retsibsi

The point would be that it's open source. And "chances are you're allergic" translates to "your use case / expectations are unusual". But in my opinion the analogy doesn't hold well at all, because destroying a persistent undo file without warning is pretty obviously incorrect and unexpected behavior.

> If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.

I think this is a decent analogy, but it works better the other way. If my neighbour offers to mow my lawn, I accept, and then he destroys the flower bed adjacent to the lawn, I will be upset, and I will have every right to complain about what he did. If he reacts by blithely dismissing my concern, then I certainly have the right (and arguably the obligation) to warn others that they should think twice about accepting his offers of gardening assistance.

Some expectations reasonably go without saying; "don't destroy my flower bed when mowing my lawn" is one, and IMO "don't destroy my data without a clear warning and a chance to back out" is another, though of course we might disagree about exactly where this does and doesn't apply.

They get to do more or less what they want with the software, and others get to say more or less what they want about that. What's wrong with deciding they've crossed a line, being bothered by that, and warning others? Nobody's trying to get the law involved, or maliciously retaliate against them, or anything like that.

> If the model is nothing more than the sum of its training data and regime, then the company is responsible for its behaviour.

What stops the company from being responsible regardless? They created this entity, it's running on servers they own or rent, and (in these cases) it's acting on their instructions.

If it's also conscious, then IMO that greatly broadens their moral responsibility, because now model welfare matters. But we're talking about their responsibility for the model's actions, and I don't see how this could be weakened by model consciousness, given all of the above. As for their legal responsibility, the models don't have legal personhood, so who else but the company could be responsible?

It gets more complicated when the person who sets the model in motion (i.e. prompts it) is a third party, but in cases of internal models committing cybercrime during testing, surely the locus of responsibility is obvious.

On my read they are criticising the reporter, not the child. We definitely should be careful, in situations like this, not to be nasty to the kids involved. But I think we should still be allowed to be upset by bullshit, and strongly criticize the bullshitters, even when they are bullshitting about a child.

> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things

It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.

I appreciate that he responded with (seeming) openness and detail, rather than just posting some pithy insult or whatever would have won him the twitter battle, but this part feels like serious gaslighting or, at best, self-delusion:

> Genuinely, at that moment, I was trying to care for him and do a last ditch attempt to get a chance to give them all the credits that they deserve.

The allegation he is responding to, and which he does not seem to have disputed, is the following passage from Buckmaster's statement (https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf):

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

This is helped along by the number of people willing to cynically offer up a blurb, or even a glowing review, to something mediocre or seriously flawed that they may not even have read. I'm sure the blurbers think they're just doing someone a favour (and/or playing the game so that they will receive reciprocation), and the reviewers are probably less often crooked than simply busy/lazy, but it all goes to make it much harder for good, substantial work to stand out.

> It's at least a bit of psychosis

I know semantic shift is inevitable, but can we put the brakes on this one at least a little? This doesn't even connect to the original meaning.

Maybe I misunderstand the analogy, but in this scenario it seems that the orphan crushing facility's donations to the orphanage are an unalloyed good. Their motives are bad, and they are bad, but their donations to the orphanage are causing more orphans to be taken care of and fewer orphans to be crushed.

Personally, my worry about anonymous donation matching would be that the anonymous (to me) funder is influencing the recipient (to whom their identity is known), and without knowing who they are I can't know the nature of this influence or whether it should cause me to reconsider my support. But I don't see any extra reason to care about anonymous donation matching in particular, as distinct from any other funding whose source is opaque to me.

I don't like that phrase either, but do you have a direct replacement? Language usage tends toward efficiency, and sometimes I want to speak generally rather than specifically, and so if my options for conveying the idea 'read books and/or listened to music and/or saw plays and/or watched tv and/or ......' are to write that out or to say 'consumed content', I'm probably going to hold my nose and go with the latter, at least once I've heard it enough times for it to feel relatively normal.

edit: actually, and this is just a tangential point, I don't think 'content' covers plays or other live experiences. It's usually screen-based, and the main possible exceptions are things that are almost interchangeable with their screen-mediated forms, like books or magazines.

On desktop, it's basically forced heavy smoothscrolling, with an attempt to replicate real motion by gradually slowing to a stop. Horribly laggy for those of us sensitive to such things.

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, so I'm glad it was linked here (and would happily read a defence of the language from one of those previous discussions, too).

When the criticisms relate to correctness bugs, I don't think 'try it out and see how you like it' is sufficient. I might love the syntax and the design and so on, but that doesn't tell me whether I'm going to run into serious bugs some time in the future.

I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.

(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)

Makes sense, but is it relevant to the upthread claim that "All provable models (theories, explanations) that we have, or could have, are by definition wrong or incomplete"? (Not being rhetorical and snide here, I'm curious and aware I may be missing something.)

If reality has irreducible randomness (an open question afaik), and we're talking about theories and explanations (so we're not necessarily trying to describe the actual state of every particle in the universe, but only the rules governing their interactions), couldn't we have a complete, correct theory that was much smaller than the universe and contained terms for the random elements?

There would always be the possibility that it would turn out to be wrong, but it could be complete and correct, so it seems like the original claim must depend heavily on the word 'provable' and not on the impossibility of describing a system via a map smaller than the territory.

edit: but also, surely 'the territory is randomized' is a contingent physical fact, and not a necessary truth of information theory. Until we know for sure that there is irreducible randomness, we can't know that the information content of the universe (including the actual state of all particles at all times) isn't losslessly compressible, right?

