elliotto

If Volkswagen goes under, the Lower Saxony government likely loses an income stream.

If Intel goes under, Taiwan becomes the battleground for WW3.

Why would the damage have been done by then? What does that even mean?

One of the most important game theory results is that in a hostile environment, asshole behaviour is rewarded, and the net group utility sucks. But in a supportive environment, virtuous behaviour is rewarded, and group utility skyrockets.

OP has stated that the system design interview exists as a way to performatively answer a set of questions that don't relate to actually being a good system designer. In your response, you have claimed that their proposed truthful answers don't give a lot of 'signal' and that you would prefer candidates to engage with the performative nature of the process. This is true - but is not an argument against the OP's claim, which is that reciting a set of facts about system design in an interview != being a good system designer.

I've made a lot of baiting internet comments in my time, but not in my wildest imagination did I expect a response to my comment mocking Palantir to be anti-women's suffrage.

I think you have conflated 'build something for society' with 'build a business' which is very hacker-news-core. My mind immediately went to building infrastructure and schools in rural Nepal, not building a b2b saas that raises customer acquisition rates by 8 %.

I've found the opposite of this to be the case. I've spent some time recently debugging a chatbot - when it goes astray I say 'what part of your system prompt made you do that' and it responds with the line that drove this decision. Then I clarify my intent and ask for better phrasing, and fix it. This usually works.

This also often works with tool use and tool cause - just ask it what part of its prompt told it to do something and it can usually point there.

If you ask it why it thought something a priori was wrong, then the bot can't answer it, and neither can I. If you ask me to clarify why I wrote some code I can walk you through the steps I got there. But if you ask me to clarify why I believed a function exists, that upon runtime I learned doesn't actually exist, I can't provide justification there.

I've thought about this problem a lot too.

I've wondered if it comes down to a game theory result where if you have x amount of time to distribute amongst y problems, there's more net social utility in applying a simple solution to everyone, and accepting that difficult problems will be missed. Versus spending detailed time on each problem, and as a result solving fewer problems but better.

Of course, when money comes into play, it seems as though you're going to be financially required to rush everyone through the door in 15 minutes, or else your business will lose to someone who adopts this strategy. Leaving anyone with a complex problem dead.

I spend a lot of time on migraine and pain subreddits and there is an air of deference to the medical authority to know what to do. But if your case is complex, you just can't fit into the simple flow chart, and need to advocate and problem solve for yourself. Which leads people into the path of pseudoscience and exploitation.

Yeah turns out leeching off the surveillance state makes heaps of money. Great business model

The author is a New yorker columnist, and seems to be a practicing / ex-practicing doctor. They talk about their experience with their various doctors and being passed around different medications with various side effects, to some degree of success. Despite all their expertise and expense, they still cannot find a root cause (which may not exist at all), and struggle to find a medication protocol that works for them.

If you really want a bad trip, head over to the r/migraine and r/chronicpain subreddits. These subreddits are full of people, with none of the resources or experiences as the author, betrayed entirely by the medical system which does not serve them, and condemned to chronic pain. The complexity and range of headache and migraine causes does not lend itself well to a 15 minute GP appointment every few months, and without the technical expertise these people turn to alternative medicine, online pseudoscience, and opiates.

I'm interested in this perspective, I haven't come across much criticism of Wolfram but I haven't really looked for it much either. Is it because of his theory of everything ruliad stuff?

I really enjoy his blog posts and his work on automata seems to be well respected. I've felt he presents a solid epistemology.

This is one of the only comments here mentioning their drugs. These guys are juiced to the gills (on a combination of legal + prescription + illegal drugs) and doing weird shit because of it. The author even mentions the example of the polycule taking MDMA in a blackout room.

It makes me wonder whether everyone on this forum is just so loaded on antidepressants and adhd meds that they don't even find it unusual.

I'm not at all a rationalist or a defender, but big yud has an epistemology that takes the form of the rationalist sacred text mentioned in the article (the sequences). A lot of it is well thought out, and probably can't be discarded as just coming from science fiction and video games. Yud has a great 4 hour talk with Stephen Wolfram where he holds his own.

I find using an AI to understand complex philosophical topics one of my most unexpected use cases. Previously, I would get stuck scrolling through wikipedia full of incredibly opaque language, that assumes a background I don't have. But I can tell a bot what my background is, and it can make an explanation that is in the right level of complexity.

As an example, I'm reading a book on Buddhism, and I'm comfortable with Kant, and AI is useful for explaining to me a lot of the ideas they have as they relate to transcendental idealism (Kant).

On the other hand, I still don't know what a body without organs is.

I think you are understating how difficult this is to do. I suspect there are a handful of super-geniuses who can read the philosophical canon and understand it, without some formal guidance. Plato and Dostoevsky might be possible (Socrates would be a bit difficult), but getting to Hegel and these newer more complex authors is almost impossible to navigate unless you are a savant.

I suspect a lot of the rationalists have gotten stuck here, and rather than seek out guidance or slowing down, changed tack entirely and decided to engage with the philosophers du jour, which unfortunately is a lot of slop running downstream from Thiel.

Couldn't you take this same line of reasoning and apply it to the rationalist group from the article who killed a bunch of people, and conclude that you shouldn't become a rationalist because you probably kill people?

My favourite instantiation of this weird invocation is from this AI video generator, where they literally subtract the prompt for 'low quality video' from the input, and it improves the quality. https://youtu.be/iv-5mZ_9CPY?t=2020

I've just migrated my AI product to a different underlying model and had to redo a few of the prompts that the new model was interpreting differently. It's not obseleted, just requires a bit of migration. The improved quality of the new models outweighs any issues around prompting.

