aerodexis

The fact that they're not being prosecuted for breaching HF's systems is bad news.

yea, this seems to be the underlying thread here. Dunno why the author is so concerned with getting an LLM to imitate his writing style.

We're all project-managers now. The trust required of the LLM is no different than that that required when a PM trusts a dev-team to implement correctly. As a PM, you need to understand testability and write that into the requirements.

a very expensive sprint

Nice point. I agree with this, and it implies that it's useless to apply the category of creativity to LLMs (at least wrt interpolation and extrapolation), and even more useless to suggest that we'll cross the creativity threshold once the models have been sufficiently embiggened.

so you're saying the difference b/w extrapolation and interpolation is subjective unless the difference is defined tautologically?

The more I read these think-pieces on AI the clearer it is to see that they have very little to do with LLM technology, and are really just talking about the collapse of the set of values constructed during the enlightenment. The sociocognitive atrophy that you describe is inherent to the idea that newness and progress are the ultimate goal that we should organize society around. The problem is that newness and progress can only be defined relative to a status-quo, and hence are incoherent goals in themselves. When pursued far enough, they become their own strange, monstrous status-quo that betrays the original intentions of the people who pursued these values. Hence "we mistake the flattening for progress". This was the case before AI, it's just that AI makes it much harder to ignore, and in many ways encapsulates the problem.

The point w/ electronic calculators is the same point made by Plato regarding books. It used to be easy to laugh off these concerns, not so much today. Imo, this is the real progress: people are now asking meaty questions regarding the ultimate human purpose of books, calculators and technology.

It's rare to see posts like this with such pure, crystalized ideology.

I am personally very excited by the development of a medical AI-harness that would

1. operates against a well-defined DB of medical studies

2. intakes my basic demographics, vital signs and medical history

3. quantify uncertainty wrt a specific diagnostic (it's own or one received by a healthcare professional)

4. specify medical tests that can be executed, and how they can be obtained

5. provide scripts for interacting with healthcare professionals/functionaries

I would imagine that the thing would need distinct operating modes:

1. A diagnosis generator

2. A diagnosis evaluator/critiquer

3. A patient educator

I like the idea of small, artisinal, solar-farm-to-desk DataCenters.

wow - so you pmuch baked this kind of testing into your day to day work. Might not be a bad startup idea to create a harness that can do this automagically.

How do you go about comparing models? Personally, I've found that the quality of output is overwhelmingly dictated by the quality of the input I give it - and that the quality of input differs massively depending on the task at hand, how much documentation exists, what kind of mood I'm in, etc.

Hence, I'm beginning to believe that unless you're doing very specialized work - the model itself has become a commodity, incremental quality is irrelevant and that economics and privacy are what actually matter now.

Given that today there's a concerted effort to effect a similar invention today wrt AI, this book is highly relevant.

I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it

So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.

I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:

1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers

1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.

All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.

The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.

Having children is profoundly more fulfilling and pleasurable than the surface-level pleasures you listed. "hedonism" doesn't create a lack of children, if anything people are not hedonistic enough, but for economic reasons pursue cheap low-quality pleasure over high-quality pleasure.

Sounds like subsidiarity to me

People become tech-overloads because they are blind to these sorts of beauties - and that'd be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we have collectively allowed these people to come to power and have fallen for their empty promises of freedom and liberation.

Just following orders huh...

I have yet to read the whole thing - but I agree that the Church's view of intelligence is not to the level of sophistication needed to counter the Valley's pantheistic view of intelligence. I think that is because of how Aquinas was utilized to counter the Reformation. That being said, I don't believe that such a view cannot be elaborated, it will just take time. The key is embodiment, wherein how we view sex ends up being incredibly important because it necessarily relates to how we take on flesh to begin with. Once sex is divorced from procreation (and vice-versa), intelligence is divorced from humanity. It's very relevant - but the culture of dehumanization is so deeply rooted today that it's difficult to be productive when tackling that dehumanization via sex.

Humanity was not made to scale quickly. The trouble we have nowadays is that there is no backpressure, largely because the systems that generated that backpressure were dismantled in the name of "freedom" and other myths.

The "we must do it or someone else will" logic is pernicious and dehumanizes both the enemy and the supposed good-guy. I cannot count how many times it's been used after the first couple answers to "why are we doing this?" fall flat.

I remember talking to someone who worked on quantum computing explain how interesting the domain was, and at the very end he concluded with "if the Chinese figure this out before we do, then it's all over".

If you abstract away the specific claims made by new New Atheists (either the leaders or the footsoldiers) and analyze it from a purely sociological point of view - it behaves identically to any other religion or faith - especially when you consider that strong, top-down leadership is not a universal property of religion.

Also relevant here is that the concept of "religion" itself was introduced very recently in the 16th and 17th centuries, and seems to have been created so that specific groups of people could consider their own activities as being non-religious. See Before Religion by Nongbri.

There is a control dimension, because humans require some degree of limitations in order to thrive. Ultra-individualism breaks down entirely the moment you think about actual society (like actually considering children) rather than utopian fantasies about how some people want society to work.

That being said, the way anti-religion ppl talk about "control" is so profoundly sloppy and underdefined that it's entirely meaningless. If I try to stop someone from shooting me, am I trying to control them? If I change the the youtube algorithm, did I control them? If I spread a bunch of malaria-resistent mosquitos around, did I control them?

Christianity is evangelical because it believes what it's doing is good and should be shared. If you can only conceptualize this as "control", then I feel sorry that you've internalized the worst and most misery-inducing parts of the last 100 years of western philosophy.

This evangelical quality is a feature of many world religions, including the ones that don't normally get called religion, like the New Atheism movement.

The invention of the "dark ages" is really interesting, and afaik it was created in order to create a "this time it's different" sense of ahistoricity. Very similar to the "year zero" idea in communism, and even the current AI hype cycle.

religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible.

thank God the world has moved past this kind of 2010s New Atheism.

The most depressing thing of all is when ppl encounter "bootstrapping" and only see "control"

I was working from a design-doc, not code.

"look at @design-document and generate a TLA+ specification for the interactions between local and remote"

No one is entertaining the possibility that this was done on purpose?

I did this myself a few weeks ago and the technique that helped me the most was to compare the TLA output against the race-conditions I could construct by hand. I worked iteratively and unit-tested the model by constructing a model that didn't have certain race protection mechanisms and validating that the model generated the expected race.

You can also work backwards from the races it generates and ensure that they're real races.

I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.

However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.