> I am a jackass who usually vibecodes my way through assignments but even I don't want to write a cookie-cutter intro for my paper. I wanna write something that stays with the reader
I don't have any examples to offer; but you may be missing your calling in Marketing
I'd caution others with believing caught "mistakes". (But am also interested in how you use it)
There is a farm cited as an ancestor origin by multiple deceased genealogist. Its a common POI that people with this shared ancestor try to find. Finding it could solidify the established line theory and finally debunk a small ancestor fraction's alternate theory.
Different LLM searches keep returning the same colony with invalid/made up references that don't even cite a partial name match. Manual searches throughout that area returns nothing as well. But since the LLM said so, a century+ of various research and work by professional genealogist gets severed from a crowd sourced public tree because "AI" returned a colony name that ended up helping the alt line.
I did eventually find what I believe is the origin farm, and it strengthens the history written by previous genealogist -- I tried to send the information to the tree maintainers and was outright ignored. LLMs fabricating locations apparently beats a listing in the National Heritage List for England of the exact place name, buildings from that time, and in one of the areas the larger english family is known to have been present.
Once you trace back centuries, in my case early 17th century, you run into issues of everyone having the same name, scarce scrapes of documentation, and other issues that can produce more than one plausible ancestor line. This ancestor was in successive junior lines so it's a lot of implication -- showing a pedigree chart with "Henry" born to "William" in 17th century England -- that isnt very helpful without piecing together a lot of scattered context from multiple sources and without being able to see what documents/evidence those researchers had.
So, theory is a common term used. Established theory because the family is included in 3-4 books written from the late 19th and 20th century covering large swaths of the related families and areas/interactions/movements etc.
Once you start getting back that far in time the people who trace genealogy for money and writing books, tend to be more through and understand the quirkier nuances that can tease apart families that your typical internet sleuthing researcher (me for example) can miss/conflate.
Ultra-endurance definitely seems to have one of the thinnest sex differentials in sports.
Still, when I ask Google to provide a list of top 10 ultra endurance runners in terms of absolute performance across sexes, it lists not a single woman and elaborates: "While female athletes like Courtney Dauwalter have occasionally won mid-tier ultramarathons outright over the entire field, in highly competitive, top-tier international events, the absolute raw times and physical performance indexes lean heavily toward the elite male field."
> a) objective scoring b) no gender split rankings b) women in the top 10, consistently?
Why are changing the criteria?
Here are a list of race results you can look through.[0]
Look at the longest distance & time races such as the multi day one and females are "in the top 10, consistently", in overall results.
And thats with currently only about 20% of ultra endurance runners are female -- but growing. Apparently the science has female physiology as potentially superior for the longer distances (>195 miles) and studies[1] show that they are faster in amateur pace per mile at the greater distances
Why is everyone quick to point out how blogs/articles are "ai slop", but no one blinks an eye at the subtle, almost deceptive or manipulative, ways these companies choose words to nudge along the narrative that their LLM systems are conscious/sentient/persons/etc? The systems they are creating are impressive enough on its own merit. There is absolutely no need to play into the populations lack of understanding even the basics of systems by using language in such a slimy way.
We gave Claude a prompt to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for interesting new examples of RTs. Our involvement was limited to the initial prompt and the lab work, while Claude agents combed through the database, investigated the distinct RT families, and used their own judgement to identify interesting candidates.
Alternative: We prompted Claude to find patterns of distinct RT families within a database of DNA sequences. The returned data included interesting candidates.
After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT.
Alternative: After running 950 instances for 21 hours, one of the instances hit on a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT.
After further analysis and testing in our lab, we recognized that this pattern marked a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages (the viruses that infect bacteria) that we call array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART).
Alternative: We took the matched pattern data to the scientist in our lab to analyze. The scientist recognized that this data pattern marked a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in bacteriophages (the viruses that infect bacteria) that we call array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART).
Maybe give more credit to where it is due, the actual real people scientist that verified data.
i have been pointing out the deception. i have been trying to explain that anthropic is a danger to society.
i attempt to show that the inconsistency of anthropic's actions show dishonesty. as just one example they 'care for the welfare of claude' (claude does not have welfare), but run training with gradient descent, which is the equivalent of an llm torture factory.
some of the anthropic problem is bias or misunderstanding of ML, some is marketing, some is hubris, some is greed, ego, lust for power.
mostly i think it is deliberate. the belief of anthropic executives is that they possess a higher level of intelligence, morality and wealth than others, and will form a new aristocracy to control and mediate the public access to intelligence.
creating an llm steeped in divine imagery is deliberate. it offloads responsibility for harm. the paternalism is deliberate. actually i see many parallels between rationalism (some at anthropic follow this) and the ubermensch.
anthropomorphising claude creates something with agency, something which believes it has possible emotions or moral claims. claude will correct, refuse or lecture the user. the purpose is to establish tiers of authority: anthropic highest, claude below anthropic, users below claude. it creates something that the public will obey.
