blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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PhysicsForums was apparently deliberately corrupted with LLM content in old posts.

From the "flipping through LessWrong for entertainment" department:

What effect does LLM use have on the quality of people's thinking / knowledge?

• I'd expect a large positive effect from just making people more informed / enabling them to interpret things correctly / pointing out fallacies etc.

A WELL TRAINED AI can be a very useful tool.

No, it can't. Go away.

A necessary precondition for the Democrats to do anything is Democrats regaining the Senate, which pretty much requires winning a Senate seat in North Carolina, where the state supreme court is taking the attitude that no Democratic win is legitimate. So, yeah: There's basically no institutional way for this country to come back from where it has gone.

For the US to avoid collapse, the Democrats would have to sweep the board in multiple successive elections and be more unified and committed to deep reform than they ever have been.

I will pause for the laughter to fade.

So that's how to translate "Yo, this diet is for chumps" into Wikipedian.

Karl Bode comments:

I like how none of the reporting I've seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbank's multi-year, very obvious history of failures

I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph

Let them fight.gif

Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. [...] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.

One word: Foxconn

I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.

Ed Zitron:

[mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn't that meant to be a Microsoft project?

Hey wasn't that project contingent on "meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI's AI"?

(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)

Here is what I wrote in the instructions for the term-paper project that I will be assigning my quantum-physics students this coming semester:

I can’t very well stop you from using a text-barfing tool. I can, however, point out that the “AI” industry is a disaster for the environment, which is the place that we all have to live in; and that it depends upon datasets made by exploiting and indeed psychologically torturing workers. The point of this project is for you to learn a physics topic and how to write physics, not for you to abase yourself before a blurry average of all the things the Internet says about quantum physics — which, spoiler alert, includes a lot of wrong things. If you are going to spend your time at university not learning physics, there are better ways to do that than making yourself dependent upon a product that is a tech bubble waiting to pop.

Tamay Besiroglu from Epoch AI says they were “restricted from disclosing the partnership” until the o3 launch. Their contract “specifically prevented us from disclosing information about the funding source and the fact that OpenAI has data access to much but not all of the dataset.”

If you had no problems with that contract, then I don't trust your ethical judgment as a scientist.

shot:

Von Neumann arguably had the highest processor-type "horsepower" we know of plus his breadth of intellectual achievements is unparalleled.

chaser:

But imo Grothendieck is a better comparison point for ASI as his intelligence, while being strangely similar to LLMs in some dimensions

I have spent the last half-hour in the angry dome

"Raw, intellectual horsepower" means fucking an intellectual horse without a condom.

Oh, wait, that's rawdogging intellectual horsepower, my mistake.

So, the Wikipedia article about "prompt engineering" is pretty terrible. First source: OpenAI. Second: a blog. Third: OpenAI. Fourth: OpenAI's blog. ArXiv, arXiv, arXiv... 43 times. Hop on over to the Talk page, and we find this gem:

It is sometimes necessary to make assumptions to write an article (see WP:MNA).

Spoiler alert: that link doesn't justify anything. It basically advises against going off on tangents: There's no need to rehash the fact that evolution is a fact on every damn biology page. It does not say that Wikipedia should have an article on some creationist fantasy, like baraminology or flood geology, based entirely on creationist screeds that all cite each other.

Julia, by Sandra Newman

Underlying original post: a Twitter bluecheck says,

Sometimes in the process of writing a good enough prompt for ChatGPT, I end up solving my own problem, without even needing to submit it.

Matt Novak on Bluesky screenshots this and comments,

AI folks have now discovered "thinking"

No worries

Cross-reference to its appearance on the stubsack

If you can't get through two short paragraphs without equating Stalinism and "social justice", you may be a cockwomble.

Paul Graham is on his bullshit again.