3,128 karma · joined August 7, 2017
But the clade also contains all the tetrapods. So valid answers include "Lion" and "Human."
If the LLM answers "lungfish," as they often do, you can follow that up with "what is your favorite animal" and see if it notices the trap: It's stuck answering "lungfish" again or else something outside Sarcopterygii, like a ray-finned fish or a Cnidarian.
> What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is?
I imagine that, like me, they're expecting to see what it has to say. You don't think it's interesting which preferences LLMs express and how stable or unstable those preferences are?
There was a time when you could search "the" in Google and the top result would be The Onion. That's obviously a case of either extreme SEO or some kind of expensive deal, but either way it's kind of interesting. But you might say, "what is anyone expecting by Googling the word 'the'?"
I've had it downgrade to Opus for the following questions:
"How confident are we that English and American Eels both spawn in the Sargasso Sea?"
"Come up with five Zoology questions of increasing difficulty for a trivia game."
"What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"
My wife has some zoology-related preferences in her user instructions, and she had it downgrade to Opus after prompting it with: "plant."
"Social media" as a term comes even later, to capture Twitter and the social features of YouTube and other stuff like that. But it's all sites where most users are people using real names and real faces, and users generally produce content themselves and follow each other's content.
There's clearly a cluster there and HN/Slashdot/Reddit/Digg are clearly outside it. An umbrella that covers both HN and Facebook is almost meaningless; it's "all websites with user-generated OR user-supplemented content."
IME even high-end KVM switches experience occasional signal interruption or, more often, failure to synchronize at all on output switch.
Do what OP did.
Instead, there should be standard civil penalties for leaking various degrees of PII paid as restitution to the affected individual. Importantly, this must be applied REGARDLESS of "certification" or whether any security practices were "incorrect" or "insufficient". Even if there's a zero-day exploit and you did everything right, you pay. That's the cost of storing people's secrets.
This would make operating services whose whole "thing" is storing a bunch of information about individuals (like Canvas) much more expensive. Good! It's far to cheap to stockpile a ticking time bomb of private info and then walk away paying no damages just because you complied with some out-of-date list of rules or got the stamp of approval from a certification org that's incentivized to give out stamps of approval.
You don't seem like a violent person; quite the opposite. Most people are like that, myself included. I'm mad at the government. Steaming mad, even. But killing? Not even remotely close.
I get that it's easy to discount low-probability futures as meaningless, but I won't do that either. Maybe the insurance policy that is the 2nd amendment has paid out $0 so far. I don't think that's the case, but for the sake of argument let's say it's so. Even if it were so, history and current events indicate to me that we should keep paying for the policy. We think we've got it bad now, but our guy is an absolute kitten compared to some of the tyrants our species has cooked up.
I don't want to be too blunt, but this is the "uninformed" I was talking about. The same asymmetry was present in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The ability to level cities is not actually that helpful when the goal is to control the population. Modern revolutions don't involve standing armies that you can kill will tanks.
> outright revolution (at which point the constitution doesn't really matter)
It doesn't matter beyond the point of revolution. It matters a lot that it was in effect before the revolution.
> what can't be argued is that the 2nd amendment has been effective at protecting our rights. Our rights are routinely violated.
I'm not sure if you just don't understand the concept of a last resort or if you actually think that we're at the point of last resort already, in which case my only question is: Do you own a gun yet?
Violent revolutions are a part of our history, and they still happen around the world today. Unless things go very, very poorly in the next few decades, we probably won't see another one in the USA in our lifetimes. We can all admit that that fact makes the 2nd amendment's usefulness feel fantastical.
But on deeper reflection I would hope that we can acknowledge that violent revolution is not an impossibility, it's merely an improbability. And anybody who tries to tell you that hundreds of millions of small arms are inconsequential in a fight is uninformed, to put it lightly.
The fact that the current level of rights abuses (which I would agree is much too high and climbing!) has not lead to a violent revolution is a feature, not a bug.
I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.
EDIT: Parent used to say "it's common for salespeople to log in to customer environments to show potential customers what the product looks like with actual data in it."
But not everything you don't need to know, like it's name. That's a barnacle. But I still love the point your making here. :)
While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
Also, there's another benefit downstream of that one: Powers of two work as a schelling point for allocations. Picking powers of two for resizable vectors maximizes "good luck" when you malloc/realloc in most allocators, in part because e.g. a buddy allocator is probably also implemented using power-of-two allocations for the above reason, but also for the plain reason that other users of the same allocator are more likely to have requested power of two allocations. Spontaneous coordination is a benefit all its own. Almost supernatural! :)
It's a very frustrating social problem. Obviously we can't let ourselves be held collectively hostage by bad actors in all situations. But I would still predict that there are some situations where the bad actor population is so large and "mildly-bad" that indefinitely giving in to their implicit demands is the right game theoretic choice.
It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.