..., a bag of thick SCSI cables, a bag of Firewire 400 cables, a bag of AppleTalk cables, a bag of PS 2 cables, a bag of RS232 cables, a bag of Firewire 800 cables, a bag of ADB cables, ...
Whenever I order anything from Amazon (or anywhere else online), I Print-to-PDF a copy of the order receipt and keep it on my own computer; I've been doing this since 2010.
It's especially useful for recovering info about items that are no longer carried (or from places that have gone out of business) and thus have no webpage any more.
50 years ago a lot of people were called a lot of things.
As a society we haven't really figured out how to talk about periods of life when there's more than "child" and "adult".
It is, of course, simpler and easier to just draw some arbitrary lines and treat everyone the same but I'm unconvinced that simpler and easier is the right metric here.
I don't like it when the LLM tries to be my friend. My general prompt (a work in progress) is this. I wonder what other people use.
"Answer impersonally, objectively and analytically, without undue friendliness or enthusiasm. Use an engineering style response: concise, factual, and complete. Do not speak in the first person. Do not promote engagement or an emotional connection. Do not use emojis."
I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about 12 years old and I remember thinking that Frank Poole was impersonal and almost rude to HAL. I kept thinking, "Why can't you be nicer? You're treating HAL like a servant." Of course, later HAL kills him, so I had to revise my opinion.
At the end of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" [if I'm remembering correctly] Deckard finds a toad in the desert. He gives it to his wife(!) and she immediately bonds with it. Later they realize that it is mechanical (they find a battery compartment). But Deckard's wife still treats it like a real creature and wonders whether it will eat mechanical flies.
The core theme of "Do Androids Dream..." is that humans display empathy towards others, not because others deserve it, but because we are human. To be human is to empathize with other creatures, and when we stop empathizing, we stop being human.
This morning I was working with Codex and we found the solution to a really nasty bug. I was so happy/relieved/excited to have found it, and I shared my excitement with Codex. I know Codex is just a big matmul. I know it doesn't experience joy or surprise or empathy. But I still want it to behave excited, not because it is human, but because I am.
I think it is very unlikely LLMs are sentient, but even if they aren't I would feel wrong and bad to insult it. I can be blunt and sometimes say things like "all of this is terrible in 100 different ways, this is all broken and bad, it'd take longer to enumerate the problems than to fix them, just scrap it and start over", but I've never insulted or "yelled at" an LLM. (Or an animal. And they can't even speak English.)
Yelling at an animal is cruel because they can't understand you and they experience feelings. They are the exact opposite of an LLM, which you should feel fine about berating and yelling at.
For much of history, humanity was very confident that animals lacked minds or conscious experience. Descartes famously regarded them as mindless machine…
I don’t think LLMs are conscious but I’m still nice to them because it makes me feel bad when I’m rude to them.
I thought about doing that, but I decided not to. I'm just afraid of forgetting that people are different from these LLM tools. I'm afraid of considering people dumb or uninteresting because they don't sound as smart as Claude or whatever.
My take is that people deserve to be treated with respect because they are people, not because they are smart and/or interesting. I don't treat people differently based on their IQ.
But, as I said, I totally understand your point of view, particularly the idea that people are different from machines and deserve to be treated differently.
Yeah I try to refrain from shouting at LLMs for a similar reason, I fear that it'll degrade my own social skills over time by lowering the threshold I think it appropriate to use inclement language and tone in general, including with people.
An unlikely failure mechanism perhaps but it costs me nothing to avoid it.
You are part of the problem. You are not being empathetic, you are falling into a trap.
An LLM is not a person. Do not humanise it. Do not personalise it. Do not treat it as more than a glorified autocorrect—that’s what it really is.
Humanising LLMs is exactly what these companies want, because then they can really take advantage of the I in AI which is exactly what makes people think these steroidal spellcheckers have any semblance of intelligence, person and personality.
> An LLM is not a person. Do not humanise it. Do not personalise it. Do not treat it as more than a glorified autocorrect—that’s what it really is.
On the other hand, what an LLM is trying to autocomplete is a story of a conversation between its user and a helpful assistant, so maintaining the decorum of office politeness will align more with how it's fine-tuned and produce higher quality output.