I read what you wrote and let it stand on its own. Your comment mentioned a single time the bot had failed - there was no mention of it occurring multiple times. Maybe you should flesh out your anecdotes properly.

If you are treating anonymous posts on forums with the same authority as experts on those topics then it makes sense why you are struggling to use new tooling.

Does a chess engine know, think, or deduct?

You're responding to simonw, the guy who could be considered the single leading voice in practical applications of llms, with an anecdote about how one time the bot gave you a compiler error, and llm coding is therefore useless.

In my experience the api call is trivial compared to the time taken for the LLM to compose the response.

It depends on your use case and scale.

If you have a million records of unstructured text (very common, maybe website scrapes of product descriptions, user reviews, etc) you want to be doing an embedding search on these to get the most relevant docs.

If you have a hundred .py files than you want your agent to navigate through these with a grep tool

We OCR them with an LLM into markdown. Super expensive and slow but way more reliable than trying to decode insanely structured PDFs that users upload, which often include pages that are images of the text, or diagrams and figures that need to be read.

Really depends on your scale and speed requirements.

Ah I understand.

My startup provides a vector search system as part of its offering. A user can upload a dataset of records and build a vector index on one of its columns and perform searches. It honestly works incredibly well on a whole bunch of different domains and I was shocked at how useful it was out of the box compared to a conventional BM25 style keyword search. Since we've got this working it's completely changed the way I think about navigating unstructured text data.

If I have a dataset of 100k company website scrapes and I was looking for gyms, and I did a search for 'gym' I would get a whole bunch of conventional gyms. But I would miss companies that described themselves at fitness centers, or aquatic centers or MMA dojos. Vector search picks all of these up, but usually ranks them slightly lower.

If I'm building a RAG bot that is helping me look up companies and I search for a gym, I want the bot to have these extra companies in its context. I can do a vector similarity cutoff, but I can also do a #records cutoff, so that it always has the X most relevant records in its context window.

We've found the fuzziness of the vector search to be a problem in general purpose search cases because people write searches optimizing for keyword match. We had this problem with a company using it for a dataset with highly technical product codes that the embedding search was missing. Our solution was a hybrid keyword / vector search system for these guys that prioritized keyword match but also considered vector similarity. But it's still a big issue to communicate to the user what to write in the embedding search box - whereas in RAG the bot handles all of this.

I think it's an unsolved problem and there continuous to be enormous development in this space.

What do you mean by automatically curated content chunks? RAG with Embedding search is the process of deciding which chunks go into the context of the bot so that it can reference them to answer a user question

Wow the description of the gemini personality as Eeyore is on point. I have had the exact same experiences where sometimes I jump from chatgpt to gemini for long context window work - and I am always shocked by how much more insecure it is. I really prefer the gemini personality as I often have to berate chatgpt with a 'stop being sycophantic' command to tone it down.

Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.

Ah I understand, you're exactly right I misinterpreted the notation of P(#). I was considering each model as assigning binary truth values to the propositions (e.g., physicalism might reject all but Postulate #1, while an anthropocentric model might affirm only #1, #2, and #6), and modeling the probability distribution over those models instead. I think the expected value computation ends up with the same downstream result of distributions over propositions.

By incoherent I was referring to the internal inconsistencies of a model, not the probabilistic claims. Ie a model that denies your own consciousness but accepts the consciousness of others is a difficult one to defend. I agree with your statement here.

Thanks for your comment I enjoyed thinking about this. I learned the estimating distributions approach from the rationalist/betting/LessWrong folks and think it works really well, but I've never thought much about how it applies to something unfalsifiable.

I think you've fallen into the trap of Descartes' Deus deceptor! Not only is #1 the only question from my list we can definitely answer yes to, but due to this demon this question is actually the only postulate of anything at all that we can answer yes to. All else could be an illusion.

Assuming we escape the null space of solipsism, and can reason about anything at all, we can think about what a model might look like that generates some ordering of P(#). Of course, without a hypothetical consciousness detector (one might believe or not believe that this could exist) P(#) cannot be measured, and therefore will fall outside of the realm of a scientific hypothesis deduction model. This is often a point of contention for rationality-pilled science-cels.

Some of these models might be incoherent - a model that denies P(#1) doesn't seem very good. A model that denies P(#2) but accepts P(#3) is a bit strange. We can't verify these, but we do need to operate under one (or in your suggestion, operate under a probability distribution of these models) if we want to make coherent statements about what is and isn't conscious.

It seems like you are doing a lot of inferring about mammals experiencing consciousness, and you have drawn a line somewhere beyond these, and made the claim that your process is scientific. Could I present you my list of questions I presented to the OP and ask where you draw the line, and why here?

My general list of questions for those presenting a model of consciousness are: 1) Are you conscious? (hopefully you say yes or our friend Descartes would like a word with you!) 2) Am I conscious? How do you know? 3) Is a dog conscious? 4) Is a worm conscious? 5) Is a bacterium conscious? 6) Is a human embryo / baby consious? And if so, was there a point that it was not conscious, and what does it mean for that switch to occur?

I agree about the confusion of consciousness with intelligence, but these are complicated terms that aren't well suited to a forum where most people are interested in javscript type errors and RSUs. I usually use the term qualia. But to your example about existing for a few seconds without a train of thought; the Buddhists call this nirvana, and it's quite difficult to actually achieve.