TechTakes

an empire has to compete on its merits

Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder

Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible

specifically this caricature:

@blakestacey

“Internal"?

So it's a civil war within Israel?

Jewish people fought back in the ghettos, nazis didnt do a genocide! Ghandi, by not fighting back tricked the Brits into doing a genocide.

What a fucked up broken classification.

E: im also reminded of the 'armed/unarmed' trick american racists pull, when a poc gets killed by the cops suddenly it matters a lot if a weapon shaped object was perhaps nearby. Despite this not being an executable reason for white people who get in touch with the police.

E2: also small annoyance if you track all definitions you should he able to understand that this means that for others who pick a different definition it is a genocide. Hell I can give several definitions of fascism, and if I were to pick a different definition of some group doesnt mean im correct, nor does it make the group less bad. They are still doing war crimes and ethnic cleansings (condemned by all big human rights orgs and the UN). But thanks for scientificly proving it is impossible to disappear into nothing by crawling up your own ass.

E3: A quick skim of the paper, it seems to only talk about genocide accusations towards Israel itself. I expected there to be a long list of European bs accusations of Jewish genocide. But nope, just about the state. (Not saying that some of those accusations aren't antisemitic, because there have certainly been people who used the state as a motte/bailey for their antisemitism).

Has Klezra Ein ever used the term “useful idiot”?

I don't think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.

Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he's playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.

EZ is a PR person, and definitely has a PR person vibe. I don't know what that poster's deal is, and I would not accuse Ed of being an AI bro. That post kind of has "haters gonna hate" vibes

he started writing about this stuff and it struck a chord with people

Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?

To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.

Looking at the details of "safety evaluations", it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.

To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.

Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.

Do these people realise that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.

It's adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

text: Thus spoke the Yud: "I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week." Yud acolyte: "Totally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases." Yud bigbrain self reply: "The other huge piece of data we're missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?"

Critical text: "On self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COST"

Another case of telling the robot to say it's a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies "I AM A SCARY ROBOT"

Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have 'leaks' for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?

E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?

So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with "engineering mindset?"

Wasn’t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isn’t intelligence?

That article is hilarious.

So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.

Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.

[...] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.

Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn't read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn't want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?

If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect

I can't see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can't see things changing.

@rook @blakestacey here's an archive Link https://archive.ph/h6fbA

this archive has it without paywall