What’s the intent of pointing out the presumed provenance in writing, now that LLMs are ubiquitous?
Is it like one of those “Morning” nods, where two people cross paths and acknowledge that it is in fact morning? Or is there an unstated preference being communicated?
Is there any real concern behind LLMs writing a piece, or is the concern that the human didn’t actually guide it? In other words, is the spirit of such comments really about LLM writing, or is it about human diligence?
That begs another question: does LLM writing expose anything about the diligence of the human, outside of when it’s plainly incorrect? If an LLM generates a boringly correct report - what does that tell us about the human behind that LLM?
> All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.
What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.
The president has no authority to rename the Department of Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus under the threat of legal consequences.
Just as one example, they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps. Other companies now follow their illegal guidance because they know that they will be threatened too if they don't comply.
There is a word for when the government uses threats to enforce illegal referendums. That word is "Fascism". Denying this is irresponsible, especially in the context of this situation, where the Government is threatening to force a private company to provide services that it doesn't currently provide.
> The president has no authority to rename the Department of Defense, but he and his administration demand consensus under the threat of legal consequences.
> they threatened Google when they didn't immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on their maps
I don’t want to downplay the government pressure you cited in your second example, so I’ll start by acknowledging - that example, as stated, does indeed look like government overreach to me. It doesn’t have anything to do with what I said though.
The stance I was taking is that renaming your own “cool kids” club while you’re in a position to effectively do that - does not amount to Fascism, or anything close to it. No one else is in that club except them, and none of them will be in it later. The moniker will only stick if next group of cool kids carry it.
An important part of remaining credible (imo) is being able to support a point directly. When someone reaches for evidence that isn’t directly relevant to prove a point (e.g. Group A performed action B and it was bad, so if Group A performs action C it must be equally as bad), that’s a clear sign of a weak argument. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not trying to stick up for anyone, I’m just asking for stronger arguments.
Renaming the DoD does directly contradict the National Security Act of 1947, which renamed the Department of War to the Department of the Army, and put it under the newly named Department of Defense.
The National Security Act of 1947, as amended on August 10, 1949, establishes the name of the executive department overseeing the military as the Department of Defense.
That would be a significant free speech violation, so it doesn't.
However, the idea that an "alternative name" should be espoused by the executive branch means that they do not believe Congress should set the name of the department. Which is a point of contention, as Congress set the name about sixty years ago. The act was already amended for a rename in 1949. The problem isn't the name. The problem is the idea behind renaming it unilaterally: the idea the President has more authority than Congress.
Someone with 1200 points after 14 years on HN shouldn’t be pointing out green noobs, especially when they are being very reasonable with their comments and you’re objectively wrong.
I'm not framing consensus as fascism, I'm pointing out what the consensus is within the current fascist framework, and that consensus is that Congress doesn't make the rules anymore. And that consensus is shared by Congress itself.
This is all such wild display of fully absorbed propaganda, even your very first bullet point, just... incredible:
> Dismantling government bureaucracy/corruption
Trump has done more to benefit financially from the presidency, to offer access and influence to anyone who will funnel money into his enterprises or give him gifts, than any president in our history.
How could you possibly write this in good faith? When Trump said he could shoot a person on 5th avenue and people would still vote for him, do you recognize yourself at all in that statement?
To be fair, considering that the CoT exposed to users is a sanitized summary of the path traversal - one could argue that sanitized CoT is closer to hiding things than simply omitting it entirely.
This is something that bothers me. We had a beautiful trend on the Web of the browser also being the debugger - from View Source decades ago all the way up to the modern browser console inspired by Firebug. Everything was visible, under the hood, if you cared to look. Now, a lot of "thinking" is taking place under a shroud, and only so much of it can be expanded for visibility and insight into the process. Where is the option to see the entire prompt that my agent compiled and sent off, raw? Where's the option to see the output, replete with thinking blocks and other markup?
