nefitty

Here's the incident page https://status.openai.com/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3

Reminds me of this thread:

"Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953592

Can you link to where Gates talks about this?

There's an official active Discord server for Bard that some users get invited to in waves.

re: discord

"Invites are currently paused for this server. Please try again later."

Anonymous Sudan claims to be currently ddos'ing OpenAI

As of this week, it appears ChatGPT now reports its knowledge cutoff date as April 2023.

The archived version of that kotaku article has the original strips that are missing from the current version: https://web.archive.org/web/20150815184327/https://kotaku.co...

I currently can't use Postmates because I'm not on iOS15.

It’s under the For Business list

There’s research to try to get closer to an objective demarcation of suffering. The latest measures place even shrimp at some level of intolerable suffering, due to some of the farming techniques, eg removing they eyeballs of females to make them more fertile.

Not seeing the moral imperative is not the same as there not being a moral imperative. The attitude that motivated your comment is astonishingly cruel.

I'd be super down to throw my shoulder into a couple projects at once. It would personally help with some of the exhaustion that happens when focusing on one codebase. It would be a lower risk for organizations and provide a more affordable chunk of value for increasing the quality of their product.

I currently feel like it's too out there to comfortably propose to companies I'm interviewing at. If a job description explicitly stated "open to discussing part-time opportunities" and leadership was realistically aligned with the time commitments part-time engineers would face, I would definitely bring it up as a possibility.

There's so many companies doing cool work. Individually we commonly end up contracting our aspirations in service of one endeavor. That makes sense for some companies. For others, the benefits in terms of production value and having their engineers exposed to multivariate problems could be huge. I'm particularly thinking if companies that have straightforward apps to present or deliver their services, like a video app, community apps, etc. A lot of those problems are solved, and I'm not sure it makes sense to invest a huge amount, in terms of full-time work, in executing on those visions.

I'm also curious what it would be like to manage a part-time engineer. Work life balance would have to be front and center. Processes for dealing with emergencies would need to be realistic. Demands from management would need to be broken down with part-time chunks in mind, and so on.

I've just recently started framing more and more of my options as if-thn statements, with an emphasis on the then being some emotion tht I predict I will feel. I think some people probably naturally do this, but it takes effort for to me to think of now vs future.

I base my understanding of generating internal motivation of of the WOOP model, academically known as implementation intentions with mental contrasting. Focusing on mounting my internal dialogue on simple if-then models is easier than running through the whole WOOP model.

I'd love to know of any mental heuristics others here use that help them effectively close the current state vs ideal state gap.

I think it helps to find people slightly ahead of you on the same journey. Their internal map of the topic is slightly more filled out, so the difference is easier to manage. I want to learn AI programming, and I'd more effectively learn from someone who has just gotten their head around Prolog than from a PhD at DeepMind.

I've notified people I know when they end up on HN. Also, maybe some analytics thing?

Good point. My mistake.

Ah gotcha. Thank you for taking the time to clarify!

I see where you're coming from. It's a failure on my part that I didn't make it clear that one of my ideals is continual expansion of our moral intuitions. It's also partly a choice to leave it out because it can become so unintuitive that it affects the basis of the entire argument.

Since you expressed openness to this dialogue, I'll share. When I really, really stretch my moral imagination to the point it decouples from practical logic, I find myself feeling spiritually reverent for the things that the mental abstraction "complexity" points at. I arrive at this by synthesizing a particular metaphor from Alan Watts with Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's ideas on complexity.

In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants. If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal. I don't know if there's farther expansive rings of morality. I imagine I might be able to peek at some with the help of deep, deep meditative practice or other tools.

The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.

That's basically the outline of my metaphysical beliefs.

Finally, specifically regarding pain and plants, I agree that we bend our intuitions to the experiences that make sense to us. My argument is that the word "pain" and what we understand pain to be, is predicated on a specific biological structure, nociceptors. To speak of pain without nociception is like saying the water in my hand isn't wet. They're enmeshed, dependent properties. So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body. As a consequence of that fact, there are just some things it can't capture, and attempting to do so places us closer to the choice: bodhisattva or buddha.

Thanks to the informative resources linked to by jack4818 and ototot I was able to slightly wrap my head around this. I'll share my barely informed, naive understanding in the hopes that it'll help others in a similar position build on it. Please correct me if any of what I share is mistaken!

Quantum computers have special properties that make them capable of breaking commonly used encryption schemes. We're dependent on those schemes for secure communication, like logging into a bank website. Due to this, the organization NIST has been working on finding encryption schemes that would be diffcult to break with a quantum computer.

NIST was at the stage of this project where they felt reasonably confident that three specific encryption schemes met the requirements. This is after review of many candidates. Rainbow made it to the top three. Ward Buellens essentially managed to break Rainbow, thereby making it ineligible for use in a quantum computer-powered future.

