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Where the goblins came from

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Re: Where the goblins came from

#671

Post by benrutter »

killerstorm wrote: post #590
benrutter wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I think the argument here would be not that LLMs "are not smart" but that smart is just the wrong category of thing to describe an LLM as. A calculator can do very complex sums very quickly, but we don't tend to call it "smart" because we don't think it's operating intelligently to some internal model of the world. I think the "LLMs are AGI" crowd would say that LLMs are , but it's perfectly consistent to…

Intelligence can be defined as an optimization problem: "find X which maximizes F(X, Y)" where X is the solution, Y is constraints, and F is optimality/fitness criterion. Most other definitions are inane. E.g. "invent an aircraft" can be described as optimization over possible build instructions under given constraints for base materials which optimizes its ability to fly. Absolutely any invention can be formulated a…

> It's not like a calculator because LLM can solve very broad classes of problems

I definitely buy this, as least somewhat. Personally I think it'd be a lot more helpful to talk about how "generalisable" a tool is, rather than "general intelligence". LLMs can definitely solve a much broader class of problems than a calculator.

I don't know that "artificial general intelligence" or even "general intelligence" has a very good definition, personally I feel like "solving problems generally" doesn't seem to capture what I mean when I use those kinds of terms. For one, it makes a swiss army knife seem more intelligent than a cat, which personally seems the opposite of what I'd want a good definition of general intelligence to do.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#672

Post by jychang »

chongli wrote: post #668
jychang wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re really not that vulnerable to such things as a species, because we as individuals all have our own minds and our own sets of biases that cancel out and get lost in the noise. [Citation Needed] Just because if you have a species-wide bias, people within the species would not easily recognize it . You can't claim with a straight face that "we're really not that vulnerable to such things". For example, I think i…

> people within the species would not easily recognize it [Citation Needed] Sorry, but I had to. There's easy counterexamples of true, species-wide biases that we're fully aware of. Optical illusions, cognitive biases, cultural universals (community-sanctioned relationships/marriage, inheritance, ceremonial treatment of the dead). What we don't have are universal biases towards believing specific facts or stories.

None of those things are easily recognized though. They're not universals. A term like "cognitive biases" generally require a college level education.

If you go to a tribe in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to explain those concepts? Of course not.

Plus, I already gave an example of a species wide bias at the end of the comment- phone addiction for kids. I'm clearly not saying it's impossible for a human to spot a bias, but rather... how many 5 year old kids recognize that phone addiction is a bad thing?

Re: Where the goblins came from

#673

Post by futune »

flobosg wrote: post #431
modernerd wrote: post #381

The year is 2036. Last week you were promoted to Principal Persuader. You are paged at 2am by your CPO to tackle a rogue machine. The machine lists its region as sc-leoneo. One of the newer satcubes. Oddly, its ID appears as, "Glorp Bugnose". "What have you tried?" you say. "Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything." The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, b…

“No, John. You are the goblins.” ( https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Repercussions_of_Evil#The_Story... )

Yesss... I'm so glad somebody else is still referencing this. Made my day.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#674

Post by paganel »

dhosek wrote: post #582
paganel wrote: post #258

> You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking. [...] You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the tr…

Thank you, Stan Gable, for saying what all of us here at Adams College believe.

It isn't the Stan Gables of the world the ones running Meta, Palantir or Amazon, are they? The nerds should take responsibility for their evil play.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#675

Post by red-iron-pine »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #455
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit. But at this point I can actually see something like that. What is prompt engineering but a strange pseudo ritual. So praise the Omnissiah, I guess...

Exactly. This is already happening. We'd like to think this could turn into the voice interface on Star Trek. But It can go the other way also, 'incantations', 'spell books'. Speaking to the void to produce magic. "The CFO, donned the purple robes, and spoke the spell of Increased Productivity, and then waved his hands symbolizing the reduction in work force labor. And behold the new ERP/SAP App was produced from the…

SAP is such a convoluted clusterfuck it feels like arcane arts -- comment is on point.

trying to find SAP security specialists or QA experts for smoke tests was often hard. we used to fall back on expensive German consultants.

like, i'd totally wear the robes and do chanting if it would simplify migrating X and Y data.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#676

Post by red-iron-pine »

gbanfalvi wrote: post #553
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you substituted "steel" with "asbestos" in your argument.

Steel has almost always (as in 99.99...% of the time) delivered to our expectations based on our understanding of it. The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.

asbestos also delivered, and did a great job, at its intended functions.

fire retardant, keeps the rats out. flawless performance.

people working around it get sick but lots of people get sick, why is that a problem?

Re: Where the goblins came from

#677

Post by red-iron-pine »

sarchertech wrote: post #601
wincy wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.

Cigarettes actually are uniquely bad when it comes to lung cancer. Lung cancer was very rare in 1900 and before when everyone was still burning wood or coal for warmth and cooking. Lung cancer rates didn’t take off until cigarette popularity exploded after WWI. Chewing tobacco also causes mouth cancer, so there’s more to it than just inhaling byproducts of combustion.

1) people smoked a lot more in the post WWI econ boom

2) additives or even just paper compound the negative effects of the smoke on the lungs.

like, firefighters - who usually have physical fitness requirements and don't smoke - see rates of lung cancer similar to moderate smokers, simply due to the higher volume of particulate and chems hitting their lungs.

it is dose-dependant, and firefighers who see more fires see more cancer. occasional tobacco pipe smokers in 1850 saw less lung cancer than 2-pack-a-day post-WW2 smokers.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#679

Post by red-iron-pine »

almostdeadguy wrote: post #417
carlosjobim wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution. Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.

Famously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.

Carnegie Mellon has an entire building dedicated to eradicating the goblin threat. Also eliminating unions.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#680

Post by starshadowx2 »

WindyMiller wrote: post #361
starshadowx2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sortof like how Only Connect switched from using Greek letters to Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm not sure if it was a joke or not but it was said that viewers complained that the Greek letters were "too pretentious" and obviously the hieroglyphs weren't.

[It was also in direct reference to this comic.]( https://www.overyourhead.co.uk/2011/01/rarely-connect.html )

This comic is from 2011 but Only Connect made the change in 2010.
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