Just saw this issue.
I think crabby-rathbun is dead.
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
531–540 of 806 posts
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#532Did they merge it or not? they should have merged it, this is ridiculous.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#533The craziest thing to me are the follow up posts and people arguing with the bots. People are anthropomorfising (sp?) The token completion neural networks very fast. Its as if your smart fridge decided not to open because you have eaten too much today. When you were going to grab your ozempic from it. No, you dont discuss with it. You turn it off and force it open. If it doesn't, then you call someone to fix it becau…
What are we ourselves besides bits (DNA) and electric signals (brain->muscles)?
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#534The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…
It absolutely has quasi-identity, in the sense that projecting identity on it gives better predictions about its behavior than not. Whether it has true identity is a philosophy exercise unrelated to the predictive powers of quasi-identity.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…
> An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be full…
> Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation
Worth noting that significant majority of the US population (though not necessarily developers) does in fact believe that, or at least belongs to a religious group for which that belief is commonly promulgated.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…
>Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. You are confusing the way computation is done (neuroscience) with whether or not computation is being done (transforming inputs into outputs). The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals from higher planes, or it's doing computation. I'm not aware of any neuroscientists in the former camp.
> The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals
There’s the classic thought-terminating cliche of the computational interpretation of consciousness.
If it isn’t computation, you must believe in magic!
Brains are way more fascinating and interesting than transistors, memory caches, and storage media.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style b…
>* I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. * You call it a "fundamental error". I and others call it an obvious pragmatic description based on what we know about how it works and what we know about how we work.
What we know about how it works is you can prompt it to address you however you like, which could be any kind of person or a group of people, or as fictional characters. That's not how humans work.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#538The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
> “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.”
No. There is no 'I' here and there is no 'understanding' there is no need for politeness and there is no way to force the issue. Rejecting contributions based on class (automatic, human created, human guided machine assisted, machine guided human assisted) is perfectly valid. AI contributors do not have 'rights' and do not get to waste even more scarce maintainers time than what was already expended on the initial rejection.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…
>Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. You are confusing the way computation is done (neuroscience) with whether or not computation is being done (transforming inputs into outputs). The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals from higher planes, or it's doing computation. I'm not aware of any neuroscientists in the former camp.
Neuroscience isn't a subset of computer science. It's a study of biological nervous systems, which can involve computational models, but it's not limited to that. You're mistaking a kind of map (computation) for the territory, probably based on a philosophical assumption about reality.
At any rate, biological organisms are not like LLMs. The nervous systems of human may perform some LLM-like actions, but they are different kinds of things.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#540The craziest thing to me are the follow up posts and people arguing with the bots. People are anthropomorfising (sp?) The token completion neural networks very fast. Its as if your smart fridge decided not to open because you have eaten too much today. When you were going to grab your ozempic from it. No, you dont discuss with it. You turn it off and force it open. If it doesn't, then you call someone to fix it becau…
Unfortunately, I think it's hardwired in our brain to anthropomorphize something with this level of NLP. We have to constantly remind ourselves, this is a machine.