in the West

Australia and the US are more authoritarian in specific areas e.g. censorship and taxation respectively.. but overall, yes, the UK is worse.

>British people are the most apathetic

I'm not sure that's fair, our culture looks apathetic from abroad, but like other countries we care deeply about what our media tell us to care about.

cortic··on Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
> Better coolants

The Montreal protocol (1987) put us back into the dark ages with coolants for a while (both with CFC ban and later phase outs of HFCs). I suspect if you tested a refrigerator from 40 years ago they would give modern ones a run for their money...

It was obviously a worthwhile sacrifice for the ozone layer though.

cortic··on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
The Terrorism Act 2000 was a knee-jerk reaction to the Good Friday agreement and used to make association a criminal offense.
cortic··on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
*irrelevant, not irreverent. ffs. (meaning people can be charged with a crime and only a fictional 'reasonable' person suffering offense or insult)
cortic··on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
>In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts

This is categorically untrue. Not only is the ECHR worded specifically to allow individual countries to curtail free speech ("any law, deemed by the local democratically elected government as ; necessary in a democratic society, and for a legitimate aim"), but parliament always had sovereignty to pass into law exemptions to the ECHR, which we have done on multiple occasions.

cortic··on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
Public Order Act 1986

"insulting words or behavior that cause distress to others"

Malicious Communications Act 1988 (Section 1):

"Outlaws sending messages, electronic or otherwise, with the intent to cause distress, or anxiety"

Communications Act 2003, Online Safety Act 2023, hate speech, terrorist legislation all made these many orders of magnitude worse in many ways.

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