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11gwern's Shortform
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5y
Ω
62
Do you even have a system prompt? (PSA / repo)
gwern2d70

Because as far as I can tell, the LLMs don't seem to train on the Markdown versions of pages

I link the Markdown versions with rel="alternate" link metadata (as well as in-page), but it doesn't seem to work, so I've taken an additional step of serving the Markdown source to HTTP requests which specify that they accept Markdown anywhere in their request as an alternative to HTML. This is a trick which seems increasingly common with LLM agents, since they handle Markdown so much better than HTML gobbledegook, and I hope that it becomes universally used. See https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/commit/79ded21772a9aa338158c16a19dd4dad5a8f3d6b for details/background/nginx implementation.

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Pygmalion's Wafer
gwern6d30

Or you could go the other direction and overload in terms of allusion/connotation, which is part of the goal of "October".

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Wei Dai's Shortform
gwern7d30

Reviewing my LW posts/comments (any clear flaws, any objections I should pre-empt, how others might respond)

Does Gemini-2.5-pro still work for this given how sycophantic the post-0325 models were?

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The Doomers Were Right
gwern7d52

Even if that were true, it might not mean anything. Why might a country not invest in Y2K prevention? Well, maybe it's not a problem there! You don't decide on investments at random, after all.

And this is clearly a case where (1) USA/Western investments would save a lot of other countries the need to invest in Y2K prevention because that is where most software comes from; and (2) those countries might not have the problem in the first place because they computerized later (and skipped the phase of hardwiring in dangerously short data types), or hadn't computerized at all. ("We don't have a Y2K problem because we don't have any computers" doesn't imply Y2K prevention is a bad idea.)

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Penny's Hands
gwern9d80

The genre here is psychological horror fiction, and the style is first-person short story; so it's reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe or Ted Chiang; but it's not clearly condensed or tightly edited the way those tend to be, and the narrator's style is prolix and euphuistic. From an editing perspective, I think the question I would have is to what extent this is a lack of editing & killing-your-darlings, and a deliberate unreliable-narrator stylistic choice in which the prose is trying to mirror the narrator's brute-force piano style or perhaps the dystonia-inducing music itself (because it can be hard to distinguish between deliberately flawed writing and just flawed writing - especially in the vastness of the Internet where there is so much flawed writing). I expect the latter given Tomas's other stories, but I think it's not sufficiently well done if I have to even ask the question. So that could probably be improve by more precise writing, or more ostentatiously musical structure, or some carefully chosen formal game; but also one could imagine making much more drastic revisions and escalating the horror in a more linguistic way, like a variant in which the narrator suffers an aphasia or dyslexia from reading a pessimized piece of text (revenge?) and the writing itself disintegrates towards the end, say.

Reply1
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, a semi-outsider review
gwern10d40

Hard to say. Oyster larvae are highly mobile and move their bodies around extensively both to eat and to find places to eventually anchor to, but I don't know how I would compare that to spores or seeds, say, or to lifetime movement; and oysters "move their bodies around" and are not purely static - they would die if they couldn't open and close their shells or pump water. (And all the muscle they use to do that is why we eat them.)

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In remembrance of Sonnet '3.6'
gwern10d130

Anthropic doesn't delete weights of released models

How do you know that? Because OpenAI has done that.

Reply1
Remarks on Bayesian studies from 1963
gwern11d140

Fulltext link: https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/bayes/1963-mosteller.pdf since it doesn't turn up in GS. (One of many papers I host with clean metadata and easily scraped and listed in the sitemap.xml for a long time which still doesn't turn up for unknown reasons.)

Reply2
japancolorado's Shortform
gwern11d*82

Isn't that just mode-collapse?

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If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, a semi-outsider review
gwern12d52

Plants have many ways of moving their bodies like roots and phototropism, in addition to an infinite variety of dispersal & reproductive mechanisms which arguably are how plants 'move around'. (Consider computer programs: they 'move' almost solely by copying themselves and deleting the original. It is rare to move a program by physically carrying around RAM sticks or hard drives.) Fungi likewise often have flagellum or grow in addition to all their sporulation and their famous networks.

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20"Tilakkhana", Gwern [poem]
11d
0
27Security Mindset: Hacking Pinball High Scores
5mo
3
215If you're not sure how to sort a list or grid—seriate it!
5mo
7
61October The First Is Too Late
6mo
10
60Ideas for benchmarking LLM creativity
11mo
11
136"Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030?", Epoch AI (yes)
1y
4
22"On the Impossibility of Superintelligent Rubik’s Cube Solvers", Claude 2024 [humor]
1y
6
176FHI (Future of Humanity Institute) has shut down (2005–2024)
2y
22
428Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning & AI risk (June 2023)?
2y
54
72COVID-19 Group Testing Post-mortem?
Q
3y
Q
6
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Adaptation Executors
6 years ago
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Adaptation Executors
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LessWrong Presence on Reddit
6 years ago
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Simulation Hypothesis
9 years ago
(+27/-2693)
Bayesian Conspiracy
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9 years ago
On Designing AI (Sequence)
9 years ago
Robot
9 years ago
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Robot
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Robot
9 years ago
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