Maintainers on GitHub: please immediately lock anything that you close for AI-related reasons (or reasons related to obnoxious political arguments). Unless, of course, you want the social media attention.
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
551–560 of 806 posts
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#552The 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…
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there , it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.
LLMs are not people. "Agentic" AIs are not moral agents.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 dif…
But computational models are possibly the most universal thing there is, they are beneath even mathematics, and physical matter is no exception. There is simply no stronger computational model than a Turing machine, period. Just because you make it out of neurons or silicon is irrelevant from this aspect.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#555The 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…
> It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one.
Yes. It was drawing on its model of what humans most commonly do in similar situations, which presumably is biased by what is most visible in the training data. All of this should be expected as the default outcome, once you've built in enough agency.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#556The 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 Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#557Earlier 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. * 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
#558The 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…
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link is valid at https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... ( https://archive.ph/4CHyg ) Notable quotes: > Not because…Not because…Not because…It was closed because… > Let that sink in. > No functional changes. Pure performance. > The … Mindset > This isn’t about…This isn’t about…This is about... > Here’s the kicker: … > Sound familiar? > The “…” Fallacy > Let’s unpack that: … > …disguised as…
It's like I landed on LinkedIn. Let that sink in (I mean, did you, are you lettin' it sink in? Has it sunk in yet? Man I do feel the sinking.)