placebo

Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...

Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.

I'm not saying this isn't the GPT-5 system prompt, but on what basis should I believe it? There is no background story, no references. Searching for it yields other candidates (e.g https://github.com/guy915/LLM-System-Prompts/blob/main/ChatG...) - how do you verify these claims?

The correct analogy to me is that being able to run fast will not help you that much in building a rocket to take you to the moon. I'm open to changing my mind though if presented with a solid counter argument.

While I can definitely see the ability to type faster as an advantage in some cases, I don't think I'll ever bother going through the process of learning it. From decades of software development I can type fast enough for whatever it is I need without looking at the keyboard and not once have I felt that the bottleneck of my productivity is the the speed that I type. Most of the time goes into thinking how to do it right so that it doesn't have to be done again... And with code generation becoming better all the time, I believe the abstraction layers were one will have to spend more time on will get even higher.

Where do you think morality fits into this game? It seems that we agree that underneath it all is unfathomable and ineffable magic. The question is how does this influence how you act in the game?

They are indeed labels, just like complex numbers are labels and just like natural numbers are labels. All of them can be regarded as imaginary if one wants to nitpick but all are very useful imaginary models

When the means become the end things start to go bad. When one's ego becomes the goal then Moralizing is more satisfying than understanding.

Working software and correct software are two different things and understanding that like in most things there is a tradeoff might be beneficial.

Thanks.

Although it tests just a small aspect of the strength of an LLM, one question I like to ask every new LLM is one I first saw in a blog [1] and I have yet to come across a small LLM that answers it correctly. Almost all large LLMs won't answer it correctly either.

A small strawberry is put into a normal cup and the cup is placed upside down on a table. Someone then takes the cup and puts it inside the microwave. Where is the strawberry now?

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-o1-the-enigmatic-force...

Perhaps if you define evil as a low quantity of ability or commitment to search for and act in accordance to what is ultimately true then that will better resonate with you. Of course, that will necessarily lead to questions regarding the nature of truth and whether it exists, but that is beyond the scope of a short reply :)

Thinking about this a bit, Language Learning Model might be a better TLA than Large Language Model since "Large" is a subjective, period-dependant adjective whereas language learning is precisely what these models achieve (with all the derivatives that come as features when you map the world with language)

Haha, awesome, thank you.

"We propose a somewhat more speculative theory (with apologies to Douglas Adams and Veet Voojagig). Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life"

I knew it! :-)

I would continuously lose ballpoint pens. At one point I thought the solution was to buy an expensive ball point pen as that would make me more aware of not losing it, but the effect was that it would just take a bit longer. I finally settled on buying many cheap pens. One humorous thought that I was curious about was that since I never found any pens (either my own or those lost by others), was it the case that there are people who find pens in the same way I lose them or do they just vanish into another dimension...

I think the part of "even if I never benefit from it" is a key point in living a meaningful life and transcending the fear of death, though hopefully you have carefully considered your decision from a financial perspective since material aspects are obviously also a part of being able to carry out your plans in this life.

I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.

Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming.

It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it.

I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.

My definition of wisdom is the ability to responsibly use intelligence, and while as a species we are blessed with an amazing amount of intelligence, our wisdom has not advanced accordingly. The phrase that with great power comes great responsibility is not something that is taken very seriously where it counts, not even (or especially?) in high level global politics and with all our technology, it seems that our actions are mainly determined by the same limited animal psychology that determined how cavemen behaved. It's just that now the stakes are much higher, and junk mail from AI is the least of those problems.

The "upside" is that nature eventually takes care of things when they go out of equilibrium, so there might be a forest fire on the horizon to restore it. In the case of AI spam, it might cause people to automatically filter their incoming mail from any content that even implicitly tries to sell something, or even any email arriving from an address that is not on their whitelist. This might eventually cause people to need to actually physically meet (gasp!) in order to add each other to their whitelist.

"Eisenstein asked whether there were some more instructions regarding the film.

Stalin. I am not giving you instructions but expressing the viewer's opinion."

Yeah, right...

Reminds me of a joke where mankind got so technologically advanced that they were able to create man from a piece of ground. They contacted God and told him they reached his level since they can create a man from a piece of ground. God asked them to repeat the process and when they started to collect some ground he stopped them saying "no, not with my ground..."

While I agree that people who take goodwill as a sign of weakness should be deterred, I think that anger as a means to achieve that is a double-edged sword. Perhaps a good method is to use the paper trick and dispose of the anger after it has served its purpose ...

