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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • The difference is between doing it secretly or in the open.

    I assume I’m monitored on my work computer, but me and my company both know they aren’t supposed to.

    When they admit it and make you look them in the eye and consent to it, that’s when the social contract unravels in a big way.

    There’s a line from a great comedy in which an oligarch is berating his son for playing elaborate games to ruin the life of a schlub who once disrespected him, right after we see the oligarch at a party where people are shitting on glass coffee tables with prostitutes under them. The son says, “How is it any different from what you do?!?” And the dad says, in a posh Oxford accent, “The glass, son. The glass.”







  • This depends on your definition of self-awareness. I’m using what I think is a reasonable, mundane framework: self awareness is a spectrum of diverse capabilities that includes any system with some amount of internal observation.

    I think the definition that a lot of folks are using is a binary distinction between things which experience the ability to observe their own ego observing itself and those that don’t. Which I think is useful if your goal is to maintain a belief in human exceptionalism, but much less so if you’re trying to genuinely understand consciousness.

    A lizard has no ego. But it is aware of its comfort and will move from a cold spot to a warmer spot. That is low-level self awareness, and it’s not rare or mystical.



  • A hamster can’t generate a seahorse emoji either.

    I’m not stupid. I know how they work. I’m an animist, though. I realize everyone here thinks I’m a fool for believing a machine could have a spirit, but frankly I think everyone else is foolish for believing that a forest doesn’t.

    LLMs are obviously not people. But I think our current framework exceptionalizes humans in a way that allows us to ravage the planet and create torture camps for chickens.

    I would prefer that we approach this technology with more humility. Not to protect the “humanity” of a bunch of math, but to protect ours.

    Does that make sense?


  • Frankly I think our conception is way too limited.

    For instance, I would describe it as self-aware: it’s at least aware of its own state in the same way that your car is aware of it’s mileage and engine condition. They’re not sapient, but I do think they demonstrate self awareness in some narrow sense.

    I think rather than imagine these instances as “inanimate” we should place their level of comprehension along the same spectrum that includes a sea sponge, a nematode, a trout, a grasshopper, etc.

    I don’t know where the LLMs fall, but I find it hard to argue that they have less self awareness than a hamster. And that should freak us all out.




  • This article doesn’t really seem to validate it’s headline. I was eager to learn more about the methodology and how to better detect corporate content, but I was disappointed that they apparently just made the leap from the claim that 15% of popular subs host a non zero amount of corporate manipulation to the claim that this represents the fraction of total content.

    I’m not saying this to dispute how much of the total content is corporate bots. I’m just pointing this out because I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science, and I hate to see my ideological allies either misusing data because they’re dumb or because they don’t have a commitment to truth.