Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.
Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.
Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.
It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.
This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.
Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.
The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.
Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.
Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.
I just like that it would mean there would be an entry right in the dictionary that links to the whole story for everyone to be reminded of for all of time.
This was the stunning one to me. Just blew my mind literally observing it run up a dead end wire and slosh and rebound like water.
Previously I was used to thinking of dead ends as simply functionally inert. That without a circuit, nothing at all happens in the dead end wire other than the potential for something to happen.
Sure I know something more than nothing actually happens since there is an elevated charge there. But still just the mental model shorthand is that no circuit = no nuthin.
But it's not. It's actually like a pipe with a little bit of air to allow for some compression, and even the dead end has a small flow that travels to the end and builds up against it, then rebounds back and eventially levels out at some homogenious but now higher pressure.
Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost.
Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc.
Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative.
If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small.
(and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful)
This will obviously have no effect on some people.
But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green.
And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything.
Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it.
Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free.
Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that.
And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology.
I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost.
But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing.
That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers.
That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape.
About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.
Find a project, find out if it's the original or a fork, and either way, find all the other possibly more relevant forks. Maybe the original is actually derelict but 2 others are current. Or just forks with significant different features, etc. Find all the oddball individual small fixes or hacks, so even if you don't want to use someone's fork you may still like to pluck the one change they made to theirs.
I was going to also say the search but probably that can be had about the same just in regular google, at least for searching project names and docs to find the simple existence of projects. But maybe the code search is still only within github.
"But OpenAI 5.2 reasoning, even at high, told me to walk. My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording."
Which to me begs the question, why doesn't it identify missing information and ask for more?
It's practically a joke in my workplaces that almost always when someone starts to talk to me about some problem, they usually just start spewing some random bits of info about some problem, and my first response is usually "What's the question?"
I don't try to produce an answer to a question that was never asked, or to a question that was incompletely specified. I see that one or more parts cannot be resolved without making some sort of assumption that I can either just pull out of my ass and then it's 50/50 if the customer will like it, or find out what the priorites are about those bits, and then produce an answer that resolves all the constraints.
Then before I give you my business or hire you, I also want to know that you are the kind of person that thinks they have a right to any other person's entire life, so I can hold it against you and prevent you from benefitting from all your other possible virtues and afforts.
So I likewise, require to know everything about you, including things that are none of my business but I just think they are my business and that's what matters. I'll make that call myself.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am definitely not concerned with the mechanics, in the sense that a consciousness could be implimented in anything. There is nothing magic about biology, go ahead and Ship of Theseus every biological construct and sub process with some analog made out of other materials or even pure energy and the result is still the same consciousness. And I do not believe in any kind of actual soul in the religious sense.
That does not mean there is no difference between what conscious beings do, and what any mechanistic process does. Mechanistic does not mean "made of electrical signals" or made of anything in particular. A purely imaginary algabraic equation is not made of anything, yet is a mechanistic process. A thought is either made of nothing or made of biology depending on how you wish to think about it, yet is not a mechanistic process.
Even though a consciousness can also perform a mechanistic process that looks the same from the outside. An axle can turn because an electric motor turns it, or that same axle can turn the exact same way because you turned it. There is a purely exterior effect that is identical in both cases. Put the motor in a box with only the shaft sticking out, and put yourself inside the same box so the outside observer can only see the box and the shaft. Since everything is the same from the outside, I guess that proves that electric motors are conscious. They decide to turn shafts for internal reasons not all that different from the reason you decided to. Or it proves that neither the motor nor yourself are conscious or thinking.
It is unutterably stupid to confuse a person with a painting of a person. LLMs are nothing but paintings of people. People wrote everything it spits back out, and the mixing that it does is entirely explicable and reproduceable by plain mechanistic process.
Take all the words and write one each onto ping pong balls.
Add slightly different weights to the different balls so some are heavier than others.
Add slightly different magnets to each, so that some are slightly more attracted or repelled to others.
Change the shapes of the balls so that some fit up against others better than others.
Glue together a few balls to form a question you want to ask.
Toss the question and all the other balls into a tumbler and shake it all up for a while. Remove all the balls that didn't stick to the question.
What you have is not a "thought".
You have something that looks like a thought because it reflects actual thoughts that people did have, which all got encoded into the rules that made up the whole aparatus.
People created the alphabet and vocabulary written on the balls.
People created the associative meanings and encoded it into syntax and grammar rules, the weights, magnets, and shapes of the balls.
A person somewhere had a thought that there is a thing they will call the sky, and a sensation they will call blue, and an association that the sky is blue, and another association that "the sky is blue" is an assertion, and that another type of communication is a query, and that an assertion is a reasonable response to a query.
That is all represented in the construction of the balls. Out of all the purely random possible results, it's slightly more likely for the shake-up to produce "the sky is blue" because it fits a little better than other things against the seed crystal of your question.
