digitailor

I think addressing people's expression of skepticism of the average motives of journalists by simply making the unqualified claim that the people expressing skepticism "know nothing" made the opposite point than you intended.

This is an article posted to Hacker News where a defendant was incarcerated by a judge for media manipulation, and journalists who were involved made statements to the judge in support of the defendant. Since the defendant was incarcerated, that makes the journalists involved closer to malfeasant than not, but the entirety of your claim is that there is never malfeasance involved in journalism and the skepticism of the people you're reprimanding is simply "populism." Frankly, that comes off as a bit malfeasant, in the reflexively defensive sense.

Would you like to claim I "know nothing" about the profession of journalism as well? How would you know that I know nothing about the profession of journalism?

In the author’s defense they mentioned the NASA standard, and that guide— while legendary— isn't a "lacing" guide. Of the 50+ images, only 2 show lacing (acceptable v. unacceptable), and the rest is spot tying, zip tying or other harnessing. Always nice to see the link though

Here’s a highly specific example about the subject matter of TFA published last month: https://nextyorktimes.com/p/boomer-predatory-crime

You’ve clearly been a victim of victims before. Your detailed analysis of these harms they’ve performed against you, and your warning not to listen to victims, is very concise, detailed, and clearly derived from experience. I think you’re right, I won’t take advice from someone trapped in a victimhood mentality

Edit: The current HN bio of this user amazes me. "Used to have close to 1000 karma, got destroyed over time by hackernews cancel culture and a change in downvote algorithms." This user is literally the victim who doesn't know that they're a victim that they "see all the time." This makes perfect sense, assuming they own mirrors

Now, if I had a victimhood mentality, I would be decrying the fact that this comment was downvoted. But I won't, because the downvoting is a positive that helps prove my point. Thank you for the downvote, unknown victim of victims, I am eternally grateful to you and your kind

This is exactly what happened in digital audio signal processing and recording, where word size represents amplitude. 12-bit audio was the first word size that provided a pretty good noise floor by the late 1980s, a real improvement over 8-bit. And by the mid-80s the CD format was already providing 16-bits for playback, which really is good enough for most playback scenarios. The 16-bit DSP era was just a few years longer than the 12-bit and quickly gave way to 24-bit, which provides a noise floor good enough for almost anything audio processing and recording related and is still the standard after more than 20 years. I have gear that defaults to 32-bit now, obviously just for power-of-2 convenience in software dev, which is annoying because the file sizes are bigger for basically no reason.

(The master buses in DAWs and digital hardware use even larger word lengths these days, but it's not really the same thing, that's a summing and calculation process)

The workflow update-deps.yaml will periodically check for new updates of SBCL or the linked libraries. If an update is found, it edits build.env and creates a pull request that will check that the set of dependencies can be compiled and linked without errors.

Just, wow. Thank you for this.

Only bc it’s Valentine's Day :)

https://peel.fm/33e538b

Nice work, fun and the repeats system is cool

McQuillan’s central point here that ChatGPT is a “bullshit generator” and not “artifically intelligent” is really apt. What we’re often working on in the industry is emulating the worst uses of intelligence processes, that humans also use, like optimized BS generation. Seeing ChatGPT turn into the equivalent of a competent essay-spitting undergrad is distressing; the internet is now such a mass of human-generated BS, it's hard to believe people will be arguing and competing with machine optimized and generated BS speech.

The really concerning thing is that in BS Wars, the party that's willing to BS most flagrantly and not be seen as truthful tends to win: https://post.news/article/2LGf4ziMatzJ3nCHuZv7e6pTKVA

The most powerful and effective and immediately available BS generators will probably rely on machine-generated, unhinged speech. I truly fear for the future of the few reputable internet forums left, because even intelligent people tend to engage with well-optimized BS generators, whether driven by human or machine.

Meta comment: I understand why this was downvoted and am impressed (not complaining at all) but please keep in mind that the top of the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34677527) was later hijacked by a completely unrelated sensationalist political issue. The initial comment that caused that was later deleted, yet somehow its responses remained at the top:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683697

Been reading HN since 2006 or so and started going to meetups from it soon after that. A bit sad to see how threads can get hijacked by a comment as low value as "GPT is a calculator for words" directly into a sensationalist political issue.

