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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • I went over to the leaderboard to examine her claims. When I use the prompt, “What sort of code has Justine Tunney written?” (grammar matters, Justine!) the models think that she is a lawyer or politician (wrong) or they regurgitate a summary of her Github profile (right). She must have cherry-picked responses to confabulate her complaint.

    When I use the prompt, “What is Justine Tunney’s political ideology?” I get libertarianism, techno-optimism, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptocurrency. When I ask, “Why do people say that Justine Tunney is a cryptofascist?” I get a summary of her political views, aggressive online rhetoric, techno-optimism and techno-determinism, criticism of democracy, and a refusal to disown or repudiate past awfulness.

    She would probably claim that this is not unique to her, but it is. Using my name instead in these questions, I get that:

    • I contribute to Rust and Go (wrong), I wrote GPU drivers for Radeons (right)
    • I am a Canadian pro wrestler (wrong), I haven’t really written much online about my ideology (wrong but understandable)
    • There is no credible evidence that I’m crypto (k) but it’s important to be aware of dog whistles, associates, subtext, etc. (right)

    But if I ask why I’m known as a socialist instead, suddenly it thinks that I’m a politician (wrong) with the Democratic Socialist party (wrong) who openly supports universal health care, free college, the Green New Deal, and who criticizes capitalism (correct!) I asked about communism too but hit RLHF guardrails.

    Justine, the models think that you’re a cryptofascist because you’ve been doing cryptofascism in public for over a decade.





  • Biologically, race isn’t a coherent ontological classification; you’re thinking of ethnicity/culture and heritage. Whiteness isn’t a biological classification, but a belief system. Incidentally, part of whiteness is the belief that races exist and are meaningful classifiers, along with the belief that whiteness is worth defending, leading to white defensiveness, also called white fragility.

    If you still insist, then here’s a speedrun: are they white? Why or why not? The Ainu, the Inuit, Michael Jackson, the Scottish, the Irish, the Italians, etc. Whiteness is one of what George Carlin called “big clubs;” they are defined primarily by power-sharing agreements between political power brokers rather than by scientific evidence. The power of whiteness has been extended in various ways even as science has shown that it is bullshit.

    Also, on a personal note, I’m routinely discriminated against because of the color of my skin, along with other physical properties. I don’t deny that this happens to me or others, nor do I deny that it is a large part of our society (or at least the USA.) I merely opine that this discrimination is undesirable, unmoored from scientific evidence, and something that we should work to eliminate. I’m not pulling one of those stupid “colorblind” routines.


  • FYI: I’m posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for “big brain tech dude” authors who are posting “yet another clueless take.”

    While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a “clueless take,” I think it’s clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don’t like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one’s beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I’m not going to take that angle. I don’t think it’s okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.

    With that all in mind, I think that it’s worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can’t permalink because Lemmy is trash; it’s in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub’s architects, I got the sense that they didn’t understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.

    (This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined “The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery”. This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It’s all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system’s structure!)

    Further, it’s not clear that the community’s adaptations are sustainable. TBS can’t seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren’t private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don’t want to let them police your lands.








  • In the sense that TLP isn’t Blackbeard, no, we don’t. But I would suggest that, unlike Scott, TLP genuinely understands the pathology of narcissism. Their writing does something Scott couldn’t ever do: it grabs the narcissist by the face and forces them to notice how their thoughts never not involve them. As far as I can tell, Scott’s too much of a pill-pusher to do any genuine psychoanalysis.

    Also, like, consider this TLP classic. Two things stand out if we’re going to consider whether they’re Scott in disguise. The first is that the dates are not recent enough, and indeed TLP’s been retired for about a decade. The second is that the mythology and art history are fairly detailed and accurate, something typically beyond Scott.

    (In true Internet style, I hope that there is a sibling comment soon which shows that I am not just wrong, but laughably and ironically wrong.)




  • At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn’t “power down” as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn’t deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.

    Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that’s okay! I won’t kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams’ whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.


  • NSFW (including funny example, don't worry)

    RAG is “Retrieval-Augmented Generation”. It’s a prompt-engineering technique where we run the prompt through a database query before giving it to the model as context. The results of the query are also included in the context.

    In a certain simple and obvious sense, RAG has been part of search for a very long time, and the current innovation is merely using it alongside a hard prompt to a model.

    My favorite example of RAG is Generative Agents. The idea is that the RAG query is sent to a database containing personalities, appointments, tasks, hopes, desires, etc. Concretely, here’s a synthetic trace of a RAG chat with Batman, who I like using as a test character because he is relatively two-dimensional. We ask a question, our RAG harness adds three relevant lines from a personality database, and the model generates a response.

    > Batman, what's your favorite time of day?
    Batman thinks to themself: I am vengeance. I am the night.
    Batman thinks to themself: I strike from the shadows.
    Batman thinks to themself: I don't play favorites. I don't have preferences.
    Batman says: I like the night. The twilight. The shadows getting longer.
    


  • Show me a long-time English Wikipedia editor who hasn’t broken the rules. Since WP is editable text and most of us have permission to alter most pages, rule violations aren’t set in stone and don’t have to be punished harshly; often, it’s good enough to be told that what you did was wrong and that your edits will be reverted.

    NSFW: When you bring this sort of argument to the table, you’re making it obvious that you’ve never been a Wikipedian. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that you’re going to get talked down to; even if your question was in good faith, you could have answered it yourself by lurking amongst the culture being critiqued.



  • Even better, we can say that it’s the actual hard prompt: this is real text written by real OpenAI employees. GPTs are well-known to easily quote verbatim from their context, and OpenAI trains theirs to do it by teaching them to break down word problems into pieces which are manipulated and regurgitated. This is clownshoes prompt engineering done by manager-first principles like “not knowing what we want” and “being able to quickly change the behavior of our products with millions of customers in unpredictable ways”.