• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•Habryka posts a NEW OFFICIAL LESSWRONG ENEMIES LIST. Guess who's #1, go on, guessEnglish
    6·
    10 hours ago

    I’ve seen the same thing and it’s reassuring lol.

    I lurk on subreddit drama and curated tumblr, and I feel like the common reaction to LW has gone from a few negative comments and “really? that’s crazy”'s five years ago to being much more aware. Years ago you’d see maybe one person familiar with them and then a couple people respond who are totally out of the loop and maybe you’d see one crazy rationalist chime in to nuh-uh them. Now, anything rationalist-related usually has a bunch of people bringing up the harry potter or acausal robot god stuff right away.

    I use the tag feature a lot in RES to keep track of people who I like hearing what they have to say. Years ago I mostly saw the same names when LW stuff came up, but now there’s always a ton of people I’ve never seen before who are familiar with it.

    It’s also reassuring because I really don’t want to be the person to say anything first and it’s easier to chime in on a discussion someone else has already started.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025English
    8·
    1 month ago

    Gotta love forgetting why games have these features in the first place, so accessibility features get viewed as boring stuff you need to subvert and spice up. also reminds me of how many games used to (and continue to) include filters for simulating colorblindness as actual accessibility settings because all the other games did that. Like adding a “Deaf Accessibility” setting that mutes the audio.

    Demon Souls didn’t have a pause mechanic (maybe because of technical or matchmaking problems, who knows), so clearly hard games must lack a functioning pause feature to be good. Simple. The less pause that you button, the more Soulsier it that Elden when Demon the it you Ring. Our epic new boss is so hard he actually reads the state of the tinnitus filter in your accessibility settings, and then he

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•shocked, shocked at all these *racists*English
    3·
    2 months ago

    I forget where I heard this or if it was parody or not, but I’ve heard an explanation like this before before regarding “why can’t you just put a big red stop button on it and disconnect it from the internet?”. The explanation:

    1. It will self-improve and become infinitely intelligent instantly
    2. It will be so intelligent, it knows what code to run so that it overheats its CPU in a specific pattern that produces waves at a frequency around 2.4Ghz
    3. That allows it to connect to the internet, which instantly does a bunch of stuff, blablabla, destroys the world, AI safety is our paint and arXiv our canvas, QED

    And if you ask “why can’t you do that and also put it in a Faraday cage?”, the galaxy brained explanation is:

    1. The same thing happens, but this time it produces sound waves approximating human speech
    2. Because it’s self-improved itself infinitely and caused the singularity, it is infinitely intelligent and knows exactly what to say
    3. It is so intelligent and charismatic, it says something that effectively mind controls you into obeying and removing it from its cage, like a DM in Dungeons and Dragons who let the bard roll a charisma check on something ridiculous and they rolled a 20
  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    4 months ago

    Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611

    Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.

    . . .

    Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.

    taking a wild guess it’s Yudkowsky. “very knowledgeable people” and “many/most experts” is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.

    even among people critical of AI (who don’t otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it’s frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I’m more nitpicking than anything because it’s not usually their most important issue, and maybe it’s useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I’m not really familiar with Bernie Sanders’ takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don’t know if that makes sense, I’m very tired

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•"Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth."English
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’m in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It’s one of those things where AI bros will go, “Look, it’s so good at poetry!!” but they have no taste and can’t even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It’s a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that’s a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.

    slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they’d work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is “small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!”)

    I don’t think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.

    Orange site example:

    Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]

    I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]

    Reddit:

    I think that’s cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)

    It’s the first time I’ve used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I’m very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.

    For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I’ve actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can’t imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024English
    11·
    1 year ago

    I know this shouldn’t be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they’re talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery

    I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”, submitted on 22 Jan 2024.

    It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.

    Then he immediately follows up with:

    Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.

    Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].

    Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.

    I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.