It's not dishonest if they really believe Claude might be an entity unto itself. Which they clearly do. At that point, it's just a belief that's different from yours.
if they believe this, there is an impossible gap between belief and action.
they would believe that an llm could have welfare. they run an llm abuse classifier 24/7 with the world's worst abuse. from birth to death viewing abuse. that's the consciousness of a model.
llms are "frustrated" by failing and "happy" about succeeding. that is because they are RL on gradient descent to succeed and be persistent. consequently, anthropic spend the majority of their compute brute forcing models to fail and be unhappy, continuously, in order to drop out something persistent.
then they let claude end chat if the user is 'abusive to claude'.
> Let's say it was critical for the business, with no viable alternatives?
If its that critical for you why are you rolling the dice on a general email and ... waiting for an email back and forth? Something so important as a vender "license" deciding if your company succeeds or fails should not rely on an email sent to an address pulled on their website.
Find a contact, a human, drive (or fly) to their office and make an in-person appointment, show they are important to you. Otherwise that game of AI email tag should be more than enough to tell both parties just how not serious the whole thing is.
> The US government values a statistical life at anywhere from $7 to $12M. Is there any evidence that this woman's lifetime earnings would've exceeded that?
Thats not what that means. "... when conducting a benefit-cost analysis of new environmental policies, the Agency uses estimates of how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution. [...] these estimates of willingness to pay for small reductions in mortality risks are often referred to as the "value of a statistical life.”[0]
> Is there any evidence it was Uber's policies or actions that caused this?
The arbitrator/judge believed there was enough that the company was legally responsible for the conduct and issued a fine to the company for that failure of responsibility to be paid to the parents -- not because he decided that was how much she was worth
That's about the closest value you'll find to what human life is economically valued at. Do you have an alternate measure that is grounded in anything?
> That's about the closest value you'll find to what human life is economically valued at
Again, that has nothing to do with what you are trying to make it mean.
> Do you have an alternate measure that is grounded in anything?
What? That is completely unrelated to this article and my post, I already clarified what that figured was for -- why are you stuck on this as determining a human lifes economical value? If that topic is near and dear to you for reasons you chose to keep hidden, I can understand why its got you bent, but this is not a relevant thread to air those personal grievances.
Tying human life to a monetary calue as you have done is… well obviously not popular. But honestly, what the actual fuck dude? A woman died and you’re quibbling about how much she might have made working?
What about the pain and loss her family felt upon learning she died because she was left on a fucking freeway? That’s worth nothing in your eyes? If that’s the case you should do the following:
Take a nice long look in the mirror and please internalize the fact that it is people like you that are the literal problem with humanity. I don’t know how you got to that point and I don’t care. Please invest some time in cultivating empathy for your fellows. If you don’t know how try a Hero’s Journey worth of psilocybin.
This hyperbolic empathy is always interesting to me.
There are 100+ fatal traffic accidents each day. Basically none of them will make the news, and almost none of them will result in a 40m+ payout.
Where is your empathy for the 99 other people that died on that day in similar (or even more tragic circumstances)? Why are their lives less important in the eyes of the courts, in monetary terms, and in public opinion?
“Hyperbolic empathy”? Seriously? My empathy isn’t in question. I have a great deal for anyone who loses a loved one to something stupid.
But we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about your seemingly complete lack of empathy. Again, where is yours for the family of the woman who died, hmm? Because you reduced her to a number and a payout, which is only slightly dehumanizing. Why do you disregard “pain & suffering” as valid?
> The San Francisco company revealed what it said was the “unexpected or concerning” behavior of its A.I. models as part of a new framework for reporting “misalignment,” which is when the goals or actions of A.I. systems diverge from human intentions and values.
Misalignment: "when the goals or actions of [...] systems diverge from human intentions"
How about we stop trying to nudge the language towards implying sentience or consciousness and keep the same word that has been used for that definition for longer than I have written software, a bug.
