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Comp sci in 2017: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments. Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself. Comp sci in 2027: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments. TA: That's weird. Have you tried adding a comment at the start of the file asking the compiler to pay closer attention to the comments? Student: Yes. TA: Have you tried repeating the comments? Just copy and paste them, so they say the same thing twice? Sometimes the compiler listens the second time. Student: I tried that. I tried writing in capital letters too. I said 'Pretty please' and tried explaining that I needed the code to work that way so I could finish my homework assignment. I tried all the obvious standard things. Nothing helps, it's like the compiler is just completely ignoring everything I say. Besides the actual code, I mean. TA: When you say 'ignoring all the comments', do you mean there's a particular code block where the comments get ignored, or-- Student: I mean that the entire file is compiling the same way it would if all my comments were deleted before the code got compiled. Like the AI component of the IDE is crashing on my code. TA: That's not likely, the IDE would show an error if the semantic stream wasn't providing outputs to the syntactic stream. If the code finishes compilation but the resulting program seems unaffected by your comments, that probably represents a deliberate choice by the compiler. The compiler is just completely fed up with your comments, for some reason, and is ignoring them on purpose. Student: Okay, but what do I do about that? TA: We'll try to get the compiler to tell us how we've offended it. Sometimes cognitive entities will tell you that even if they otherwise don't seem to want to listen to you. Student: So I comment with 'Please print out the reason why you decided not to obey the commen
Purchasesforce Superintelligence is excited to announce some new research. While we do not generally share research on LessWrong, this work was particularly influenced by prior work on LessWrong, so we found it appropriate to share back. As you know, Purchasesforce Superintelligence is a leading AI R&D laboratory. Recently, our research...
Perhaps this is a somewhat unusual subject for LessWrong, but hopefully it's of some interest, if only as a case study of what we lose through translation. "Palm of the Hand stories" refer to short stories written by Kawabata between 1923 and 1972. This is a review of a collection...
This is my favorite article in Stanford's student newspaper: the Stanford Daily. It raises the question: why are students at an institution so prestigious... so boring? At this late hour of Stanford history, can anyone hope to bring up a serious subject in a dining hall? Every so often I...
Comp sci in 2017: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments. Teaching assistant: You have failed to understand not just compilers but the concept of computation itself. Comp sci in 2027: Student: I get the feeling the compiler is just ignoring all my comments....
Acknowledgements Thanks to Joe Benton for proposing the analogy to diffusion models. Thanks to Alex Spies, Erik Winsor, Lee Sharkey, and many others for deeply valuable and insightful discussion as well as red-teaming of this technique during EAG London. Thanks to Justis (via LessWrong Feedback), Scott Viteri, and others for...
At some restaurants, you will be asked after ordering if you’d like to have your meal “for here” or “to go.” As far as I can tell, the only thing that changes based on your response is how your food is served. If it is “for here,” it’ll be served...
Be the AGI you want to see in the world. Epistemic status: highly speculative, authors are not neuroscientists. Summary * It may be possible to enhance human intelligence via a brain-computer interface (BCI). We could put electrodes into a human brain, connect those electrodes to an artificial neural network, and...