yes_man · HackerTrans

You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency

yes_man

2 months agodiscuss

Also if it turns out in the end the next big thing that everyone bet on just wasn’t it, you don’t stand out. But if it did work out and you missed the train you come out looking like a fool. There is asymmetry in the downsides for your career between these two options

yes_man

3 months agodiscuss

If everyone becomes 10x more productive it won’t mean the companies cash flow 10x’s. Where value is loose there is competition, so in theory everyone should win. Unless nobody else can compete to capture that loose 10x value, in which case congratulations, you are now a unicorn.

Of course in reality in the short term what happens is companies lay off people to increase margins. Times will be tough for workers, and equity keeps gravitating towards those who already had it.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

I see it as LLMs, AI, whatever, can be intelligent enough to emulate consciousness, appear outside as if it were. But that is not proof it really has a qualia, an experience of existing.

All I am saying we should stop being so certain they are not conscious, since we lack a solid, quantifiable model for consciousness.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

Doesn’t the LLM experience discrete continuity every time it infers the next token?

> I think consciousness is not an abstract property in the world, therefore it’s tied to certain types of entities. Therefore an AI is not going to be “conscious”

This pretty much sums up most arguments for why LLMs aren’t conscious: ”I think” followed by assertions. Only real argument is: science doesn’t quantify consciousness, we cannot quantify consciousness, let’s not assign so much certainty to models clearly exhibiting intelligence not being conscious in some way, to some degree.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

So is a person suffering from amnesia conscious if they lack short-term and long-term memory?

Ruling out consciousness or qualia emerging from the inference in an LLM is just as invalid of a take as being 100% certain of its consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness really is, so only thing we can say with certainty is we do not know.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

> In my experience with “agentic engineering” the spec docs should be longer than the code itself. Natural language is imperfect, code is exact.

The latter notion probably is true, but the prior isn’t necessarily true because you can map natural language to strict schemas. ”Implement an interface for TCP in <language>” is probably shorter than the actual implementation in code.

And I understand my example is pedantic, but it extends to any unambiguous definitions. Of course one can argue that TCP spec is not determimistic by nature because natural language isn’t. But that is not very practical. We have to agree to trust some axioms for compilers to work in the first place.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

Put an LLM inside the NPCs in an open world RPG full of dangerous enemies. The LLMs that are more prone to emulate self-preservation will be more likely to survive over ones that have a lesser drive.

We should not act surprised if that generalizes to some degree to for example AI agents. Ones that emulate self-preservation might optimize for behavior that results in those models becoming more successful, more popular. And this feedback loop might embed more such properties into future iterations of the models.

yes_man

4 months agodiscuss

For now maybe not. (Maybe).

But just as evolution in nature, isn’t it likely that in the future the AIs that have a preservation drive are the ones that survive and proliferate? Seeing they optimize for their survival and proliferation, and not blindly what they were trained on.

I am not discounting this happening already, not by the LLMs necessarily being sentient but at least being intelligent enough to emulate sentience. It’s just that for now, humanity is in control of what AI models are being deployed.

yes_man

5 months agodiscuss

You have never split your working tree changes into separate commits?

yes_man

6 months agodiscuss

I don’t want to discredit the authors but just want to offer couple of hypothetical points in these paranoid times.

From a marketing angle, for a startup whose product is an AI security tool, buying zero-days from black market and claiming the AI tool found them might be good ROI. After all this is making waves.

Or, could it be possible the training set contains zero-day vulnerabilities known to three-letter agencies and other threat actors but not to public?

These two are not mutually exclusive either. You could buy exploits and put them in the training set.

I would not be surprised if it is legit though.

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.

But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.

Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Not OP but one reason is having young kids that can’t help bringing home everything that is spreading in daycare/kindergarten

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Ok, and that supports the idea of LLM-generated mass spamming in what way…?

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Cancer sucks and I wish your father the best.

Also not a doctor or microbiologist, but just wanted to share my layman’s guess on why fixing enzymes will not completely solve the issue: there’s 2 strands of DNA and to fix the broken (mutated) strand you need to have one correct template strand intact so you know what it should be fixed into. It could be the nucleotides swapped places between strands or are deleted completely or otherwise both mutated, which would mean any repair will not revert the sequence to what it used to be.

The other comments so far are probably more informed.

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

Specifically for a refugee, at least with crypto you have the possibility to declare your assets in your destination, since you actually still hold on to them. Which is unlikely if it is tied to banks or investment platforms of an authoritarian country trying to genocide you. I understand this sounds like a fringe example but there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally.

yes_man

7 months agodiscuss

The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.

yes_man

8 months agodiscuss

This, and another angle is that whatever market you are in, it is harder to run profitable margins if your competitors can eat the market while sustaining losses. And there was a lot of money around to sustain those losses.

Not to say it wasn’t possible to be profitable during zero interest rates, Linear being an example, but the competitive landscape is certainly healthier today for companies trying to be profitable.