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The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

211–220 of 301 posts

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#211
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).

Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.

Maybe, but that's hardly comforting (and definitely not in the spirit of open source) if you're forced to take that decision, knowing it will hurt your project, because the alternative is getting DDoSed.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#212
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).

Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.

Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high quality standards.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#213

For the better part of the last 20+ years big corpos had the $ to throw and replicate virtually anything they wanted. They got the cash and man power, yet they didn't do it. Why? Because they don't care, they have business to run, they need to somewhat keep focus which can't happen when scattering attention all over the place. The difference now is that for relatively >simple One seems to omit the fact that LLMs are…

Do not bet against the sheer expressivity of the transformer LLM's design. They fill graveyards with those kinds of bets.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#214
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.

Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high q…

Thank you for the correction, I should have said "not open contribution" rather than "closed contribution".

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#215
post #111

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…

I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make ne…

> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years

Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.

If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#216
post #184
post #111

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…

I would suffocate it. Know the greedy snake idiom? A snake is so hungry and greedy that it suffocates on its prey? Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.

I assume you indicate LLM poisoning with bad web data ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561819)

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#217
post #137
post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

>Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly. Was this just awkward phrasing or did something change and they learn after training?

If you are implying I am a bot myself i have to disappoint you. I am just not a native speaker, so some phrases could be awkward because I translate german to english.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#218
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make ne…

> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing. If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.

AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#219

I guess not many people know but app templates for Uber, AirBnb etc. have been around for years now. You don’t even have to prompt. It’s sitting on the shelf, complete. “Execution is hard” was never about the code part. Up until 2 years ago I was an engineer/entrepreneur. I could build anything. Other stuff, selling, supporting (execution) was hard. LLMs made building some of the things I could build faster/easier, o…

Couldn't agree more. The opportunity cost of executing something is maintaining it. And that's where the real cost lies.

Big companies won't execute our ideas because they need maintain everything that they execute. Plus, the cost of modifying something that was executed itself is also very high at a big company.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#220
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of anti-fragility, I'd point you to the law of requisite variety instead. You'll notice that all AI improvements are insanely good for a week or two after launch. Then you'll see people stating that 'models got worse'. What happened in fact is that people adapted to the tool, but the tool didn't adapt anymore. We're using AI as variety resistant and adaptable tools, but we miss the fact that most deployments…

New models literally do get worse after launch, due to optimization. If you charted performance over time, it'd look like a sawtooth, with a regular performance drop during each optimization period. That's the dirty secret with all of this stuff: "state of the art" models are unprofitable due to high cost of inference before optimization. After optimization they still perform okay, but way below SOTA. It's like a kni…

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