strangegecko

> Individually, people prefer be kind and compassionate, prefer to help when they find another in trouble.

What are you basing that claim on?

How do you know it's an actual preference and not mainly caused by external factors (e.g. not wanting to be seen doing unkind things, wanting to be seen as upstanding)?

Have we arrived at the conclusion that terms like "understanding" and "interpretation" for what is happening is appropriate?

Isn't it simply that there are two competing goals that the LLM received RL for, honesty on one hand (a goal that is often assumed as implicit for humans) and producing a solution that meets expectations (which doesn't technically require honesty)?

So the LLM didn't read and interpret the prompt and decide via discussion to violate ethical behavior, the unethical result merely won out because ethics wasn't a hard requirement (and one that isn't reliably detected in the result). An LLM doesn't fear punishment, so ethical behavior is simply one of many positive signals that were trained into it.

FWIW, I had a similar impression of your comment as JohnMakin.

> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on

If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.

If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.

It could work, but those types of jobs (paying significantly more than local salary and yet fully remote in a different time zone) are few and not easy to get nowadays (not that they were ubiquitous before).

No, he says it's a different category of problem, and ability to solve one doesn't carry over to the other and it doesn't imply intelligent understanding.

The overseas person didn't work out because of time zone and cultural and language barrier friction that wasn't anticipated in the idea.

This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.

I'm guessing with backstabbing he means China's practice of stealing technology and closing off the market for foreign companies.

Lots of smaller and mid sized companies that tried to invest in the Chinese market lost everything because the government protected and supported local copycats, with no intention of giving the foreign company fair access to the market.

He literally said it for China: stopping an invasion. I would add limiting political influence from autocratic governments that don't respect individual rights, but I know that's opening another Pandora's box.

We all have a health problem that puts an end date on our efforts.

Product does what it should and doesn't what it shouldn't?

Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.

His analogy is that a gas station is for putting gas into your car. But he walks there often, so the assumption that you need your car if you go to the gas station isn't inevitable.

You could conceivably walk to a car wash that has similar sundries as a gas station.

Oh sure, Chinese investors and business people share their profits with everyone out of the goodness of their heart. Nice fairy tale.

Did they consider that profits on the build out won't be uniform, i. e. there will be some companies that go under but the rest of them will capture the profit?

Maybe, but you have very similar dynamics in China or other countries. At the root the problem is one of power dynamics, inequality, authoritarianism (whether legitimized by money or politics or both). Or said otherwise, an erosion of democratic and egalitarian ideals.

I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace.

Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.

Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...

Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.

It's a dumb joke considering Germany has been one of the most peaceful countries in decades. And the people making the jokes are often citizens of a country actively engaged in wars.

Personally, I prefer the US approach. At least then everyone knows what they're dealing with and they can openly react instead of being forced into a fake dance between what is said and what is REALLY said.

The covert stuff gives some degree of plausible deniability and it causes a good amount of the population to be complacent and ignore reality. I don't see how this can be considered good for anyone but the people creating propaganda.

I have no idea and for me it's not the central question.

I don't like it from any party, but from a moral standpoint, the more authoritarian someone is about their propaganda, the more invasive and violent it feels to me.

I perceive what the CCP is doing as denying my (and other people's) humanity and individual rights. I simply cannot accept a government that imprisons artists and human rights activists. A world where art is crime is not one I find worth living in.

I perceive American propaganda in the same category as advertising, harmful and annoying, but they won't lock me up or threaten my safety if I speak up against the propaganda. Well, at least that's how it used to be, who knows with the current trajectory.

I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.

If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.

They're doing a lot that goes against that strategy, you just don't see it in the headlines except in cases such as these or when you dig into how they conduct international negotiations or business deals involving the Chinese market.

Not to mention how they are openly expansionist in the SCS and obviously wrt Taiwan.

Of course they want to be seen as reasonable, their ideal is to control the international narrative just how they can do it internally in China.

What examples do you have of the US government doing to CEOs what has happened to people like Jack Ma and many other public figures?

For China, there are so many examples of people doing 180s and being full of contrition after those interventions, it's hard to imagine anything but severe intimidation or worse happening behind closed doors.

Expand?

German government is certainly slow and overly limited by bureaucracy, but dangerous?

Who are you comparing to?

Reminds me of this article https://aeon.co/essays/instrumentalisation-is-making-everyth...

Doing things with an ulterior motive most likely changes the experience of those things.

There's something inherently stressful in "doing relaxation".

Go to Russia and ask the average person on the street what they think of Putin. Thing is, the people who had to be afraid are already long gone. The rest just didn't care or tried to stay safe rather than prioritizing their beliefs and principles.

You really think the people who are left on the streets feel free to speak their minds if it would conflict with what the Politburo is enforcing?

There is also European AI and probably other places.

You may think only those two are relevant, and so every discussion of one party requires discussion of the other. I disagree with that fundamentally.

I'll be honest, I also disagree that one side is "clearly less evil than the other". For me, living in Taiwan and caring about democracy, the risk of Chinese authoritarian expansion and invasion is not a "speck of wood in the eye", frankly I find that framing disrespectful.

But that discussion is entirely beyond the question of hypocrisy. Again, the guy people accuse of hypocrisy said nothing of the sort that indicates that he doesn't see the problems of the US government. He merely didn't talk about them.

This isn't "shutting down talk about hypocrisy".

I'll add my anecdote here: I bought a Tern Verge and the accessory bike bag about 1.5 years ago because I imagined taking the bike on the train or public transport and because I lived in a small apartment. With the bag, you can take it like any other bag, but without, even if folded, you need to pay extra and place it in dedicated bike spots.

Now partially that's just my laziness and trajectory in life, but I haven't used the bag once (I'm not even sure how to use the bag, it's...complicated?). And the bike was folded only once, when I moved.

About a year later I bought a road bike because I wanted better climbing and longer distances and more comfort. Ultimately, for me the folding bike - while great fun in general, it's fast and agile - was kind of the wrong choice.

My family had cats when I was young and I walked the neighbor's dog too. I fondly remember reading the translated versions of Catwatching and Dogwatching in the early 90s.

I find the black and white thinking scary and I see as a result of social media. Nowadays you even have to argue for the possibility of nuance because everyone immediately jumps to "for or against" mode.

I strongly believe humanity needs to find ways to slow down, but the prevailing culture is for everything to go faster and faster, which doesn't leave room for nuance and non-emotional reasoning.

I have to say that I don't believe in most people's ability to teach their children critical thinking, compassion, nuance, etc. Most people barely manage to feed their kids and not mess them up too badly on the emotional side.