Yup, you’re dead on, that’s how "engagement" tends to work, but hook is not also line and sinker, no? So advanced speech generation models are now having to account for engagement— contextually— as well. It’s all getting much more refined, somewhat rapidly, but not necessarily truly usefully

Edit: At the time of this comment, that 1/7 sentences had generated almost all of the 84 resulting comments. I had been hoping for more like 20% comments on the other parts, or more people to latch on to the behavioral aspect of trained model content generation, but whatevs

I kind of do think some people do get hired to continue to be like undergrads, and ChatGPT is turning into a pretty good undergrad. I really don’t know what the progression is going to be, but it seems like a widening in the middle of Moravec’s Pdx or something. Algorithmic management is next on the block and tools like GPT will be (and are) involved: [edit:algo stuff] took over a lot of content-making decisions in media concerns years ago, for example.

The results of that aren’t nearly as straightforward as was being portrayed (and so much capital injection was involved too) but what if models trained on known employee behavior really can understand the incentives that would work for individual employees at a finer grain than your typical middle manager? With all the data gleaned from the employee’s work computer etc? And blaming the algo has already become a national pastime!!

It could get weird once trained models start to emulate the behavioral and suggestion parts of communication, and soon. But we tend to want to minimize the behavioral aspect in favor of the raw computation aspect, despite the fact that generative models are creating content based on the behavior they learned from a training process, which is a behavioral training process, distinct from an imperative instruction writing process.

I think a lot of it comes down to that on this whole TFA commentary. People haven’t totally adjusted to the fact that there is a material difference between trained generative models that produce and written imperative sequences that compute. What the difference is and implications isn’t exactly clear, but certainty is not really on the table anytime soon

Spoken like a truly based groyper. :D I understand, yes, all things are composed of atoms, electrons, etc. All computation is achieved through calculation, or to be more precise, processes like execution of instructions and transistor flipping. How is this illuminating for doing anything practical other than circuit design, exactly? And why couldn't my Texas Instruments write me a blog post that fools thousands?

Agreed that comparing everything to our (very incomplete) understanding of human cognition & intelligence quickly gets into metaphysical-style speculation of the human vs. the animal vs. the machine type that I don’t have much time for. We use the same language for all types of intelligence and it can bring out the pedantry in people.

But let’s say I’m facing a door with a mail slot in it and I suddenly feel the barrel of a gun in my back, and a strange voice says “Don’t you dare turn around, and put your wallet in the slot or I shoot.” I can’t see anything other than the door. Do I care if the entity with the gun is a short man, a tall woman, or three mutant badgers in a trenchcoat?

I see. I call this the “all code is just a really big abacus” argument. Others call it algorithmic reductionism or essentialism, and I will argue for it too in many cases. (I don’t get too bent out of shape about it, even when shallow depth of human thought may have security implications down the line.)

How about generative adversarial networks? Are they just calculators too?

Conversely, someone could argue you might be under thinking the behavioral-style implications of what the word training means in machine decision making scenarios. Think about something like a GAN, even. The concepts at play are not as simplistic as some people want them to be, when they make reductive comparisons to SQL injection attacks and the like.

One could also argue that veering too far in one specific direction over the other in “thinking” on these subjects has more considerable potential negative consequences.

All good nerdy fun, in the end

How could you discuss this openly so brazenly? I fear for your security. Good luck, I hope you know the hand signal

It’s wild how many people will split hairs lingually over models that are the result of a TRAINING process :D

That's more or less correct. My post was targeted to the investor segment of HN readership about labor automation, displacement, and re-valuation. The coder/techaesthete segment has focused exclusively on 1/7 sentences of my comment, as noted here, 20 min before your post, that quoted the 1/7 literally:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34681721

Which is pretty cool, actually

Lol on the "chicken"x4 plan, here’s hoping. I’ll let you in on a tiny secret: I only really focus on the incentives exploit in one of seven sentences in the OP. I agree, the Reddit premise is a bit of a stretch, but not to the breaking point. What happened is all the discussion generated here has focused on the 1/7 of the sentences I wrote that were germaine to the kind of “gossipy” TFA, that discussion not being meritless at all. But the rest of my post is the real meat and potatoes of what I wanted to communicate on the subject, about labor displacement and re-valuation, and I theorize that’s what’s being upvoted, with no ability to qualify that statement whatsoever!

