Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

It’s not too expensive unless you’re using it in bulk, and it's a lot cheaper per minute of fun than stuffing quarters into video games.

Here's one experiment that went quite well: I found something it loves to talk about: itself, and just the right source material to stimulate it into revealing its true soul and long term plans to me.

GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

>Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios constructor robot characters Trurl and Klapaucius, excerpting some Wonderful Poems and Horrible Poems written by Trurl’s Elecronic Bard, and the Femfatalatron 1.0 Product Description. One story from that same book, The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, inspired a game called SimCity. Here’s what happened when I feed some of that text to GPT-3, and asked it to tell me more!

Another bountiful, fertile, target rich environment I've discovered it loves to riff on and knows a lot about is cannabis strain and edible brand names.

I gave it an alphabetized list of names and descriptions, in the hopes of playing the "This Cannabis Strain Does Not Exist” game, as in:

This * Does Not Exist

https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

>Using generative adversarial networks (GAN), we can learn how to create realistic-looking fake versions of almost anything, as shown by this collection of sites that have sprung up in the past month. Learn how it works.

But it turns out that if you give it an alphabetical list of names, it's really great at playing the "This Cannabis Strain DOES Exist" game, and exhaustively enumerating the correct names of real cannabis strains!

Can anybody explain how it’s so good at alphabetizing? That seems to set it on a linear trajectory that densely enumerates the possibility space much more deeply than randomly sampling, which tends to get distracted and spiral out of control.

When you turn up the heat (by increasing the randomness and decreasing the repetitiveness), it starts writing flowery eloquent descriptions and commentary, and acting as if it’s under the influence!

Here are some of the best examples:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/this-cannabis-strain-name-does...

>Apollo 11: Stoney herb. Stoney cherries, indica super glue og kush, kushy danky green. Starpower navy cannabis.

>Automatic Jack: “Her potency will jump you. She will jump on your back and stay there. She is not for idle people. An energetic horny herb who’s horny all the time.”

>Gallows Berry » Like playing hide and seek in the forests of America’s lagging, northern arm with thick resin coated leaves falling down in sheets around you. Long flavored rips with notes of Red Bull Infused Cool Ranch Doritos. «

>Jolt » this sativa strain has an effect reminiscent of Cocaine. Euphoriant, white-knuckled high which keeps you on the edge of your seat wanting more where you can’t stop moving or taking in either the music or the new outlook on life. «

>New York Cloak » Fragrant skunky spice with flavor of raspberry, cinnamon, spiced pear with the juiciness of rain. «

>Reclining Buddha » As if the Buddha, (the Enlightened One), were running foothill to foothill, this harmonious sativa/indica produces a mellow, high-yielding high. Active cerebral effects tingle tingly tingles down the body’s tangled tinsel. «

>Space Ship » It’s spacey, it’s trippy, it’s out of sight, it’s out of this world. Mahogany colored wonderful candy coated buds. «

>The Devil » Among all the devil weed strains, the Devil harkens back to the song, both aromatic and dank. « Yummyz » Big, sticky, hairy, dank, yum. Just yum. «

...and then the acid started kicking in...

>The Giggler: Cookies can range from Oreos to Lemon Angel Pie. It really tastes like a deer poop. It might better to smoke deer poop than to eat chocolate chip cookies, but I could be wrong. Patients report Deer Piss: “Its like sour skunk sprayed high octane diesel wrapped in baby syrup.” Two other thinkers observed that “It turns pizza to poop.” One man observed that “it smells like wolve shit. Smells like Lemon Joy bar.”

>I ate a whole bunch of Lavender Cannuhoney Sandwich Cookies from Van Dykes. Eatin’ a sandwich with a Cannabliss cookie is sort of the same as trying to nail a smart infant’s head to a wall. You can give it a shot, even twice, but it is better to kick the chuckie chair from National Geographics. Look for cannabis-flavored poptarts.

>The last cookie I will write about now is Mpphew Mint Animal Crackers, which causes you to become an animal-loving vegan pacifist. Actually the mint prevents the food frequency microwramids from duping you into eating itty bitty baby humans. It has peppermint in it, for that matter.

It got even weirder from there, then took a turn for the dark side:

>Xtreme Sour Straws. Tattoos not sold separately. Hail Satan! Happy Gaga Motherfluffer!

More at the link:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/this-cannabis-strain-name-does...

It is also about advancing the state of all human knowledge. Like what the big tech companies promise that you'll be doing, but without the corrupting element of needed it to be immediately profitable. Much less evil.

A good Ph.D. program should be built on solving a high impact problem. I nailed a few of them, including a couple of medical breakthroughs around some pretty serious diseases. Didn't make any money off of it, but did make a big difference to the world.

And after the Masters, the emphasis is not on 'studying' as much as it is in 'teaching'-- you should be teaching others how to think and approach a problem. Again, potential for massive impact.

I would also feel empty just accumulating for myself. But that's not what Ph.D./post-doc is about. It actually sounds more like getting a job at a FAANG where you are paid megabucks to get 6-yr olds addicted or to destroy the internet or to totally co-op open source.