This bingo tumbler produced a communication yet did not have a thought.
Most, maybe all? communication is some form of mechanistic encoding of thoughts. It's always possible to copy it or fake it, because it's not the consciousness itself, it's just something the consciousness caused to happen.
Some writing on a paper is not a thought, it's a picture of a thought.
The picture can be reproduced without the original thought occurring again. A new piece of paper can have a new instance of the writing spring forth without any conscious process behind it.
If you write something on a piece of paper, that was a person expressing a thought.
Now that piece of paper with writing on it lays on top of another peice of paper in the sun long enough for the sun to brown both papers. But the shadow from the ink transfers a duplicate inverse image onto the underlying paper that doesn't yellow as much.
That was a communication being reproduced. The written message on the 2nd paper did not exist, and then it did exist. What created it? Where did it come from? Is the first paper conscious and decided to communicate it's thoughts to you?
The first paper did not speak a thought via the 2nd paper, even though you can read the 2nd paper and interpret it as being the result of a coherent conscious thought. Neither the 1st nor 2nd pieces of paper thought anything. Merely ultimately a consciousness did cause the first paper to have an encoded representation of their thoughts on it, by writing them there.
That is the only reason the 2nd removed copy looks like a message. It is a message, but it's not a message from the piece of paper itself.
Even though the piece of paper is made out of complex carbon compounds "just like humans ZOMG!!!!!"
How is the human brain also not a stochastic process? I still don't see what makes it so categorically different from a computer program or even an LLM.
The man and the future llm are equivalent from outside. There is no way for me to determine this ill defined thing of them being "conscious". If we are unsure llm is conscious, then by the same standards we are unsure other humans are conscious. If both are the same outputs for the same inputs, they I don't care about some magical indefinable soul. Even current LLMs are I believe on some spectrum of what many people would call conscious.
I could throw out some ignorant basically random and meaningless guesses like "emergent property arising from sufficient threshold complexity" or "quantum effects" but these are just bullshit examples that are nothing more than filler noises to say in place of "a thing we don't know". It's more honest to just say we don't know. There are infinite things we don't know and there is nothing wrong with that. The unknown does not have to be filled in with fiction, it can and should remain simply unknown until some actual observation or reasoning can supply something real.
Obviously biology includes simple processes. Your elbow is a simple hinge and any number of chemical reactions are simple chemical reactions that will happen exactly the same way all by themselves without being part of a biological construct. This is not interesting and doesn't prove or disprove anything about any other kind of process or phenomenon. The mechanics of biology are irrelevant.
And yet the tumbler of pingpong balls and the piece of paper are contemplating their own exitence? They communicated because they have a thought and then a desire to communicate the thought? Are you saying that?
You aim to suggest that I am failing to stick to the hard facts of reality by imagining something we can't put our fingers on in a consciousness, but I say that imagining that a bin of pinpong balls thinks is a rather more egregious example of unsubstantiated faith.
If you mean the opposite (more likely I assume), that you yourself are not doing anything different than a bag of pingpong balls when you engage in this discussion with me, well I have nothing to say to that. But then I don't have to say anything to that because I don't owe a bag of pingpong balls any consideration at all. It can emit text all day and it means nothing to me and warrants no response. Even if it emits text that says "What biggoted chauvanistic discrimination! Just because I am made of pinpong balls that means the veracity of my arguments don't matter and I'm not a person?"
Correct, I haven't yet seen any evidence humans are nore than what you call pingpong balls. You are a bunch of ping pong balls. So if the inputs and outputs are same as a person, there is no way to know whether this so called consciousness exists or not. If you are being consistent, its equally impossible to say from outside if another "human" is "conscious" as it is for an ai or the piece of paper. If the inputs and outputs are same then I don't give a shit about meaningless ill defined terms like that.
>Obviously biology includes simple processes. Your
So tell me again what is this aphysical magic thats missing? And tell me why you believe in magic when nothing else in the universe has needed magic till now.
But the other holes in the bucket doesn't mean you have to help. From a real opsec point of view a single tiny hole is the same as no wall at all. But from a day to day view less is less. It does at least reduce the spam.
And there is also, say you plug hole A and you can't do anything about hole B.
Some day something may develop that changes hole B (maybe a new law, maybe it's a service that you can stop using, maybe one org stops cooperating with another, whatever).
If hole A has already been wide open for years then closing hole B may not change much. But if hole A has been closed for years when the opportunity to close hole B comes along, then maybe closing hole B actually does something.
I choose to see it as something is better than nothing and it's worth it to apply pressure and be sand in the gears.
It's got to be better for everyone that there is at least some sand in the gears than if there were no sand in the gears.
Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.
Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.
Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.
It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.
This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.
Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.
The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.
Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.
Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.
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