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The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

longbets.org

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Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#91

Post by wasmperson »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #77
CSMastermind wrote: post #18

It's worth noting that some prediction URLs, for instance: https://longbets.org/6/ are offline. The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/ You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities. https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think…

I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia. Arguably, ELIZA passed the Turing test ca. 1967: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... and not that long ago, ELIZA was still more convincing: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-... The Turing Test can be gamed.…

I don't know whether LLMs pass the test as Turing originally worded it, but I always interpreted the success condition to be "is indistinguishable from a human" rather than "can trick someone into thinking it's human". Anthropomorphization is a human weakness, and exploiting that doesn't make something intelligent.

I'd only consider an AI to pass the Turing Test if an expert in how the AI works who prepares in advance for the test is unable to tell it apart from a human. The tester should even be allowed to use automated tools as part of the testing process.

If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of how it works internally. It's not like I make my friends take an MRI before I decide whether they're intelligent.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#92

Post by mikewarot »

Ugh, I really hate SSL. This is a simple text page, why couldn't it live where it was?

  C:\Users\User>curl -i http://longbets.org/601/
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:49:33 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 178
  Connection: keep-alive
  Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
  Location: https://longbets.org/601/
  X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

  
  301 Moved Permanently
  
  301 Moved Permanently
  nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Yes, I'm an old fart, yelling at the internet clouds. You'll get here some day too, if you're lucky.

I am quite impressed that the bet included above redirection as part of the terms.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#93

Post by JoshTriplett »

munch117 wrote: post #90
JoshTriplett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or command line tool (like curl) Even if you interpreted the bet generously to allow for a browser to render the content using JavaScript, if I understand the bet correctly, the condition of working with a command-line tool like curl would fail.

I read the or's as giving alternatives, only one of which needs to work. I can see how other interpretations are possible, but I don't see anything especially generous about mine. I'm not "allowing" anything: To make a judgement you have to pick a web browser to try it with, and you'd probably pick the most popular one, in the most popular configuration, that seems the most fair. If that web browser happens to execut…

It says that the browser must download "an HTML document that still contains the following text". I can see how either interpretation could work, but I would interpret "contains" as "the text is in the HTML document", not "rendering the HTML document in a JavaScript-capable browser displays the text".

(Though, that said, some approaches to rendering sites via JavaScript would still have that text in the initially downloaded HTML file as JavaScript data.)

As for the "or", I read it as "doing either X or Y must", not "either X must or Y must (not necessarily both)", but yeah, I can see either interpretation being valid.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#94

Post by kimos »

mg wrote: post #14

It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html. One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now: https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/ I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online…

Flattening old things down to plain HTML is underrated and important here. Old apps don’t need to be updated or upgraded or maintained or even deployed. It’s way simpler to argue to keep old stuff around if it’s essentially a domain pointing to a static bucket.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#95

Post by tsimionescu »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #88
tsimionescu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are usually from a missing context (i.e. specifying where the car is right now). The reason for the mistake is irrelevant here. All that matters is that you catch the agent saying something that basically no human would, especially in this type of game.

If it is missing context, it will be indistinguishable from mistakes that humans could make as well.

No, the context is obvious to any human, that's the whole point. No one would think you've left your car at a car wash, as no one ever does that, and if they did, they wouldn't even consider driving there. It's obvious to any human that the question is a little trick and that the answer is extremely obvious.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#96

Post by sigmoid10 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #95
sigmoid10 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is missing context, it will be indistinguishable from mistakes that humans could make as well.

No, the context is obvious to any human, that's the whole point. No one would think you've left your car at a car wash, as no one ever does that, and if they did, they wouldn't even consider driving there. It's obvious to any human that the question is a little trick and that the answer is extremely obvious.

