Viewing profile — yannyu

If AI has a survival instinct, then we should theoretically see evidence of it if we construct the right environment for AI to express it. Animals and cellular organisms demonstrat…

If an active shooter is the anticipated threat, how does a turnstile effectively stop that? Many of these turnstiles are specifically meant to allow people through in emergencies, …

I think you're right, but I also think it's worthwhile to look at Edward Bernays in the early 1900s and his specific influence on how companies and governments to this day shape de…

Did you read the article you cited or are you just evaluating the snapshot of numbers? > WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty-four percent of Americans say they are “very satisfied” with the …

Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter …

This is an interesting idea, I think clickbait titles are one of many problems with our engagement-based social media tools today. For the sake of experimentation and transparency,…

Sure, it worked and then it stopped working. Upvotes, reviews, social media, and word-of-mouth have been co-opted by advertising and marketing.

Or maybe companies turned products that were one-time purchases into monthly subscriptions. Or companies made it incredibly hard to cancel monthly subscriptions. Or companies will …

One thing I don't understand in these conversations is why we're treating LLMs as if they are completely interchangeable with chatbots/assistants. A car is not just an engine, it's…

> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero. Then the question is, why don't they do t…

Well, then we should judge the ideas on their own merits. And it's also not a great idea. It's a shallow, post-hoc, mystic rationalization that ignores all the work in multiple fie…

I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility …

Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about. Thanks for the info.

I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speedi…

Why would someone in an Idaho suburb care about how Manhattan manages its congestion pricing? Why is this national news? Everything you're saying has zero impact on 93-97% of the U…

> The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen. Citations? Simply saying that World War 1 happened during a ti…

This is just "might makes right" but modern. I don't know that this is the consistent, wide-held belief that you seem to think it is. Plenty of people would rather our governments …

It's a chicken and egg issue. We don't build dense, mixed-use housing and commercial, we don't build transit. There's no way to live a Tokyo-like lifestyle in 95% of California. An…

> They know that congestion pricing coming to their city would hurt them in very real ways. But why should they even care to begin with? Just because the news and media made them a…

Two things can be true: 1) I wish we had better rail transit in the bay area and to the areas surrounding the bay 2) I have to own a car to get to places in Northern California The…

And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool and that constant praise fulf…

I think there's a lot of utility to current AI tools, but it's also clear we're in a very unsettled phase of this technology. We likely won't see for years where the technology lan…

I agree entirely, and I think it's worthwhile to note that it may not even be the LLM that has that behavior. It's the entire deterministic machinery between the user and the LLM t…

It's not just the pretraining, it's the entire scaffolding between the user and the LLM itself that contributes to the illusion. How many people would continue assuming that these …

I agree 100%. Most people haven't actually interacted directly with an LLM before. Most people's experience with LLMs is ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or any of the other tools that autom…