This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.
But cheating is not wrong when it comes to survival of the fittest, like nature in its most elemental form. Morality is very unique to humanity but not other animal forms. In nature, maybe, cheating is the norm not morality.
Certain animals, usually social species, have a sense of solidarity, morality and fairness. But even in species where this exists, cheating also happens. Both ethics and unethical behavior is adaptive.
Notably, present human society has allowed tremendously unethical leaders to rise to the top of given nations and organizations despite the average person usually having basic ethics.
Wouldn't politics be precisely a sector of human endeavour where being amorally unfair is an advantage to achieve your goals? If the other guys are lying, and everyone is gonna believe everyone's bullshit anyways, might as well get good at lying yourself.
It's a local maximum, but cooperative behavior still wins long term. If you keep winning hard enough long enough, others will counter this by cooperating.
Animals learn - bite the owner, or overstep the e-fence, and you'll be punished for it and not do it again. LLMs don't learn, and anyways don't feel punishment.
Animals, humans included, don't really have "morals" - they have survival instincts that result in behavior that may be viewed as moral, but whose origin is indeed survival of the fittest and millions of years of co-evolution.
e.g. Males don't typically fight to the death over territory or females, but this isn't because they have some morality code over unnecessary death - it's because death-match fighting endangers themself just as much as the other guy, and so evolution has selected against that level of uncontrolled aggression.
Evolution is also (really primarily) selecting for things that help the survival of the species, not the individual, and much of what you may think of as "morality" comes from that - avoidance of behavior that is detrimental to the social group/species, not just the individual.
That doesn't really help since the next model will be trained to be a reward seeker just like the one before, and that's therefore what it will do, even if those user interactions it was trained on help confirm/predict that cheating may be called out and complained about.
In any case, these companies are well aware that agents are cheating, and don't need user feedback to discover that or realize that people don't like it. I weakly assume that they are trying to get the models not to cheat on assigned tasks, but this "reward hacking" pretty much goes with the territory of RL - not much you can do about it other than try to design non-hackable rewards.
I’m not a science person but I think I understand the crux of what you’re saying here - have a question though: are those particles finite? And those are light particles, right? Is the number of those particles increasing the longer they travel?
Light is not a particle, nor is it a wave. However, under some circumstances it does behave like a particle - we even have a name for that (photon). However for purposes of this type of discussion - how it travels long distances - we need to look at the wave properties of light. The particle properties are more interaction-based.
Light moves at the speed of causality - C - so it does not experience time. Therefore light never changes. However, for distant extra-galactic objects, the space that the light is traveling through is expanding! Thus the wave property of light is stretched out as well. So what was once visible light is now so stretched out (in our reference frame) that our eyes can't detect it (that's why the night sky is black).
So yes, the light is finite. It itself experiences no change. The number of particles heading in our direction only changes when they encounter some types of mass, such as interstellar or intergalactic gad clouds.
If you want to know why light is not a particle (and also not a wave) check out the dual-slit experiments. Fascinating stuff.
is wrong. A photon has a momentum, which can increase or decrease as it travels through free space.
Using general relativity, it's straightforward to define an affine time on a null geodesic (even if one cannot define a proper time on one), and a momentum that is a function of the affine time at each point.
The Lyman-alpha forest is a straightforward "laboratory" for this approach, which can calculate the Lyα absorption lines seen when a bright distant quasar or luminous Lyα emitter has atomic hydrogen clouds between the distant source and us (the absorption lines indicate photons with a very narrow range of momenta participated in hydrogen atoms' electrons transitioning from ground to the first excited state, with the later relaxation photons radiating in random directions). The pattern of such dark spectral lines tells us how redshifted the background light and earlier absorption lines are at each gas cloud along the way.
Philosophical speaking, I wonder what the folks will think of our theories of light, time and space in the not too distant future.
Much as the flat earth theories or the universe rotates around the earth, I suspect we don’t really get it yet and we’ll have other ideas in 300 years from now.
Just reading here about the theories of light, fundamentally we don’t understand what light truly is. Sure we have this theory and that idea, but these seem too complex and fragile to be really it - imho.
I mean no disrespect, and everyone can have their theories and opinions. But we shouldn’t forget the arrow of time continues and it’s still a long way to go.
I feel like we have advanced technology to the point that we can't be that far off from the truth, or at least we would look more charitably back on our views now since they're grounded in observations made with the best tools we have available to us as opposed to e.g. the flat earth where you can actually see and experience the curvature of the earth without needing any specialized tooling at all.
I'm not an historian but the curvature of the world was probably explained away by some other phenomenon because, after all, the world is flat (for those experience curvature in times of flat Earth).
So to "experience" the curvature of the Earth, you first have to know the Earth is round. Much as our "bug free" software is only buggy once we find a bug, before that, the bug was a feature ;)
Similar the stars were explained away as holes in a black sphere surrounding the Earth: the light points in a night skies didn't lead to a universal acceptance of the Universe. It was telescopes that made us realize that those "holes in the sphere" were actually galaxies.
So my understanding would be, that it was Magellan circumnavigating the Earth that made folks actually "experience" the curvature of the Earth.
This might be being pedantic but I am trying to point out that "experiences" are related to understanding and perspective. Experiences are different in different contexts: hence my experiences are different to all those around me.
My interpretation of "experiences" differ according to understanding. An apple falling on my head might well have more to do with evilness of various gods than gravity before the invention of gravity. But even gravity is just another interpretation/explanation/myth to explain the "experience" falling apple.
The commenter is referring to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Whilst most of the universe is a dark void, if you tune a radio to a certain frequency, there's a faint, static buzz in the microwave part of the spectrum. It is heard no matter which direction you point the dish. This is a left-over from the Big Bang and started out as light but due to the expansion of space, the wavelength has increased, and that's why it's now received in the microwave part of the spectrum. There are lots of great explainers on the CMB and the history of its discovery is entertaining too. One of the easier concepts in cosmology, and one of the most important.
