voidhorse

6 ms·

1.
by voidhorse 4d ago
First of all, I do not think they've been pursuing that to the degree that you think. But even assuming that's the case, the natural thing to do in that scenario is to not contribute to the development of the doomsday device. But
2.
by voidhorse 4d ago
No, what you would do is stop your own private development immediately, get in touch with the government by any means necessary, and build a coalition as fast as possible to stop the technology from continuing and put hard regulation (deter
3.
by voidhorse 4d ago
Thank you. This is the kind of basic critical thinking that basically no one in technology today seems to possess. Some days I wonder if I've gone insane because everyone else seems to be staking life itself on wispy, undefined meani
4.
by voidhorse 4d ago
This is a fine example of how rational good faith can quickly turn into naivety. Consider the massive power and wealth differentials these companies stand to gain if they "win". When the other participants have given up all reason
5.
by voidhorse 4d ago
Bingo. What we're seeing is all their early bullshitting and waffling about intelligence back when the models couldn't count the r's in strawberry paying off. They've managed to dupe the dull eyed masses into thinking th
6.
by voidhorse 4d ago
Cool, I guess we can all give up and go to bed then. The propositions: (1) humanity has always dealt with crises and (2) absurd wealth and inequity gives those crises particular shape, makes new crises acute, and creates crises unheard of a
7.
by voidhorse 4d ago
Yes, thank you. The demise of basic reading comprehension skills will be the true end of us all.
8.
by voidhorse 6d ago
Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.
9.
by voidhorse 9d ago
I don't think it's possible to have a universal "colloquial" definition of "simple" that is also precise. It's all relative. This is why I think the formalists studying complexity back in the 50s had the r
10.
by voidhorse 9d ago
Definitely. Much of the structure of internet media encourages constant, passive consumption. Or, to use the terms of the grandparent, we move traded ambient thinking , reflection , and imagination , which the brain is pushed into duri
11.
by voidhorse 9d ago
Programming can be a medium of expression for working through ideas. However, source code is not art in the same way that the paintbrush is not art. I think because a program is textual, people incorrectly draw analogical conclusions for pr
12.
by voidhorse 9d ago
I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine". Just as they produce writing that isn't structured well for humans, they
13.
by voidhorse 9d ago
The biggest tell is that, most of the time, verbatim LLM output still doesn't actually make much sense if you read it carefully. Consider this excerpt from a README someone linked in the comments: > A compiler for the interface yo
14.
by voidhorse 9d ago
When human beings write we do so with a particular perspective with an intention to communicate to a particular audience. Even the driest scientific writing is partially informed by the experiences of the researchers, no matter how hard t
15.
by voidhorse 10d ago
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted. Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to p
16.
by voidhorse 10d ago
> Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. No it isn't. It trades concrete imagery for empty abstractions which could encompass just about anything and are basically meaningless. If you think this is good wr
17.
by voidhorse 11d ago
To me, a lot of the child comments on this thread are technically correct (the best kind) in that, yes correctness bugs in Lean boil down to compiler bugs in a language like lean. What these comments all miss is that ensuring your 13 mil
18.
by voidhorse 14d ago
That's largely because we intentionally model llm "brains" after the human brain.
19.
by voidhorse 25d ago
> Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will? I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I
20.
by voidhorse 25d ago
Again, you're assuming a lot about this situation that we don't actually know to be true. For example, that these purchases are limited to "bargain bin" books that have essentially no market value. These may be cases we
21.
by voidhorse 25d ago
> You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right? No. It definitely isn't. There are plenty of US companies, one of them large and recognizable, that actually make it their missi
22.
by voidhorse 25d ago
There was never any reason for it to be slow in the first place, yet here we are. In my view, we have slow software not because knowledge of optimization comes at a premium, in fact, most compilers do well enough at optimization that you ca
23.
by voidhorse 25d ago
While I agree with this in principle, I think the market is a separate problem. As much as this is correct, the market is not going to select for competence. The market is going to select for affordability. Ultimately the most affordable wo
24.
by voidhorse 25d ago
Assuming these texts exist in large quantities seems to definitionally contradict the term *rare* book. Plenty of books have small print runs or have reached out of print status. One could obviously reproduce films too. Ultimately, you don&
25.
by voidhorse 25d ago
You should already be upset. A company with far greater resources than you has potentially prevented you from accessing a portion of the world's information. Because they haven't been transparent, you don't know. You should
26.
by voidhorse 25d ago
Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today. I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguabl
27.
by voidhorse 26d ago
Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know t
28.
by voidhorse 26d ago
Why assume it is? We don't know, and the fact that the process is so opaque and would have been totally undisclosed if not for journalists doesn't exactly make me confident they are "doing things by the book" on this one
29.
by voidhorse 26d ago
How would film be any different in any capacity whatsoever? Believe it or not, what matters here is the message and access to the message, not the medium.
30.
by voidhorse 26d ago
Since we don't know what was actually purchased and what was actually destroyed, how do you expect us to furnish an example? This would require the destroyers to admit it, and beyond that it would require all of them to admit it since

More ›