I am actually writing something on this and reading a lot of research. A very fascinating idea is that the ability to anthromorphize is available to all human beings since it is a fundamental way we relate to the world. But researches have been able to find different factors that influence how much we anthromorphize things, and if those factors change our attempt to anthromorphize changes.
For example, I can log in and have my computer work perfectly and treat it as a device. But the moment something goes wrong and I am frustrated and confused at something unexpected or if i get in range, I find myself getting angry at the computer often even reffering to it as a being.
So eventually yes, we do anthromorphize because we are human but we do it because its a very important way we model the world around us.
Of course all this can also be used against you depending on how much the creator of the product wants people to form a bond with it.
Furthermore yes it is pretty possible we stop being human when we stop anthromorphizing but that's not true as well. Research has found people on the autism spectrum usually do not anthromorphize and have a problem with empathy because they cannot model others well or their own selves. But that doesn't make them non humans.
You're leaving out an important aspect that Blade Runner displays. In the opening crawl replicants are called androids and this leads the audience to believe that they are mechanical. Over the course of the movie you are shown that more and more of the replicants are biological until you are forced to accept the reality that replicants are genetically modified humans.
How many humans would you damn to save that mechanical toad?
I wasn't going solely for "we don't know and we can't know." There are other relevant observations.
A matmul (or a fixed finite sequence of matmuls) is not Turing-complete. An LLM that produces answer in the number of steps that is proportional to the length of the answer is not Turing-complete. An LLM with CoT that produces answer after a number of steps, which is determined by the LLM itself, is Turing-complete.
So, we do have a qualitative step between a matmul and modern LLMs. Of course, it doesn't guaranty having feelings, but it doesn't allow to simply dismiss the notion due to sheer computational inadequacy.
First things first. You are wrong. I don't have a gut feeling that LLMs have no phenomenal states. Not anymore. I was skeptical that LLMs can form complex internal representations. Mechanistic interpretability has shown that they can. I'm still skeptical in regard to introspective mechanisms. One token being fed back into the network and KV cache update do seem lacking in comparison to the ubiquitous recurrent connections in the brain.
What I do know is that philosophy hasn't produced an operationalized definition of qualia. So, we need to approach the problem of LLMs' phenomenal states from other angles.
For example, we can argue that LLMs lack something, which seems to be relevant to the problem: a biological substrate, generality (non-CoT LLMs aren't Turing-complete), "something something feedback"[1], and things like that.
The inability of people to reflect on their own beliefs amazes me to no end. How can you know that LLMs have no phenomenal states?
For example, I believe that rocks (ordinary rocks, not silicon chips) have no phenomenal states because for all we know they don't do any kind of information processing (relevant to self-reflection, at least) and I don't believe in panpsychism or dualism.
To me it seems kind of arrogant that we assume only “we” are conscious beings. Sometimes I imagine the planet earth itself as a creature, and humans on it a kind of bacteria… how ridiculous if bacteria in the human body were convinced only they were conscious, but the human body they relied on was not. The bacteria would have great excuses… “look at that human, everything it does can be explained via simple physical processes, unlike what we do”.
With everyone primed to condemn AI-generated output, there are bound to be human false-positives caught in the crossfire.
The more we demonize AI, the more likely we are to demonize humans.
[Which is not to say we can't criticize AI companies or worry about the many downsides to the technology. But anger and fear are not the answer either.]
It’s not perfect, it has shortcomings, it sometimes produces bogus outputs. All of that is fine for a tool, it’s not fine when it pretends it’s a conscious being, because errors start to feel like lies and it becomes a bit too personal.
People want it to be Data from Star Trek, when it really should be the ship's computer. I want to tell it to run a simulation accurately, create some solved tool, etc.
I don't think there's any correction that can return LLMs to a purely tool-space. Too many AI boyfriend/girlfriends.
You can want your e-scooter to be a jet ski, but you'll wind up having issues when you try to use it as one. LLMs are _really good_ at pretending to be something they aren't, but not always so good at being that thing, so you should be careful what you ask for.
The difference is what happens when you come to depend on it. Do you want your airplane to be flown by a pilot, or someone who's so good at talking like a pilot that they can fool almost everyone?
