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Building Pi with Pi

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Re: Building Pi with Pi

#101

Post by jtbayly »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #23
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals. Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter. Setting software agents loose on the world to make…

> agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money? > "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter Do…

Lack of agency in your work is one of the main contributors to burnout.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#102

Post by mplanchard »

esperent wrote: post #67
spooneybarger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263889

Clanker? Are you afraid to even say it or something? It's a great word, I personally loved it in the article and I hope it becomes more common as a reaction to "agent" which feels so corporate and soleless.

Maybe they’re worried the basilisk will eat them once the AI becomes sentient and looks back on their posts, so they have to defend it against any perceived-to-be-negatively-connoted words people might come up with for it.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#103

Post by esperent »

mplanchard wrote: post #102
esperent wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clanker? Are you afraid to even say it or something? It's a great word, I personally loved it in the article and I hope it becomes more common as a reaction to "agent" which feels so corporate and soleless.

Maybe they’re worried the basilisk will eat them once the AI becomes sentient and looks back on their posts, so they have to defend it against any perceived-to-be-negatively-connoted words people might come up with for it. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

That might be it. I also seem to remember one scifi book I read where robots had actual sentience and clanker was a slur. Can't remember what it was, but maybe that's leaking into the real world?

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#104

Post by mplanchard »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power"…

This is a weird co-opting of existing language that you’re doing here, applying a definition because it sort of technically fits when no one would ever use it that way. No one would ever say that your car has agency. It doesn’t have agency, because it deterministically responds to inputs. Usage meaning “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” is predicated on the ability to decide whether or not to exercise that power. If I have “the agency to effect change,” it is only because I have the choice to do so, not because I am deterministically bound to. To have no choice in your exercise of power is not agency, it is slavery.

The choice is what makes agents/agency meaningful: if I secure a real estate agent in my search for a house, they are authorized to make choices on my behalf. That’s their whole point.

Because of this use of agent, I think it’s actually not a terrible term for the LLM harness that allows them to seem to act “independently” on the operator’s behalf. I do agree with mitsuhiko though that it, along with much of our other language around LLMs, risks anthropomorphizing them too much (which is to say at all). It also becomes too easy to conflate the “agent” part (the harness) with the LLM itself, which leads to a further-inflated perception of the inherent capabilities of the LLMs and plays into the doomsayer hands of anthropic et al.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#105

Post by miroljub »

aryehof wrote: post #16
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power"…

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

Did we already reach wokeness level five where we worry about offending a software?

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#106

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

Mashimo wrote: post #61
raulparada wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess loaded derogatory terms are somehow worse than otherwise worse-sounding terms. Think about it in the context of e.g. the n-word. “A piece of shit”, while sounding very bad: 1. is generic, can be applied to anything thus has no discrimination component, and 2. ends there. It has no history, no reference to previous usage, etc.

I guess. I'm not sure if it's the exception, but for example "rust bucket" is mostly used against old vehicles. Now I'm laying here, wondering if it's bad to be discriminating against objects.

Sometimes I’m wondering what to call people who get offended on behalf of other people or entities that they imagine might be offended by some term or other. See, they feel bad, and like small children, they assume everyone else must feel bad.

Okay, in case of people and words like n___er, one could argue they have a leg to stand on. But stupid computer programs? Really?

And then I remember that in my part of the galaxy, we indeed have a word to describe such people. We call them “dumbasses”.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#107

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

Npovview wrote: post #75
JSR_FDED wrote: post #11

Tool that hastens production of slop experiences downside of hastily-produced slop.

We have sewage infrastructure to handle human waste. Maybe future AIs will help in building such infrastructure in information space to handle pollution, noise, slop. Gmail has perfected the art of aggregating distributed signals from emails to filter out spams. Maybe someone can take a look at this problem. This is what bot protection looks like in the age of AI, we need slop-protection as well.

In this case I have a perfect agent code right here:

    const perfectAgent = (prompt) => "Nope";

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#108

Post by linsomniac »

trvz wrote: post #78
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's Berkeley Mono. I use that one, Commit Mono and Mono Lisa depending on how I feel :)

The 7 is different though.

Just FYI, in case it isn't obvious, you are replying to the author of the image in question, IIRC.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#109

Post by mplanchard »

dminik wrote: post #73
defrost wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article covers various opinions expressed by various people, one person Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the representation of race and gender in the media, expressed several opinions at various strengths. including: Bailey also points out that racism within the AI industry goes as far as the actual methods used to power it. She references the negative health impact of xAI da…

Amazing. People here would rather be mad at fake racism than at real racism. I wonder if that correlates with how much they're invested in LLMs.

Presumably no one said “let’s build the data center where the black people live, mwahahah.” Instead, they said, “let’s build the data center where it’s cheap.” Where it’s cheap also happens to be where the black people live, and that’s a pattern. The pattern has historical roots, but it also affects modern communities. The academic quoted in the article is likely highlighting this point, which probably to them seems obvious, given they are steeped in the field.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#110

Post by KptMarchewa »

aryehof wrote: post #16
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #8

> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power"…

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

I also strongly dislike when people are trying to forcefully push those kinds of terms onto broader public.

Last one I disliked was "grok", at least this one was killed by existence of Elon's "clanker" in a similar way that "Adolf" stopped being a popular name.

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