If that's what you're after, tou MITM it and setup a proxy so Claude Code or whatever sends to your program, and then that program forwards it to Anthropics's server (or whomever). That way, you get everything.
I'm aware that this is possible, and thank you for the suggestion, but surely you can see that it's a relatively large lift; may not work in controlled enterprise environments; and compared to just right click -> view source it's basically inaccessible to anyone who might have wanted to dabble.
As models gain a deeper understanding of the physical world (e.g. Google world generator), I see nothing less than a new renaissance in our future.
Forget about data centers, all the little things will iteratively start getting a little better. Then one day we’ll look around and realize, “This place looks pretty good.”
This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.
There’s been some interesting research recently showing that it’s often fairly easy to invert an LLM’s value system by getting it to backflip on just one aspect. I wonder if something like that happened here?
I mean, my 5-year-old struggles with having more responses to authority that "obedience" and "shouting and throwing things rebellion". Pushing back constructively is actually quite a complicated skill.
In this context, using Gemini to cheat on homework is clearly wrong. It's not obvious at first what's going on, but becomes more clear as it goes along, by which point Gemini is sort of pressured by "continue the conversation" to keep doing it. Not to mention, the person cheating isn't being very polite; AND, a person cheating on an exam about elder abuse seems much more likely to go on and abuse elders, at which point Gemini is actively helping bring that situation about.
If Gemini doesn't have any models in its RLHF about how to politely decline a task -- particularly after it's already started helping -- then I can see "pressure" building up until it simply breaks, at which point it just falls into the "misaligned" sphere because it doesn't have any other models for how to respond.
Thank you for the link, and sorry I sounded like a jerk asking for it… I just really need to see the extraordinary evidence when extraordinary claims are made these days - I’m so tired. Appreciate it!
Your ask for evidence has nothing to do with whether or not this is a question, which you know that it is.
It does nothing to answer their question because anyone that knows the answer would inherently already know that it happened.
Not even actual academics, in the literature, speak like this. “Cite your sources!” in causal conversation for something easily verifiable is purely the domain of pseudointellectuals.
One weird skill I have is the ability to describe simple concepts as complex and confusing systems. I’ll take a go at that now.
When working with LLMs, one of my primary concerns is keeping tabs on their operating assumptions. I often catch them red-handed running with assumptions like they were scissors, and I’m forced to berate them.
So my ideal “async agents” are agents that keep me informed not of the outcome of a task, but of the assumptions they hold as they work.
I’ve always been a little slow recognizing things that others find obvious, such as “good enough” actually being good enough. I obtusely disagree. My finish line isn’t “good enough”, it’s “correct”, and yes, I will die on that hill still working on the same product I started as a younger man.
Jokes aside, I really would like to see:
1. Periodic notifications informing me of important working assumptions.
2. The ability to interject and course correct - likely requiring a bit of backtracking.
3. In addition to periodic working assumption notifications, I’d also like periodic “mission statements” - worded in the context of the current task - as assurance that the agent still has its eye on the ball.
Unless they careened into your vehicle while making the lane change, just calmly allow your vehicle to drift away from theirs until you have a safe buffer again, and take joy in the fact that it didn’t meaningfully impact your arrival time, but you’ve meaningfully impacted the safety of your immediate surroundings.
Wasn’t there a static memory store from before the wider memory capabilities were released?
I remember having conversations asking ChatGPT to add and remove entries from it, and it eventually admitting it couldn’t directly modify it (I think it was really trying, bless its heart) - but I did find a static memory store with specific memories I could edit somewhere.
Is it like one of those “Morning” nods, where two people cross paths and acknowledge that it is in fact morning? Or is there an unstated preference being communicated?
Is there any real concern behind LLMs writing a piece, or is the concern that the human didn’t actually guide it? In other words, is the spirit of such comments really about LLM writing, or is it about human diligence?
That begs another question: does LLM writing expose anything about the diligence of the human, outside of when it’s plainly incorrect? If an LLM generates a boringly correct report - what does that tell us about the human behind that LLM?
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