> The map has to be become the territory for genuinely perfect accuracy.

Why couldn't the territory be losslessly compressible?

Studies show that your concentration remains sharper if your visual processing system is jarred out of its complacency at frequent, semi-random intervals, preventing you from lapsing into a low-effort 'skim-reading' mindset. It's something to do with the predictive processing model; over time, your brain comes to rely increasingly on top-down processing if its expectations are consistently met, and I guess there is some interplay between visual processing and semantic comprehension in this context.

(Just kidding! I think it is simply an annoying affectation.)

> while respectable people said nothing like it would ever happen

Can you give some examples of predictions he got roughly right where this applies?

(Not a gotcha, I'm genuinely interested, because this is the key for me when thinking about whether to give credit for 'close' or 'right but early' predictions. If you're predicting things that most others have dismissed as impossible, or nobody has even thought of, then it's pretty impressive and interesting when you turn out be even roughly correct. (I'll still ding your credibility if you are overconfident about dates and details, but I'll do that while paying plenty of attention to what you say next.) If you're predicting things that are already suspected to be possible, though, and what makes you stand out is your confidence and your timelines, then I'm not going to be very interested when some of your predictions turn out to be fairly close to the truth.)

> We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.

If he was often right-but-early about things that weren't even in the hypothesis space for everyone else, that would be huge, even though his dated predictions would technically be wrong. But this example seems way less exciting. Facial recognition was not a new or impossible-seeming idea, so the remarkable thing about his prediction was the part where he said "by 2009". (And yeah, 15 years is a short time compared to 2000 years, but 'recorded history of people making predictions' is not really a serious reference class for his predictions. He's a guy in the computer age making predictions about what computers will do.)

Isn't that pretty much his whole thing, confidently telling us what will happen? Of course his reputation should suffer if his predictions are wrong, as should those of the others whose correctness : confidence ratio is too low. (But if their reputation/power/relevance mainly comes from things other than their punditry, we can't really stop 'taking them seriously' altogether.)

Of course you don't need to keep trying until you think it's good. But if you haven't found anything it's good at, and meanwhile lots of smart and seemingly-honest people are saying they've found it to be very good at some things, then it's pretty likely that you really are holding it wrong (and perhaps not even trying to hold it right in the first place).

Yeah, but that applies to the argument in the original comment too. It's supposedly directed at someone who denies we're in an AI bubble, telling them to put their money where their mouth is. But then suddenly they're supposed to risk literally everything they have on "creating a business with infinite growth and value" before their "unlimited" leveraged loans are called in.

Obviously there's some hyperbole there, and I'm not really sure what serious point was being made, but it does seem to depend on the anti-bubble guy having some very confident and specific beliefs...

> Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time.

I dunno, I think this example kind of works in the opposite direction. If we're talking about memorising tables of logarithms or something, then yeah that was a complete waste of time. But a lot of the stuff kids would like to skip because calculators can do it is the absolute basics. IMO it is still important to have a solid grasp of arithmetic, useful to have enough trigonometry that you intuitively understand where it can be useful, and so on. (Much more so if you want to leave open the possibility of studying further mathematics.) And for people to whom these things don't come naturally, you really need to drill it a bit in order to develop the conceptual understanding.

I don't know exactly where this does and doesn't apply to programming/CS, though. I would like to think that a lot of the fundamentals will remain useful, but maybe that will only be true for a few specialised workers and self-motivated hobbyists.

Of course it's hard to define. That doesn't mean every definition is valid. And often this comes up in the context of the Hard Problem, where a definition is clearly inadequate (dodging the problem and talking about something else) if it does not even try to point at qualia/subjective experience/what-it-is-like-to-be.

Sadly, many philosophers, including some who are highly respected, make similar mistakes / play similar games. (Consciousness is inaccessible from the outside, which is epistemologically inconvenient... so how about we pretend it doesn't actually exist, or redefine it and hope everyone forgets about the thing we were trying to talk about in the first place? Aha, now all the so-called mysteries have been dissolved!)

I don't know; I think people in general are just not great at this. Successful people tend to underrate luck and overrate the brilliance of their own decisions, but the rest of us are prone to either reversing that and blaming everyone but ourselves, or being so determined to take accountability (or just depressed) that we become overly self-critical, or simply not understanding why things happened the way they did and reaching for any explanation that resolves the chaos into something narratively satisfying.

How many long-unsolved maths problems have you solved?

Or are you perhaps defining true intelligence as that which computers do not have (yet)?

From interviews with successful creative types, that seems to be a common theme. Often, early on in their careers, they were basically trying to copy their influences, but the copy was imperfect in an interesting way.

(Also, often they're trying to copy multiple things simultaneously, which means their goal is something a bit more complex and interesting than a pure ripoff. But I think their originality really is related to the ways in which they 'fail', or, in more positive terms, the ways in which their own individuality forces its way through.)

> very obviously what is happening

I don't think this is obvious at all. There's enough competition that this would at least arguably be a silly, self-destructive approach. And it's not like it's the only plausible explanation.

I independently reached the same conclusion, and I think we must be right, because the thing I thought I might have missed was some way in which the shoes/clothes are actually relevant and rule out one of those orderings. But our answer matches the one in the paper, and I don't see a mistake we could have made to reach the right answer in the wrong way.

I guess they were not optimising for a satisfying solving experience! (I'm not sure what 'expansion' means in this context, but it sounds like maybe the 'expansion strategy' referred to in the paper involved padding out problems with red herring premises?)