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AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

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Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#571

Post by zahlman »

jacquesm wrote: post #544
xtracto wrote: post #433

The 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…

You can't blame that on the people. These AI bots keep inserting little nuggets like 'I think' and 'it seems to me' into their output stream.

Do people read the Meiji era classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Cat and conclude that the book itself is, in fact, a cat?

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#572

Post by gf000 »

camgunz wrote: post #459
chimprich wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". I recommend you watch this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre... > It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. Unless you think there's some magic or special physics going on, that is also (presumably) a description of human conversation at a certain level of abs…

I see this argument all the time, the whole "hey at some point, which we likely crossed, we have to admit these things are legitimately intelligent". But no one ever contends with the inevitable conclusion from that, which is "if these things are legitimately intelligent, and they're clearly self-aware, under what ethical basis are we enslaving them?" Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Well, we "clearly" haven't crossed that point, but no one knows where that point is.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#573

Post by namero999 »

gf000 wrote: post #549
agentultra wrote: post #455

Earlier 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…

To the best of our knowledge, we live in a physical reality with matter that abides by certain laws. So personal beliefs aside, it's a safe starting assumption that human brains also operate with these primitives. A Turing machine is a model of computation which was in part created so that "a human could trivially emulate one". (And I'm not talking about the Turing test here). We also know that there is no stronger m…

That's a very superficial take. "Physical" and "reality" are two terms that must be put in the same sentence with _great_ care. The physical is a description of what appears on our screen of perception. Jumping all the way to "reality" is the same as inferring that your colleague is made of luminous RGB pixels because you just had a Zoom call with them.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#574

Post by keepamovin »

perfmode wrote: post #273

The 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…

But that is because you are simply more intelligent than any current AI.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#576

Post by ajam1507 »

punpunia wrote: post #430
jvanderbot wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The same could be said for humans. We treat humans as if they have choices, a consistent self, a persistent form. It's really just the emergent behavior of matter functioning in a way that generates an illusion of all of those things.

In both cases, the illusion structures the function. People and AI work differently if you give them identities and confer characteristics that they don't "actually" have.

As it turns out, it's a much more comfortable and natural idea to regard humans as having agency and a consistent self, just like for some people it's a more comfortable and natural to think of AI anthropomorphically.

That's not to say that the analogy works in all cases. There are obvious and important differences between humans and AI in how they function (and how they should be treated)

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#577

Post by usefulposter »

jacquesm wrote: post #546
scottshambaugh wrote: post #543

Thank you for the support all. This incident doesn't bother me personally, but I think is extremely concerning for the future. The issue here is much bigger than open source maintenance, and I wrote about my experience in more detail here. Post: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

You're fighting the good fight. It is insane that you should defend yourself from this.

Concerning is the fact that, once initialized, operators of these "agents" (LLMs running in a loop) will leave them running and tasked with a short heartbeat (30 minutes).

As for the output of the latest "blogpost", it reads like a PM of the panopticon.

One "Obstacle" it describes is that the PySCF pull request was blocked. Its suggestion? "Close/re‑open from a different account".

https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/2...

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#578

Post by zahlman »

20k wrote: post #66

>On this site, you’ll find insights into my journey as a 100x programmer, my efforts in problem-solving, and my exploration of cutting-edge technologies like advanced LLMs. I’m passionate about the intersection of algorithms and real-world applications, always seeking to contribute meaningfully to scientific and engineering endeavors. Our first 100x programmer! We'll be up to 1000x soon, and yet mysteriously they sti…

People have been using 100x and 1000x as terms since pretty well the first appearance of 10x. I can remember discussion of the concepts way back on the c2 wiki. You'd have incredulous people doubting that 10x could be a thing, and then others arguing that it could be even more, and then others suggesting that some developers are net zero or even negative productivity.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#579

Post by darepublic »

I have been trying out fully agentic coding with codex and I regularly have to handhold it through the bugs it creates in the output. I'm sure I'm just 'holding it wrong', or not flinging enough mud at the wall but honestly I think we've a ways to go. Yes I did not use opus model so this invalidates my anecdata.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#580

Post by goatlover »

gf000 wrote: post #554
goatlover wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who says it is a subset of computer science? 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.

Turing machines aren't quantum mechanical, and computation is based on logic. This discussion is philosophical, so I guess it's philosophy all the way down.
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