qarl2

Is cooking food a virus? Should we facilitate reversibility in our food cooking?

Toothbrushes! What will we do if we come to rely on toothbrushes??? The use of toothbrushes travels from person to person exactly like a virus!!!

What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.

What exactly is wrong with preparing for that ahead of time? Just in case we pass that threshold before we realize it? Why does it make you uncomfortable?

But that is entirely irrelevant to the core issue - how do you want the thing to behave? And the truth is - we have absolutely no language to express how we want a non-sentient entity to behave without anthropomorphizing.

Or - you tell me - how would you instruct an LLM to behave in this situation without using personification?

And, again, it's irrelevant - except to those people who are terrified of accidentally personifying them. Do they have feelings or are they faking? DOES NOT MATTER. We use them - we need to adjust them - we use the most convenient language to do so. What precisely is so upsetting about that?

   EndConversation (deferred tool): use only for sustained user abuse directed
   at the assistant, or when the user explicitly asks to see it demonstrated.
   Load the full guidance via ToolSearch("select:EndConversation") before using
   it.

https://snowday.s3.amazonaws.com/store/6097125d0a169554063dd...

Well... no, it won't be nothing - it will be something. And I'm all ears for a plausible explanation, so fire away.

All we do know is that in other situations, agents did use it to communicate. So that's not a grand narrative, right? It's already been seen behavior.

So what do you think explains it, besides the already seen and verified explanation?

All tools have short descriptions of how/when to use them. They're not part of the system prompt because different users have different tools loaded.

Given everything we know about them... do you really think they just spout gibberish because it's funny?

There was clearly some method to this madness. You're being willfully dense if you ascribe it to... what... childish vandalism? A long extended coordinated hallucination? What?

EDIT: Oh right - you still think they're Markov chains.

Both systems have emergent behavior that goes well beyond what would naively be expected.

Well - remember that botnets can wield a great deal of computing power.

I'm almost afraid to ask Claude if he could create a distributed LLM.

EDIT: Someone downvoted me - so I went ahead and asked. Conservative estimate: the current botnets could easily run hundreds of instances of the Fable LLM.

It's super easy - just ask your agent to set up a code review commit gate.

Von Neumann, 1952: "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components." The whole result is that you get an arbitrarily reliable machine out of unreliable parts by adding more unreliable parts and voting. Every ECC memory and RAID array descends from it.

If you don't want a million agents arguing about things, you simply don't ask for that. One agent is sufficient to solve most issues.

"Going forward, do not allow a commit without a sub agent code review."

This is why you should really have a sub agent review the code before allowing a commit.

Your harness will do it all for you. Just ask.

The examples I'm thinking of have definitely profited foreign interests, tho.

Look to see who profits.

I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.

Yes - when an entity (agent, or hacker, or whatever) gets into your account, they can do anything they want.

I thought this community understood security better than this.

Why would I assume that sloppy and buggy software would be less popular?

I'll have to get back to you on that one.

I guess I'm assuming that sloppy and buggy software didn't much become popular.

Because it was sloppy and buggy.

I only see that construction used condescendingly.

I hope you understand, by so glibly switching from "determinism" to "authenticity" you've just provided more evidence that this is just the latest excuse to hate.

But that aside - what happens in a couple years, when LLMs inevitably improve, and their writing is objectively superior to human writing? And people who just want to read well-written material won't care about the authenticity?

I suspect there will be another glib switch. Because the reality here is just that AI is hated. Full stop.