Counter example: A person who always has their car brought to the car wash by someone else (could be super wealthy, could be company cars, could be a million other reasons...) is asked whether to go or drive to the car wash. Of course they'll tell you to just walk if it's close anyway. To them the car is already there implicitly. Human life experience is not universal. And so context can't be either.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#97

Post by dmitrygr »

kimos wrote: post #94
mg wrote: post #14

It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html. One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now: https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/ I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online…

Flattening old things down to plain HTML is underrated and important here. Old apps don’t need to be updated or upgraded or maintained or even deployed. It’s way simpler to argue to keep old stuff around if it’s essentially a domain pointing to a static bucket.

I did that to palmpowerups.com. The original CMS is long gone.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#98

Post by DonaldFisk »

wasmperson wrote: post #91
DonaldFisk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia. Arguably, ELIZA passed the Turing test ca. 1967: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... and not that long ago, ELIZA was still more convincing: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-... The Turing Test can be gamed.…

I don't know whether LLMs pass the test as Turing originally worded it, but I always interpreted the success condition to be "is indistinguishable from a human" rather than "can trick someone into thinking it's human". Anthropomorphization is a human weakness, and exploiting that doesn't make something intelligent. I'd only consider an AI to pass the Turing Test if an expert in how the AI works who prepares in advanc…

> If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of how it works internally. It's not like I make my friends take an MRI before I decide whether they're intelligent.

You can be reasonably sure about your friends, as they're sufficiently like you to leave little doubt. I disagree but can understand you thinking that LLMs are intelligent, but unless by conscious you mean something like being self-aware, I don't understand how you could conclude LLMs are conscious. For example, although LLMs can tell you what colours things are, how the visual system distinguishes colours in humans and other animals, and what wavelength mixtures different colours are, they don't know what it's like to see colours because they cannot see colours. All the input of LLMs is text, and you can't describe, in words, what it's like to see colours, or hear sounds, or feel pain, in a way that someone incapable of these sensations would understand. And to remove any remaining doubt, there was an expert in colour vision (Knut Nordby) who, as he could not see colours because his retinas lacked cones, could not imagine what it's like to see colours, despite all his knowledge.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#99

Post by wasmperson »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #98
wasmperson wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether LLMs pass the test as Turing originally worded it, but I always interpreted the success condition to be "is indistinguishable from a human" rather than "can trick someone into thinking it's human". Anthropomorphization is a human weakness, and exploiting that doesn't make something intelligent. I'd only consider an AI to pass the Turing Test if an expert in how the AI works who prepares in advanc…

> If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of how it works internally. It's not like I make my friends take an MRI before I decide whether they're intelligent. You can be reasonably sure about your friends, as they're sufficiently like you to leave little doubt. I disagree but can und…

I have no way of knowing whether other people are conscious except by observing their behavior. Similarly, I have no way of knowing whether a machine is conscious except by observing its behavior. If something is outwardly indistinguishable from an intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever being and you claim that it's still not i/c/s/w, then you've implicitly accepted the possibility that all humans besides you are not i/c/s/w either.

Your tangent on color vision/hearing/pain is not relevant. None of those things are required for i/c/s/w, nor is it obvious that a machine is incapable of feeling those things.

Also you keep using the term "LLM" a bunch here but I wasn't talking about LLMs. The question of machine intelligence is much broader than whatever the current state of the art happens to be.

Re: The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

#100

Post by 9dev »

tsimionescu wrote: post #55
9dev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the p2p problem really still one in our world that is mobile first, but also has ubiquitous internet connectivity pretty much everywhere? I’m almost sure I could host my website from my phone and have at least 99.5% percent of uptime.

Give that it's impossible to even listen on port 443 on a phone, as that would require root privileges, I don't think you can host your website on your phone at all, at least not if you want it to accessible in a normal way. And that's not even going into all of the problems with running background apps on a phone, especially on iOS.

By I could, I meant that my phone has a persistent connection uninterruptedly long enough to be theoretically able to serve a website in the background. There are all sorts of (arbitrary, mind you) technical limitations, from the IPv6 address randomly changing as you roam across networks to iOS killing background processes - but those are software limitations.

The point was that mobile device doesn't equate spotty connectivity anymore for most people.

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