pmichaud · HackerTrans

há 3 mesesdiscuss

If I were in charge of a package manager I would be seriously looking into automated and semi automated exploit detection so that people didn't have to yolo new packages to find out if they are bad. The checking would itself become an attack vector, but you could mitigate that too. I'm just saying _something_ is possible.

pmichaud

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I think it's probably a little bit about Goodhart? At some point soon after stars were widely in use but prior to them being connected to any particular incentive I bet they were actually a great signal of... something. But then once someone started using the signal to give attention or dollars, the signal was compromised.

pmichaud

há 4 mesesdiscuss

I think it's more like a sign post in the text. At the start of any paragraph (or sentence, really) the text may go literally anywhere--could be a new thought, a continuation of an implicit list, an explanation of what came previous, or anything else.

If you say something weird or apparently unsupported, the savvy reader at that very moment is going to be thinking so. So it's helpful to orient them like:

> Here's a wild sentence. Here's why it's not actually that wild: reasons

Without the connecting phrase, the reader has to figure out from context that out of all the possible things the following text could be doing, what it's actually doing is explaining the previous claim.

You can rightly counterpoint that it's not strictly necessary, that a savvy reader can figure it out. But I think the moment right after a wild statement is a hotspot for readers getting ready to jettison, and having a little assurance is likely very helpful.

pmichaud

há 5 mesesdiscuss

I think as many other people who replied to you have said, it's a mixed bag. It's better in some sense, with abstractions and frameworks that sand down sharp edges, and libraries that can do everything. But it's also crushingly more complex. Back in the day you had to know and care about memory allocation and ASM, but all the knowledge you needed was in a manual or two that you owned and could actually know the contents of.

pmichaud

há 6 mesesdiscuss

My tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.

The abstract:

> “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con- ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro- tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out- side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.

pmichaud

há 7 mesesdiscuss

It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.

pmichaud

há 7 mesesdiscuss

I’m guessing that this is the first thing they thought of and the problem only exists in the superficial gloss you’re responding to?

pmichaud

há 8 mesesdiscuss

I think the concern is that if the system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation, then when it’s inevitably put in charge of life critical systems it will hurt people.

pmichaud

há 9 mesesdiscuss

A language learning platform that works would be nice, instead of this.

pmichaud

há 10 mesesdiscuss

Probably not. I think it's the beginning of a major language evolution.

pmichaud

há 10 mesesdiscuss

I experience and wonder the same thing, but literally yesterday I had to help my grandmother recover from a phishing scam that actually (very nearly) worked on her. So there you go.

pmichaud

há 3 anosdiscuss

https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.text...

pmichaud

há 6 anosdiscuss

I get what you're saying in the abstract, but when I try to imagine it concretely, it stops making sense to me. Eg. a person is using a sex toy and tries to make it vibrate a certain way, but an attacker has caused it vibrate a different way. Sure, in some vague sense it's an unwanted type of stimulation and someone is involved in it that isn't supposed to be. But I think that scenario tortures the definition of sexual assault beyond recognition. Am I just not thinking of more obvious cases?

pmichaud

há 7 anosdiscuss

The Orthogonality Thesis[1][2] states that the ethics of a given mind is orthogonal to its intelligence.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis [2] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_An...

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