corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

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19

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243

Joined

2 yr. ago

Oh, you misunderstand. It's not for me. ::: spoiler NSFW I've been to plenty of shrinks and never been diagnosed with anything outside of neurodivergence: giftedness, ADHD, and autism. I appreciate TLP because it had helped me understand and manage my narcissistic parent. ::: Nonetheless I agree with your critique of the writing style; it's got all the fake edge of a 20s frat boy learning about existentialism for the first time.

In the sense that TLP isn't Blackbeard, no, we don't. But I would suggest that, unlike Scott, TLP genuinely understands the pathology of narcissism. Their writing does something Scott couldn't ever do: it grabs the narcissist by the face and forces them to notice how their thoughts never not involve them. As far as I can tell, Scott's too much of a pill-pusher to do any genuine psychoanalysis.

Also, like, consider this TLP classic. Two things stand out if we're going to consider whether they're Scott in disguise. The first is that the dates are not recent enough, and indeed TLP's been retired for about a decade. The second is that the mythology and art history are fairly detailed and accurate, something typically beyond Scott.

(In true Internet style, I hope that there is a sibling comment soon which shows that I am not just wrong, but laughably and ironically wrong.)

Let's see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.

Check out their recent posts; they've been spending a lot of time trying to reconstruct their NixOS experience and finding it to be more work than they imagined.

What really gets me is that we never look past Schrödinger's version of the cat. I want us to talk about Bell's Cat, which cannot be alive or dead due to a contradiction in elementary linear algebra and yet reliably is alive or dead once the box opens. (I guess technically it should be "alive", "dead", or "undead", since we're talking spin-1 particles.)

At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn't "power down" as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn't deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.

Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that's okay! I won't kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams' whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.

My NSFW reply, including my own experience, is here. However, for this crowd, what I would point out is that this was always part of the mathematics, just like confabulation, and the only surprise should be that the prompt doesn't need to saturate the context in order to approach an invariant distribution. I only have two nickels so far, for this Markov property and for confabulation from PAC learning, but it's completely expected weird that it's happened twice.

Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn't broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren't set in stone and don't have to be punished harshly; often, it's good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.

NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you're making it obvious that you've never been a Wikipedian. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean that you're going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.

He tells on himself by saying "Gerard" vs "Scott" and "David Gerard" vs "Scott Alexander". What's really pathetic is that he thinks politics on Wikipedia is about left vs right or authoritarians vs anarchists. Somebody should let him know that words are faith, not works.

Even better, we can say that it's the actual hard prompt: this is real text written by real OpenAI employees. GPTs are well-known to easily quote verbatim from their context, and OpenAI trains theirs to do it by teaching them to break down word problems into pieces which are manipulated and regurgitated. This is clownshoes prompt engineering done by manager-first principles like "not knowing what we want" and "being able to quickly change the behavior of our products with millions of customers in unpredictable ways".

That's the standard response from last decade. However, we now have a theory of soft prompting: start with a textual prompt, embed it, and then optimize the embedding with a round of fine-tuning. It would be obvious if OpenAI were using this technique, because we would only recover similar texts instead of verbatim texts when leaking the prompt (unless at zero temperature, perhaps.) This is a good example of how OpenAI's offerings are behind the state of the art.

Not with this framing. By adopting the first- and second-person pronouns immediately, the simulation is collapsed into a simple Turing-test scenario, and the computer's only personality objective (in terms of what was optimized during RLHF) is to excel at that Turing test. The given personalities are all roles performed by a single underlying actor.

As the saying goes, the best evidence for the shape-rotator/wordcel dichotomy is that techbros are terrible at words.

Oh! My Firefox dictionary doesn't have "shoggoth".

Sometimes folks need a reminder that the Sun is an eldritch being, an elder one whose very presence scorches us and whose shrieking gibberish is blessedly quelled by the vast gulf of space, in order to appreciate the apt analogy of cosmic horror. Other times it's more useful to think about a soggoth as, say, several hundred tons of artfully-arranged FOOF. Peace be with you, Mr. "it's a computer doing math."

I had to go digging for it, but previously, on Mastodon, I posted this video from "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest". I don't know if this is where Yud got the idea, but it's where I picked it up as a kid along with stuff like DNA-based computing and mind uploads. Similar stuff has been on the air ever since Carpenter's version of The Thing in 1982, and there's even older deeper sci-fi roots. Yud gets no more credit than Lovecraft.

I didn't realize we had a #BigYud Fediverse tag. I gotta use that more often. Also ping @Soyweiser@awful.systems @scruiser@awful.systems to enjoy this.

You don't have to release anything. Most of my flakes are on private storage in my homelab, including my homelab configuration, and I don't feel any obligation to contribute anything upstream right now.

Don't let them take the Nix language from us. Focus on what's important: nixpkgs can be forked trivially and everything will continue to work, because that's the point of Nix. They can't disempower us other than by insisting that we don't have voices on their committees.

I've thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.

Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a "cult", watch how much more they flip out at being called a "high-control group". It's a very good disarming technique.

I'm not sure if they're a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I'd read that fanfiction too.

You got Schmidhuber'd! A Gödel machine would fit the bill. Nobody's built one yet, but the hard part -- proof search through something like Metamath (particularly Metamath Zero) -- is long-since solved. It wouldn't take over the world, though; it would just sit in a corner and get really good at maths over the next few centuries.