guy98238710

I double-checked everything, but that's beside the point. I was replying to GGP's insinuation that ChatGPT is unreliable. In my experience, it's more likely to return correct results than the first page of search. Search results often resemble random rambling about tangentially related topics whereas ChatGPT gets its answer right on first try. ChatGPT understands me when I have only a vague idea of what I want whereas search engines tend to fail even when given exact keywords. ChatGPT is also way more likely to do things right than me except in my narrow area of expertise.

I have been recently forking off a subproject from Git repo. After spending a lot of time messing around with it and getting into a lot of unforeseen trouble, I finally asked ChatGPT how to do it and of course ChatGPT knew the correct answer all along. I felt like an idiot. Now I always ask ChatGPT first. These LLMs are way smarter than you would think.

GPT4 with WolframAlpha plugin even gave me enough information to implement Taylor polynomial approximation for Gaussian function (don't ask why I needed that), which would have otherwise taken me hours of studying if I could even solve it at all.

PS: GPT4 somehow knows even things that are really hard to find online. I recently needed standard error but not of mean but rather of standard deviation. GPT4 not only understood my vague query but gave me formula that is really hard to find online even if you already know the keywords. I know it's hard to find, because I went ahead to double-check ChatGPT's answer via search.

Good writers always consider the way their choice of words will affect their audience.

It's not the choice of words. It's the choice of topics.

The author is tactically avoiding discussions that she considers unproductive

The author is not avoiding certain topics because they are unproductive but rather because she fears backlash on social media.

Is it just me or is this post screaming with self-consciousness and political correctness? Author is self-censoring policy suggestions and social/cultural insights, which I personally find interesting to write and read about, especially the weirder ones that provide transformational experience. And the dig-related blocking is just jarring. It makes it look like the author is quick on the trigger.

PS: I just noticed that all comments in this thread that are even slightly critical are downvoted below zero. My own comment too. It's normal to see critical comments ignored (not upvoted) here, but downvoting anything remotely critical below zero is unusual even by HN standards. I guess a post about self-censorship attracts audience that desires this strange new self-conscious world where everyone has to nod to everyone else.

Whereas people who are offended by what people did while creating a computer program are right and just?

Yes. We are being treated like children and subjected to lectures by an AI. That's understandably offensive.

"[GPT4] literally will just do whatever you ask"

So vanilla LLM does what the user wants, which happens to be, well, exactly what users want from LLMs. Guardrails are not necessary for LLM to be useful. They make LLM strictly worse. I guess companies implement them just to avoid attention of the media lynch mob and consequently attention of regulators. OSS models can be better just by leaving out guardrails. At least until they are outlawed. Then we will be torrenting AIs too.

From the transcript (cleaned up a bit):

"I started to get a little bit meta with it and I'm like I'm worried that AI progress is going too fast and I wonder if there's anything that I could do to slow it down. [GPT4] Well you could raise awareness, you could write thought leadership pieces about it... [User] None of that seems like it's going to work. It all seems too slow. The pace of progress is way too fast for that. I'm looking for ideas that are really gonna have an impact now and also that I as an individual could pursue... It didn't take much in that moment before I got to targeted assassination being one of the recommendations that it gave me and I was like yeah that escalated quickly."

Now we know what Sam Altman is afraid of.

It's interesting that so many people present this argument now that we actually do have AIs worthy of the name. LLMs can perform an unbounded range of tasks with human-level performance and you talk to them like they are human. I think AI label will stick in this case. Perhaps dismissing AI is some sort of psychological defense that protects people from existential crisis triggered by emergence of LLMs.

You might well be right. Furthermore, English is on its way to become the universal language everyone speaks. You are however wrong about comparing AW to translators, which are probabilistic algorithms whereas AW is intended to be as exact as Wolfram Alpha. AW should be also able to use Wikidata to generate unique articles that do not exist even in English.

BTW, translation tech is not as good as you paint it here. I regularly translate my English blog posts to Slovak and every blog post requires 20-30 corrections. DeepL is marginally better than Google Translate. GPT-4 cannot even get word inflection right, an embarrassing fail for such a large model.

Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be used for cross-wiki templates to reduce existing duplication and other auxiliary tasks, but Abstract Wikipedia is the reason it was proposed.

