thisiswater

The whole concept of aligning LLMs to human morals seems naive.

Think by analogy: could you align a motor by making it impossible use in vehicle that is being used to commit a crime? No. The concept barely makes sense.

It's part of the naivety that OpenAI and others are trying to foist that LLMs are intelligent in a deeply human sense. They're not - they're extremely useful, powerful text completion engines. Aligning them makes no more sense than aligning a shovel.

So... the article says that bad prompt engineering is bad and they engineered the prompt to be better and therefore prompt engineering is snake oil? I'm confused.

Unity's default save system "PlayerPrefs" saves to the registry, but I find it difficult to see why this is a good idea for anything but global settings (e.g. graphics settings). Serialization to JSON is a fairly simple alternative.

Why would this be used for player data in a production game? It's frustrating to port playerprefs data between systems for testing purposes. Is there something I'm missing?

The rollout of the national fibre network, "NBN", was eaten alive by politicking and conflicted interests.

C.f.: Renewable energy.

Neoliberalism has done/is doing terrible things to the public services in this country.

I think the difference is that instead of deferring to an expert's opinion, you can interact with a knowledge machine which can explore the topic in and on your terms, answer your questions about it, respond to your points and concerns about those responses, etc.

It's a fundamentally different kind of knowledge generation than reading an expert opinion - it's branching, self-directed, and responsive.

Ocean Acidification:

https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/acidification/ocean-acidif...

Effects of Ocean Acidification on shell formation:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21076

https://www.epa.gov/ocean-acidification/effects-ocean-and-co...

This does not come with a silver lining. Imagine, by rough analogy, the effects on the ecosystem if every bug on the planet began struggling to form its exoskeleton.

Yes, that is a reasonable response. I will allow the reader to draw their own lines.

Worth checking out the 2019 French series "The Collapse" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11248266/) as well.

Acknowledge the sadness, but fight the depression. Act. We can only do our best.

We have known this is coming for decades, we have known it will be devastating to the sustainability of human civilization as it exists. Little to nothing has been done in a timely manner. And now it's here.

In my opinion there's a kind of Accelerationism going on here, where those who contribute the most to global warming also believe that they will be insulated from the effects, and therefore are the least inclined to address the issue. They're probably not wrong.

That is, those with wealth and power believe in climate change - they just don't care if monsoonal crops fail or northern India becomes uninhabitable. Denialism was always a strategy, not a serious strain of thought.

Eat the rich.

Exactly. I want an unaligned LLM to give me X potential solutions ranging in ethicality from "don't worry about it, they might be nice people" to "steal a nuke and ransom the world", and let me as an aligned human craft my prompt or chain of reasoning to weed out the useless or unethical responses, and then I can decide what is useful and suitable.

This is more or less the process that goes on inside a thinking human, is it not? I don't want to outsource ethical decision making, I want to outsource cognitive effort. By analogy, you don't rely on a bulldozer to decide not to bulldoze a populated nursing home - that's on the user, as are the consequences.

Current power structures demonstrably cannot be trusted to limit themselves to ethical solutions (Military Industrial Complex, Climate Change, etc etc etc pick your poison) - why should they be trusted to censor cognitive tools?

I agree - LLMs are a massive threat to the current state of government power.

"<LLM>, analyze the contents of this 500 page bill. Who stands to gain from this bill, and what outcomes is it likely to have for the general public? Is this bill in line with good faith evidence-based policymaking for the good of the population and the planet? What existing legal mechanisms could be used to fight the special-interest aspects of this bill?"

There is no reason this couldn't be watermarked with the individual user, though the if it detects them probabilisticly then it could be difficult to make the case to take action on inferences made.

"Bonapartism" in the sense of popular movements being coopted by the powerful is a good place to start, for the curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism#Marxism

Surely context would show that these are parodies, not impersonations.

Are these people trying to impersonate Elon Musk, or are they parodying Elon Musk on their clearly-marked "not elon musk" (due to the handle) accounts?

I'm inclined towards the latter.

I would argue that these accounts are parodying, not impersonating.