I assume this puts the two remaining candidates' eligibility into question. Were the requirements lacking, or is the project inherently at risk of failure due to the nature of quantum computing?

The gap between what I imagine and desire motivates my art and coding. "Damn, I can't find what I want to listen to. I guess I'll have to make this song up that my brain wants to hear, myself."

I think you can draw on the screen with a mouse while you're sharing in Zoom. There's also Jamboard for collaborative whiteboarding https://jamboard.google.com/

Not necessarily. A large part of what makes killing unethical is that it's a subversion of the creatures' preferences. In my mind I imagine that sentient beings have a little sandcastle-shaped plan for the future. Killing them is like stopping on their sandcastle. It's not the only way, but it's the worst because that sandcastle can never be rebuilt.

I see what you mean. I took it for granted that it's clear that sentience is a prerequisite to the capability of having desires. If someone did argue that plants have desires then I would question what they mean: either they're implying conscious preference of future states, desire predicated on sentience or they mean some metaphysical teleological conception of desire. The first two are mistakes, the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games.

I agree in regards to the universe's indifference! Cradling that understanding had a big part in my conclusion of moral objectivity. The freedom I gained from that is what allowed me to discover what I know now.

My basic formula for moral truth is: starting from a non-maladaptive state of mind, would I prefer to have or recoil from 'X' experience? With that in mind, could I reasonably conclude that sentient others around me would arrive at the same conclusion as me? How about strangers? Other animals? An extraterrestrial? A synthetic being? Humans in a million years?

If my chain of reasoning doesn't break at any point as I expand the set of sentient beings to check against, then it is likely that I now have clear guidance on engaging in actions that produce experience 'X'.

Here is an example: Should I break my friend's arm against his will? I would not want that to happen to me. Most people I know prefer not to have their arms broken. My dog would not want that. A cow would not want that. A fish would not want his tail snapped off. People in the future won't want their arms broken if it feels how I imagine it feels. I don't imagine that a sentient robot would like its gripping mechanism broken. Whatever sorts of appendages extraterrestrials have, they probably don't want to lose the ability to use them.

I can then extract the generalizable term from "I shouldn't break my friend's arm against his will" to, "I shouldn't hurt sentient beings when it's counter to their overriding preferences."

It now follows that if I were able to poll every sentient creature through all time (sentient according to a rubric), I would expect the majority to share the uncovered preference or aversion in question. I now have a positive statement about morality that is universalizable, apparently akin to Kantian philosophy, which I have some bare surface knowledge of.

The exercise seems pretty robust to me insofar as language and idea-derived conclusions hold up. For example, culturally dependent preferences, idiosyncrasies, aesthetic preferences, etc, fail the test easily.

I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you.

I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".

There may be simple damage-avoidance reflexes, but comparing that with what it feels like to break a bone would be like saying that pedestrians and vehicles should share the road. The difference in quality is so significant that it makes better sense to categorize those reflexes as not pain at all although in service of the same tissue-protecting goal. My legs are not a vehicle I don't think.

A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.

If the above is not enough to convince, there's some recent research that sought to systematize the analysis of sentience. Here's the 8 points used:

  1) possession of nociceptors;
  2) possession of integrative brain regions;
  3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions;
  4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics;
  5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward;
  6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat;
  7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation;
  8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured

I hope that helps!

Sentience is more akin to the preference to avoid pain. Intelligence plays a role in the expression of sentience, but it is ultimately more akin to an ability rather than a preference trait as sentience is.

I do. I would like to know what you think. My understanding of the mechanism is probably oversimplified.

"Allow" implies some sort of consent. I understand that you mean in an evolutionary sense, but it's clear that most living beings are averse to dying, even when possessing the most biologically primitive nervous systems. I prefer to head off any arguments in bad faith, "well, why don't all the cows just run away?" Some people are very comfortable resorting to satirical absurdity when discussing suffering, as evidenced by ridiculous arguments like "plants feel pain, why do you eat plants?"

It's not a novel idea. Isn't it just a fatalistic coloring of ethical relativism? I personally subscribe to the idea that moral truths can be discovered from principals we can derive on inspecting our own preferences and experiences. We can than radiate that practice out to uncover more, and it historically happens by dint of physical/genetic proximity, eg prioritizing the wellbeing of family and friends and so on.

An interesting aspect of the internet is that it makes the determinant lines fuzzier and clearly arbitrary. Objectively, why would the life of a child in one country matter more or less than one from the other side of the planet? It's completely arbitrary, but the entrenched human social structures have been built around physical proximity and so we end up donating money to feed a relatively healthy child instead of donating to the distant one on the verge of dying from malnutrition.