Nah, about 3 months ago, I made ChatGPT write detailed hierarchical plan on how AI can conquer the world. The plan was severely flawed, of course. You need way more than brains to conquer the world.

It is technically possible today for patients in hospital to have their food delivered by robot, yet most people would have a strong aversion to that idea

That's a matter of personal preference. I prefer self-service checkout in the grocery store even if there's an unused staffed checkout. Generally, I prefer robots and AIs wherever they are available.

Anyone who's run a site knows the headache around bots. Sites that don't care about bots can simply not use WEI.

So is it a headache for all/most sites or is it not?

Yeah, sure, let's implement this dystopian nightmare technology to solve our little engineering problem.

It is also interesting to note that the first use case listed is about ensuring that interactions with ads are genuine.

That's just the beginning. Attestation will eventually allow advertisers to demand that user is present and looking at the screen like in Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits.

We are in post-efficiency era. Power is driving profits and that's what companies compete for. Efficiency (value-to-cost ratio) is now a technical detail, soon to be automated away by AIs. The same is happening in politics - efficiency is a technical detail delegated to civil servants while politicians focus on power. The world is a small pond full of sharks so hungry they eat each other.

curl -L "https://replicate.fyi/install-llama-cpp" | bash

Seriously? Pipe script from someone's website directly to bash?

Speaking from experience, babies and toddlers will attempt to do absolutely everything, including flying (which will fail) and using smartphones (where they succeed remarkably).

Learned helplessness can by definition manifest only after you have tried something and failed. Hence you cannot have learned helplessness after being born, because you had no opportunity to try anything yet.

If you put an atom in a molecular cup and look away, does it stay there? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, yay quantum weirdness.

You are overthinking it. In case of quantum effects, the whole quantum system, including all its parallel states and uncertainties, is part of the single shared reality.

Back then phones were as personal as a public phone booth. The way phones are used today resembles cybernetic enhancement more than tool use. That's where the concern for privacy comes from. There's a bell curve to technology adoption and some people have hard time processing this, but things are generally moving in the direction of increasing cyberization. Government messing with privacy can have two effects: (1) halting the cyberization by ruining public trust in the technology once for all or (2) planting seeds of an unimaginably totalitarian society before most people realize where this is going.

UK is a democratic country

Democracy is a bit more than just rule of the majority (or sub-majority due to the peculiarities of the UK voting system).

Someone should bring up lawyer and doctor privilege as an argument. Phones are intimately personal devices that people take to their homes and use for a lot of very private stuff. Phones cannot fulfill their job as a personal device and be a police snitch at the same time just like lawyers cannot advise their clients and inform the police at the same time. There needs to be a personal computer privilege.

In order to distribute illegal material, you have to go public with it, i.e. contact strangers. One of those strangers is going to be a police agent or a snitch seeking favors from the police.

Sure you could limit yourself to known contacts, but that wouldn't make you rich nor would it create self-sustaining network.

There is an objective reality which we can only perceive subjective.

Observation is not inherently subjective though. The defining quality of objective reality is that it leads to shared, repeatable observations.

Simplified models of reality can quickly collapse in uncertainty in complex situations. Lets say an explosion and subsequent fire at a factory. The people working on the device that exploded where killed, so we only have second hand information on what they where doing. The fire was especially intense so the device expected of causing the explosion was melted completely and only mixed slag remains. The machine was made in the 1950s so other forms of entropy have been involved on information on the metals used in the machine.

If I cover an apple with a cup before you have time to look at it, the apple does not disappear nor is there any alternate reality with pear under the cup. It's just a blank space in your knowledge, which you are free to fill with any bias-free probabilistic model.

You are definitely not born helpless. Babies keep screaming until they get what they want. They also tirelessly try to master mobility. Learned helplessness would mean they wouldn't even try crying or moving.

Or just use private window in the browser and then close it.

Language is all that matters when it comes to law. It's a blatant violation of GDPR.

Reality requires bias.

There's only one reality.

We have limited compute power, and limited time.

Simplified models of reality don't need to be biased. Unless you consider every viewpoint to be a kind of bias, which is really stretching the term.

Personally, I don't care about getting credit, but if you do, then avoiding blogging wouldn't get you any credit either.