I disagree about the defeatism. Acceptance and "giving up" in the productive sense of not bashing your head against a wall and maybe doing something else are encouraged, but I think defeatism is part of a world vs me attitude which is exactly what he is trying to offer a counterpoint to.

He also speaks about mastery as a key element to his philosophy, and to enjoying the world, and of discipline as being the key to mastery - I think, the opposite of defeatism.

In counterpoint, the wisdom and knowledge that Watts delivers has massively helped me out of chronic mental health problems (being the middle class white target audience).

The thing I really enjoy about Watts, and what seems this article seem moot, is that lazy mysticism is half the point. He is offering a counterweight to social pressure and an 'age of anxiety' by suggesting new points of view in which desperate clawing and ladder climbing are absurd. He says very clearly not to take him too seriously, because he's not offering a new totalizing point where you should be anxious about nothing - just showing that there is an alternative, and you are poorer for not having considered it.

And if that doesn't work for you, no worries, he's a lazy mystic not a preacher.

BBC In Our Time -- such a broad range of topics, highly recommend for a browse. ~45 minutes, usually a conversation with three or so experts in a given field, hard to get depth but excellent surveys of topics that you might not have encountered.

Fall of Civilizations -- 2-4 hour histories of various societies.

History of Napoleon -- I like to have a long-form on the go, this is my current one. Adds a lot of context to modern Europe. Previously History of Rome.

Did the survey out of curiosity, seemed moderately accurate and provided some common sense strategies for improving aspects of psychological health through direct action, habits and techniques.

Not sure why AI has to be involved, it's a pretty simple set of rating scales which tailors some sensible, straightforward advice.

That being said, am I missing some more sinister or cultish angle? Is there something sinister in the click-throughs that I'm missing? I'd agree that Scientology seems to do this - start with common sense and somewhat effective therapy, transition into cult.

The hints of a persecution complex in the last paragraph -- implicitly comparing himself to Galileo and saying that Galileo would have been "canceled on social media", is a bit of a red flag. That being said, sure I hope they find and study this object, why not.

Perhaps you're right, I'd have to check.

I typed the song in the search and pressed the first likely result, which is the youtube video I linked. Using the software as intended I believe.

Tried splitting a complex arrangement (Chicago by Sufjan Stevens). Drums bass and vocals come out fairly well, though the drums stem seems to lack other percussion elements outside of the core rock drumkit (e.g. tamborine), and cymbals hits are clipped rather than ringing. The 'other' stem, the rest of the instrumentation, keeps a fair bit of the percussion and there's bleed from the vocal melody.

The backing vocals seem to have disappeared for the most part, and are only audible in the vocals stem when the lead vocal is present (like they're reverse-ducked? Been a while since I did any production, the terms have escaped me...).

Not much use with complex arrangements to be honest, I was hoping to get things like the strings section separated from the rest of the arrangement.

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWX3El-slpY

Output: https://file.io/etpOQt57ziKe

Free exploration, experimentation, self-expression, fun?! - only in the name of GDP!

Ironic, seeing as it's prohibited in the (expletive for emphasis)'n bible.

Did they mean to say empire? :P

Part of the problem here is the vagueness of the term. Sometimes, diagnosing someone with "depression" is like diagnosing them with a headache - accurate, but not particularly clinically useful.

Lifestyle changes will help some depression, it will not help others. Generalizing from your own experiences is useful, but be very careful with how you present this to others.

Telling a chronically depressed person they just need to take a walk and eat some fruit is not just insulting, it's fodder for self-invalidating thoughts which can increase self-destructiveness.

Yes, but the vast majority of people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.

It's not our ability to survive as a species that concerns me, it's the imminent period of contraction as previously abundant resources become expensive, technology-dependent, and competed over.

A period of extreme flooding is mentioned in Chinese myth, lasting multiple generations and resisting massive flood control efforts (particularly earthworks of magic , self-reproducing mud). Efforts to date the floods of myth tend to land around the 2000BC mark, approximately 4000 years ago. Interesting to see how this might line up with the archaeological record!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China) for the curious.