I doubt the fact that we know we've had a good or bad sleep is related to the existence of awareness when in deep sleep. If someone remains indefinitely in deep sleep there will be no personal experience and therefore nothing to qualify as good or bad. When a sense of self returns with waking up then your body gives you the signals from the accumulated effects that you didn't sleep in a good position or whatever positive or negative aspect that has left a trace while you were out cold.

I'm not negating the possibility that consciousness might be a primary aspect of existence - it's just that if that is the case then it is not something you have or can remember. It would be more accurate to say that it is something that has you, and as some spiritual masters would point out, it would be even more accurate not to say anything about it :)

I think the fact that "structure determines behavior" is true is exactly what it is he is lamenting about. The fact that a tool enables you to shoot yourself in the foot is never an excuse to shoot yourself in the foot. Knowing how not to shoot yourself in the foot with a powerful tool is one thing that separates amateurs from professionals, and you get to be a professional by caring.

That is not to say that work shouldn't be done on making tools which require less cognitive load to use professionally, but until that happens I feel there are too many opinions blaming the tools instead of taking on the responsibility required to use them correctly.

Agree, seems like a good example. I also understand what you meant by an example :) Sorry for the misunderstanding...

I see nothing wrong with platitudes if they are true :)

I'm not sure what examples you're looking for or would find convincing. I can speak about my own experiences of learning new things, where the speed of what I learned were always proportional the how interesting and accessible the material was made to be. In the cases where it was made enjoyable, I usually had more than enough motivation and curiosity to dig deeper using new materials that were less fun to learn (but could have been made fun too).

I can also speak of my experiences teaching young people with no knowledge about programming who had preconceptions about how boring and difficult it is, which illustrated the degree of how you teach something has an effect on the perception of struggling.

I assume you have your own examples as well, but if you can offer a counterexample I'll reconsider my opinion :)

There is another important thing I'd like to point out though. What makes something fun or accessible for one person is not always what will do it for another. Having to teach groups, and especially large groups of people will make it very challenging if not impossible to be the ideal teacher. I'm not judging anyone for not being to be an ideal teacher under these constraints. Just pointing out that this should be the objective - not saying it is always possible.

I think there are two main factors in doing this: The first is creating the passion for the subject matter by making it both fascinating and accessible and by that generating even more curiosity and motivation that I believe are innate in everyone. The second is never letting anyone feel that they are treading water (although this can be seen as a by-product of making things accessible).

Even when babies learn how to walk (assuming a healthy and secure environment) they do not need (or would understand) any assurance that the struggle will be worth it. They go for the struggle because the instinct/motivation to explore is already there - it gives a sense of autonomy, of being in control, of making progress, of being involved, of being alive.

But no need to make assumptions about what motivates babies - you can look at how people feel when playing games, solving puzzles etc. They don't see it as a struggle, it is something that is a joy to participate in, even though it might be very challenging. A great teacher is someone that makes learning a by-product of having fun. I believe this is possible for any subject, no matter how "difficult" or "boring".

Although there is no way around the struggle, there is a way around how the struggle is perceived and experienced. A good teacher shows the struggle is worth it, but I believe a great teacher makes the struggle something you enjoy doing, and not something you have to put up with so you can enjoy the compensation at some point in the future.

Cool. Created the same idea quite a few years ago. Also added the ability to traverse the network and view clips and info about the artists. The entire thing leverages one SQLite file.

https://nocurve.com/musicmap/

As the google API key is now invalid, you get to see how the clips were queried... ;-)

It was an API I developed using ActiveX on Microsoft's Internet explorer and NPAPI on other browsers

made something similar 14 years ago...

https://youtu.be/bEwsuWNxdno

domain isn't mine anymore...

Both our opinions about this are equally unfalsifiable unless we agree on an experiment that can be performed at some point which would make one of us change their mind.

I assume you'd agree that the pursuit of what is ultimately true should be exactly the opposite of making oneself more closed minded by repairing inconvenient holes in one's opinions rather than reassessing them based on new evidence.

I wasn't referring to the ability to persuade someone to hold an arbitrary position (although that could be a fun debate as well), and putting aside the discussion about the ability to persuade fanatics, if a super intelligence had an internal model that is more aligned with what is true, it could in theory convince someone who wants to understand the truth to take a critical look at their opinions and change them if they are authentic and courageous enough to do so.

While I agree that human persuasion would probably not change a worldview built on lived experience, you can't know in advance what might be possible with superhuman persuasion. You might be led to believe that your experience was interpreted incorrectly, that things are different now or that you live in an illusion and don't even know who you are. There is no way to tell what the limits of psychological manipulation are for reprogramming your beliefs unless you are totally above any human doubt about everything, which is in itself a sad state to be in.

I hope that persuaded you :)