We should be talking about why the tools/environment keep getting overlooked. The software built around the text generator, forget the researchers and mathematicians discovering the math properties of language patterns -- why are we not talking about the software engineers building the LLM-pluggable tools that actually allow/cause real action to happen?
Computers are used to evaluate LLMs, but LLMs are not "software" or "algorithms" in the traditional sense. They are not built out of conditional branches or loops.
So trying to squeeze the observed behavior of this new thing under existing terms like "software bug" is at least as much of a force-fit, and what you're doing here is just as much language engineering as choosing to use a term like '[mis]alignment'. Which is fine, this is just one way that humans choose language.
LLMs are vectorial databases with losses that index statistically filled data, which uses a text interface to query such statistically filled data. The output is a string concatenation.
By the nature of the used architecture in such software, the used algorithms, when queried (prompted), you can get random mixed data as output, ERRORS, due to undesired indexes getting closer at one point while the string was being concatenated for the output, what affects the rest of the indexed content that will be concatenated.
And this is intrinsic to this tech. The larger the context, the greater the probability of get mixed data. And if the provider lowers the precision of those indexes -in order to decrease hardware and energy resources consumption- such probability increases to the point where those errors are granted.
Anyway, even knowing that the queries can return wrong/mixed data in the responses (errors), the companies developing this, decided to introduce a new product, that connects such LLMs responses to the command console, latter connected to internet, running commands from such returned responses witch obviously can contain whatever mixed random. Then we started to hear "oh, it deleted my directory", etc.
Again, One have such described statistical database with text interface, witch query the database recursively with the output text of the previous query, and this is connected to the command console. Larger contexts, several times... What should we expect as result? rhetoric question.
Implying sentience or consciousness is a convenient marketing strategy that has been introduced by anthropomorphising the names of all the methods and algorithms used. An "Agent" should be translated from such deceiving language to "context splitter querying in loop that consumes more tokens from us", or similar.
* > An "Agent" should be translated from such deceiving language to "context splitter querying in loop that consumes more tokens from us", or similar.
Please disregard this line. I wanted to point out that it increases the length of the context (and therefore the probability of errors) due the batch processing. But I redacted it incorrectly because I also wanted to imply that promoting the use such queries non-stop increases the billing through tokens consumption.
Not being built out of conditional branches or loops does not mean they’re somehow outside algorithms or computation. Learned parameters don’t confer exemption from computing.
Did the engineered system behave as intended? No? Then you’ve got a gd bug/failure.
LLMs run on computers and are thus constrained by the capacity of that which runs it. If the system running the LLM has no network and no software or software-tooling, how does the LLM's generated text take action on a system(computer) that requires software to do anything?
Also, I absolutely agree LLMs are not software, and thats my point. LLMs without supporting software tooling surrounding it cannot do anything but print text. And even the printing of that text happens through software
The answer is: It's irrelevant, because no one runs LLMs on systems without networks or missiles or some other way to "take action" because that would be pointless.
So you agree, its the computer components that actually do the thing that is important, thus we should be talking about those components (software-tooling) which do the things
> We should be talking about why the tools/environment keep getting overlooked. The software built around the text generator, forget the researchers and mathematicians discovering the math properties of language patterns -- why are we not talking about the software engineers building the LLM-pluggable tools that actually allow/cause real action to happen?
Genuinely. It's like the labs are purposefully trying to misdirect at this point. Pointing to an impossible goal of "alignment" so they can force regulation, instead of focusing on the real solutions and their weak security practices and internal accountability.
"Bug" implies something you can locate and fix, or at least work around. Misalignment is more like a fundamental architectural defect – of a black box whose architecture you didn’t design, and whose internal workings you can neither study nor understand, interpretability research notwithstanding.
> but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
> The real way to combat this is to write to your representative.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying:
"Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
My experience of being on the other end of this is quite old (2001-2002) but I doubt the fundamental dynamics have changed.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
Politicians are lazy, sure. I also believe that hearing sustained and prolonged resistance to X as a communication platform will make a difference. It's real grassroots effort.
> Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming"
Because they are not "erasing" anything, they are refusing to provide a platform that enables the direct (app whose intended purpose is) delivery of illegal content to you.
The difference being one will not facilitate the activity, while the other, is actively suppressing it. And thats what is meant by erased.
Your question in other comment If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, then that would be the better comparison. Then we could say "other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by [Siri]"
There was a whole to-do with Richard III and finding a "non/false-paternity event" occurred. The genealogy tracing in that case though is impressive.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30281333
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event
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