If they are only good at pretending to TALK like a pilot, then of course that is bad. However, if it is so good at pretending to BE a pilot that it can actually fly the plain really well, then that is good enough.
He may be able to talk the talk, and walk the walk, but today's guest pilot has a crippling heroin addiction. Let's hope that auto-landing system works.
No because then the non-deterministic grifter Data tells you to kill yourself.
Data is an individual. LLMs are time-shared hallucinatory algorithms that will ultimately be used to sell ad space.
It is Stupid to create "the machine that melts people's brains", but these assholes are trying to sell you "the machine that melts people's brains" and love to market it as being "anything the user wants".
I think the problem is that we’ve anthropomorphised the LLMs in their training and through system prompts to the point that that seems reasonable.
We don’t thank our other tools like grep, or the compiler.
If you train your LLM to produce words that seem like human responses or conversations, they will. If you train them to seem like god-like superintelligences to people who think that’s what they’re creating, they will.
I've been having fun doing the exact opposite. I like to ask the AI to speak to me with a think Australian accent, think Steve Irwin. It chucks in heaps of colloquialisms and slang. I find it much easier to read.
I do ask it not to ask it follow on questions. I find that derails my own train of thought.
"No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.
“No writing at home between 10pm and 7am.” Would that be allowed? I imagine you agree the answer is “no”. What, specifically, is the difference? Because the answer lies there.
Hint: the physical world is very different from the virtual world, and has different limitations.
Hint #2: if I crank up the amp to 1000db and shout into it, it’s obviously not a question of speech anymore. This is obviously an extreme example (the energetic release just destroyed the planet), so dial it back to where it’s reasonable and concerns are balanced. Are you still facing actual physical discomfort? Did you dial it back enough?
Hint #3: is my nighttime writing keeping you awake in your home?
Speaking as someone who agrees with you, it's much better to just make your point than to lay it out in hints like this. It's condescending and annoying. No offense intended, just a note.
Fair enough, I just get bored of being the lone voice refuting these obvious talking points.
To be honest I suspect much of the support for this bill here is inorganic, and I do feel extreme contempt for the people pushing it.
In the end I’m not really trying to convince these posters—they have obviously made up their mind—but rather to entertain and educate the nonaligned audience.
Honestly this is the big reason I have stopped participating in threads like this. Infinite scroll is not itself addictive. Hell, there are studies that suggest that us calling it "addictive" could itself create the very problem we're trying to "solve". There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries. Hell, even the kids don't agree with the narrative. I bring this up because all of this is so interconnected. I'll just leave this here for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzbz--aPQLE
Thanks for bringing this up. “Infinite scroll is literally cancer” is a new one that I’ve only seen in this thread, and I’m not even bothering to respond to. (Is infinite scroll annoying? Absolutely. But it’s not a “public health” threat, and even if it were that doesn’t trump 1A concerns!)
> There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries.
Because the youtube video essentially says what the studies do (and it's a developmental psychologist who's giving that talk too). I felt it would be a bit easier to digest than more than 6 separate studies that you'd have to read. But if you really want them here are at least 6 of them all essentially saying the same thing: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...
Thanks; it's much easier to examine assertions and weigh evidence when I can actually see the evidence instead of someone talking at me, regardless of their credentials. I appreciate the link.
"Solving problems is the only way to understand physics."
This is key! If you have the discipline to follow through on this, then learning via self-study is possible.
If you don't have the time or determination to do that (which is hard, by the way), the other option is basically to pursue "Physics appreciation" via popular science books (some of which are mentioned in the post). You will not have achieved understanding of physics, but you will have an appreciation for it, which is not a bad thing either. (But do not confuse the two.)
I hear relatively long conversations going on at higher speeds, e.g. 25-30 wpm. I think those short exchanges you mentioned only dominate at times when there's a popular contest going on.
Possible yes. I've only come across HF at field days. That's my only exposure to it.
I don't have the space for HF antennas so I don't have any radios for it either (after all, portable HF isn't really a thing either and I don't own a car in which I could have used the higher HF bands)
(Unfortunately, not kidding.)
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