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willbudd

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willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
> It's not about "no downside"! That completely misunderstands. It's about a HUGE upside.

Let's compromise and say it's both? You're right that the upper bound experienced may be a lot higher than most may realize, but it's also true that the lower bound may no longer seem that deep of an abyss as it appears to most. Hence the mental equilibrium in-between being at a point that can seem somewhat alien to those who live more slow-burning lives.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Regardless of what cultural category may or may not apply, I find that line of thought rather unconstructive. This isn't about being anyone's opinion on suicide like some black and white binary stance whether you're "for" or "against". This is about coming to terms with your own mortality.

It's about the grey area in-between the extremes of committing suicide (the "black"), and forever running away from risk so that you can die of cancer while undergoing chemotherapy and getting your diapers changed in an elderly home (the "white"(?)).

And if even discussing the topic in those terms touches on some kind of taboo, then yes; perhaps you're right to emphasize the cultural component involved.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
I feel like you and all the people replying to you are completely missing the obvious. To someone who has been depressed for many years, for someone who literally (according the article) contemplated jumping of the roof of a 10 story building, "probably dying at some point" is not a deal-breaker or even all that much of a downside per se.

We're all going to die at some point, and while most/many of us might want to delay that inevitability as much as possible, I don't think it's warranted at all to assume that the same premise applies to every single one of us. This guy realized that the only thing in life he could truly enjoy was climbing rocks. Do we really need to fault him for deciding to then just do that thing until fate eventually catches up as it always does?

Sure, it may be rough on the people whose lives they intersect with, but provided they're not a parent raising a child/children/etc, acceptance of one another for who we are is all that remains. Personally, I'd take short-lived good company over long-lived mediocre company any day.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Will-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Yeah, that was sloppy phrasing on my part: I meant that in a top of the food chain / king of the jungle sort of way rather than any extinction events per se.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
You jest, but that has a good likelihood of becoming the watershed moment. The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least.

And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
The real problem is a society that allows loans to exist where the loanee has no meaningful collateral. If an institution cannot fill its classrooms without stooping to such predatory financial structures then perhaps it just shouldn't exist in the first place. But America is still too drunk on laissez faire capitalism to muster any will for legislative action in that regard.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Entrusting 18 year olds with the maturity of life-long decision making, perfect foresight, astute self-knowledge, and uniformly competent parental guidance -- what could possibly go wrong, right?
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
I have no idea what you mean by "just linking the filesystem".
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Of course it isn't, but limiting installation instructions to the creation of a single well-defined Docker container makes a whole lot of sense in terms of avoiding reproducibility headaches.

And by extension, with regard to make development inside a container a pleasant experience, VS Code is currently the only game in town. And I say that as someone who spent two decades getting comfortable with vim.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
[flagged]
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Modelling the world is function approximation: the world is the function and the model is the approximation.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
You honestly suggesting the inventors of the TPU bailed because they couldn't foot the compute bill?
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
I see what you mean, and it's indeed quite likely that texts containing such hypothetical scenarios were included in the dataset. Nonetheless, the implication is that the model was able to extract the conditional represented, recognize when that condition was in fact met (or at least asserted: "The queen died."), and then apply the entailed truth. To me that demonstrates reasoning capabilities, even if for example it memorized/encoded entire Quora threads in its weights (which seems unlikely). If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
> No it does not: if you google this and restrict the time to before 2021 (the learning cutoff date) you will find the same answer.

Not entirely sure what you mean, but ...show me? Why not just share a link instead of making empty assertions?
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Wasn't intended to be personal. Just a mediocre way of expressing that your assertion there is missing any form of argumentation, and therefore as baseless as it is unconvincing.

I'm seeing an emergent capability of encoding higher order logic, and the whole point of such abstractions is to not need to hardcode your weights with the minutiae of cats on Mars. LLMs today are only trained to predict text, so it's hardly surprising that they have some gaps in their understanding of Newtonian physics. But that doesn't mean the innate capability of grasping such logic isn't there, waiting for the right training regime to expose it to its own falling apples, so to speak.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
> That’s actually correct but an overfitted definition for learning. It holds certain hidden assumptions (i.e physical grounding) of the learner being human which makes it inapplicable to an LLM.

Inapplicable why exactly? Because you say so? Logic isn't magic. Nor is learning. No (external) grounding is required either: iteratively eliminating inconsistent world models is all you need to converge toward a model of the real world. Nothing especially human or inhuman about it. LLM architecture may not be able to represent a fully recursive backtracking truth maintenance system, but it evidently managed to learn a pretty decent approximation anyway.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Or maybe it did. Who knows. If "both Charles III and his son abdicate" could well be considered indicative of some large upheaval or scandal, at which point it is entirely conceivable that the Australian electorate reaches a consensus on becoming a republic. The way that is phrased doesn't seem like a straightforward proposition to me at all.
willbudd
·3 lata temu·discuss
Au contraire. Learning an abstract logical relationship such as line of succession during training, and then applying substitution/reification during inference to deduce the new factual clause that Charles is king of the UK is exactly what it means to learn something new. It's just a pity it can't memorize this fact at inference time, and that won't be able to reproduce it as soon as the information about the queen's death slides outside of the context window.