Kenoubi

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Hmm. My intuition says that your A and B are "pretty much the same size". Sure, there are infinitely many times that they switch places, but they do so about as regularly as possible and they're always close.

If A is "numbers with an odd number of digits" and B is "numbers with an even number of digits" that intuition starts to break down, though. Not only do they switch places infinitely often, but the extent to which one exceeds the other is unbounded. Calling A and B "pretty much the same size" starts to seem untenable; it feels more like "the concept of being bigger or smaller or the same size doesn't properly apply to the pair of A and B". (Even though A and B are well defined, not THAT hard to imagine, and mathematicians will still say they're the same size!)

If A is "numbers whose number of digits is a multiple of 10", and B is all the other (positive whole) numbers, then... I start to intuitively feel like B is bigger again??? I think this is probably just my intuition not being able to pay attention to all the parts of the question at the same time, and thus substituting "are there more multiples of 10 or non-multiples", which then works the way you said.

I think this comment demonstrates that the list of reacts should wrap, not extend arbitrarily far to the right.

The obvious way to quickly and intuitively illustrate whether reactions are positive or negative would seem to be color; another option would be grouping them horizontally or vertically with some kind of separator. The obvious way to quickly and intuitively make it visible which reactions were had by more readers would seem to be showing a copy of the same icon for each person who reacted a certain way, not a number next to the icon.

I make no claim that either of these changes would be improvements overall. Clearly the second would require a way to handle large numbers of reactions to the same comment. The icons could get larger or smaller depending on number of that reaction, but small icons would get hard to recognize. Falling back to numbers isn't great either, since it's exactly in the cases where that fallback would happen that the number of a particular reaction has become overwhelmingly high.

I think it matters that there are a lot of different reactions possible compared to, say, Facebook, and at the same time, unlike many systems with lots of different reactions, they aren't (standard Unicode) emoji, so you don't get to just transfer existing knowledge of what they mean. And they have important semantic (rather than just emotive) content, so it actually matters if one can quickly tell what they mean. And they partially but not totally overlap with karma and agreement karma; it seems a bit inelegant and crowded to have both, but there are benefits that are hard to achieve with only one. It's a difficult problem.

In the current UI, the list of reactions from which to choose is scrollable, but that's basically impossible to actually see. While reading the comments I was wondering what the heck people were talking about with "Strawman" and so forth. (Like... did that already get removed?) Then I discovered the scrolling by accident after seeing a "Shrug" reaction to one of the comments.

I've had similar thoughts. Two counterpoints:

  • This is basically misuse risk, which is not a weird problem that people need to be convinced even needs solving. To the extent AI appears likely to be powerful, society at large is already working on this. Of course, its efforts may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

  • They say power corrupts, but I'd say power opens up space to do what you were already inclined to do without constraints. Some billionaires, e.g. Bill Gates, seem to be sincerely trying to use their resources to help people. It isn't hard for me to imagine that many people, if given power beyond what they can imagine, would attempt to use it to do helpful / altruistic things (at least, things they themselves considered helpful / altruistic).

I don't in any sense think either of these are knockdowns, and I'm still pretty concerned about how controllable AI systems (whether that's because they're aligned, or just too weak and/or insufficiently agentic) may be used.

On SBF, I think a large part of the issue is that he was working in an industry called cryptocurrency that is basically has fraud as the bedrock of it all. There was nothing real about crypto, so the collapse of FTX was basically inevitable.

I don't deny that the cryptocurrency "industry" has been a huge magnet for fraud, nor that there are structural reasons for that, but "there was nothing real about crypto" is plainly false. The desire to have currencies that can't easily be controlled, manipulated, or implicitly taxed (seigniorage, inflation) by governments or other centralized organizations and that can be transferred without physical presence is real. So is the desire for self-executing contracts. One might believe those to be harmful abilities that humanity would be better off without, but not that they're just nothing.

Thank you for writing these! They've been practically my only source of "news" for most of the time you've been writing them, and before that I mostly just ignored "news" entirely because I found it too toxic and it was too difficult+distasteful to attempt to decode it into something useful. COVID the disease hasn't directly had a huge effect on my life, and COVID the social phenomenon has been on a significant decline for some time now, but your writing about it (and the inclusion of especially notable non-COVID topics) have easily kept me interested enough to keep reading. Please consider continuing some kind of post on a weekly cadence. I think it's a really good frequency to never lose touch but also not be too burdensome (to the reader or the writer).

I don't know how far a model trained explicitly on only terminal output could go, but it makes sense that it might be a lot farther than a model trained on all the text on the internet (some small fraction of which happens to be terminal output). Although I also would have thought GPT's architecture, with a fixed context window and a fixed number of layers and tokenization that isn't at all optimized for the task, would pay large efficiency penalties at terminal emulation and would be far less impressive at it than it is at other tasks.

Assuming it does work, could we get a self-operating terminal by training another GPT to roleplay the entering commands part? Probably. I'm not sure we should though...

Sure, I understood that's what was being claimed. Roleplaying a Linux VM without error seemed extremely demanding relative to other things I knew LLMs could do, such that it was hard for me not to question whether the whole thing was just made up.

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