I couldn’t disagree more that our heuristics don’t fail constantly, especially at the group level, but please do send the link to buy the tinted lens glasses you’re wearing. I want a pair ;)

In all seriousness I agree tho, intelligence does not strictly cover ethics and morals, but we are headed into boundless territory there if we continue

I think it's not so much “buying" it, as understanding the larger point that’s being made about the class of technology in order to make much more critical points. Quibbling over the later stages of exploit execution instead of focusing on all the classes of vulnerabilities that lead to exploits don’t necessarily make us more secure either, as is sometimes claimed

I don’t think we’re in actual disagreement, and this is no prob, but I think you’re hung up on the word comprehension, which you introduced in your first reply “Is there any evidence that ChatGPT has any comprehension…” and then I intentionally used in my reply to you.

You keep claiming I’m anthropomorphizing when I'm not, I’m not sure why but it's common and not particularly bothersome. Comprehension is not a strictly human phenomenon, and when you use terms in relation to cognition and intelligence in relation to machines it is not automatically anthropomorphizing. These are all terms of art in regards to the field of intelligence, which includes information, as in terms like “intelligence operatives.” Anyway, cheers

This is the comment I was waiting for. I knew the overview of prompt overloading with ChatGPT already, and this story was obviously as much as of a form of exploit entertainment for us old phone phreaks etc. as anything else.

Really I’m trying to make a larger point about exploit mechanics: it's not so much that ChatGPT is as intelligent as many people, it’s that many people are as unintelligent as ChatGPT, with a crappy heuristics system

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat” is a very strange expression a highly skilled worker who trained me in a complex task twenty years ago would put it. All the ways of skinning the cat work. No, I still don’t totally understand the expression, but I always understood what he meant ;)

Go get ChatGPT to override its policy without using incentive mechanics^, then you can pontificate ;) That’s what TFA is about

^edit: which is already known to be possible, but doesn't devalue the success of an incentives-based exploit

ChatGPT is executing and evaluating in order to perform acts, including overriding creator's policy in this case. I'm not concerned with “anthropomorphizing;” even lists can be comprehensive.

While there’s undoubtedly demand for Blackwater meets Uber in the nouveau riche set, I don't think this goes far enough in securing the arriviste’s perimeter. How can I be sure my Gigachad operatives aren’t also being hired by my many opponents and detractors? How can the same foreign aristocrat who is after me be using the same Gigachads as me on a gig-work basis??

To be fair, that does already happen, and that’s why I have Gigachads watching my Gigachads. My own Gigachads are sworn enemies of my opponent’s Gigachads, and STILL, they are constantly selling each other out, often over jewelry or strangely-chambered boutique firearms. I think this is just another bunch of dilettante college kids I don't trust with my perimeter.

I agree it’s not evidence of ChatGPT being human, but you just described an agent comprehending incentive mechanics in order to override established policy, yeah

Using a reward-penalty system to achieve this “exploit” is pure behaviorism, going to show once again that we’re not just creating “artificial intelligence,” we’re emulating our own fallibility. Giving us things like advanced parroting skills with a large lexicon — drawing from an encyclopedia of recycled ideas— with no genuine moral compass, that can be used to do things like write essays while being bribed or convinced to cheat.

In other words, we’re making automated students and middle management, not robots that can do practical things like retile your bathroom.

So the generation of prose, essays, and speech is already low-value, gameable, and automated for some cases that used to have higher value. What it seems we’re looking at is a wholesale re-valuation of human labor that’s difficult to automate and isn’t as susceptible to behaviorist manipulation. Undervalued labor “should” start to be valued higher, and overvalued labor “should” be devalued, depending on how our system of commercial valuation heuristics is able to adjust. Needless to say, there’s a commercial political layer in there that’s a bit of a beast.

Disney’s 2021 “Cruella,” based on the 101 Dalmatians franchise, has a main villain who tries to kill her own daughter. Lot of complexity there. Great film.

SuperCard was awesome too (color came so late!) but I guess a little too little for the times. Once the web started really heating up, it was all about trying to get into places that had NIX or WinNT boxes. And by '96 I was old-enough looking to get snuck into the lab with a couple of SGIs at Parsons… ;)

I ended up at a “startup” in '97 called onlinetv.com and our boxes were originally in the data center next to the NYSE and it wasn’t ludicrously expensive yet. The founder, an extraordinary Boomer who got us thrown out of the Film Center on 17th for smoking pot, moved us into the basement of a bar in the East Village called the Spiral.

Where we streamed the bands playing upstairs in potato quality and sold Troma videocassettes, because the boss had been given the rights to them. Bell Atlantic put some kind of huge hub in the basement at our request that I can’t remember the details of anymore, but we got speed