trans
clo
2hr ago
While I agree with your view, the other counterpoint is that they don't have to be attractive to non-Chinese. They just need to be attractive to those who rule the non-Chinese.
Many countries would prefer having purely transactional interactions. A standard Chinese strategy is to loan money to countries that don't like the strings the IMF attach to their loans. Of course, China has its own reasons for offering those loans and will happily snap up the collateral.
The populace are not and have not ever been much of a concern in places where they lack power.
wlxd
2hr ago
Think of it this way: the point of even purely text-based LLMs is not to understand text per se, but rather to understand concepts, ideas, and meaning. The text itself is just a medium through which these are conveyed. The same is true about voice modality: we do not care about the pressure waveforms, but rather about what is being conveyed by these. Transcribing them to words and digesting them as word tokens is lossy, you lose tone, tempo, background, etc. Training on audio is going to make your model perform better, not only on audio, but likely also when dealing with just text. It's similar to how models pretrained on lots of computer code work much better at non code related tasks.
Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot
Sorry, but no. The main effort into multimodal models has been to bolt on multimodal features to a text-trained base model, leading to the absolutely dismal state of vision models. It merely involves, chopping up images and other media into patches, and projecting those into the token embedding space (which is different than tokenizing them), and finetuning an existing model on that information.
Take a look at the LLaVA paper, which while somewhat dated is largely the technique still used on the state of the art for multimodal models.
LLaVA perceives the image as a “bag of patches”, failing to grasp the complex semantics within the image.
For a more recent paper, see Qwen 2.5 vision which is also a text-only LLM with vision slapped on top.
Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.
TTS is of course fundamentally a sequence task, which maps neatly into an extension of generating text. Bolting on an output head and giving a nice massage of finetuning will straightforwardly give good results. (note that this is fundamentally different from using a separate TTS engine, but also fundamentally different from having a native multimodal model.)
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
China see itself as the "middle kingdom" that should rightfully be at the center of Asia, and ideally the world.
Now where have I seen that... I'm pretty sure it had something to with hats making something great...
Deals with other nations are entered into not out of any sort of altruism or common ground, but as purely transactional interactions,
This is de facto US foreign policy for the next four years or possibly longer.
I wager after a decade they will learn their lesson and either return to the American fold
Why would they when the Trump administration is doing their utmost to let everyone know that US is not interested in anything other than at best a transactional relationship (with a sideline of threatening to just take what they want)? An alliance requires trust. "I've just altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it again." isn't exactly the type of message to inspire anything like that.
Incanto
3hr ago
Direct audio input is better than a transcript because it can capture things like tone.
doglatine
3hr ago
Cross posting from /r/credibledefense, but thought Mottizens might have an angle on this.
As someone with family in the Philippines, I’ve been feeling concerned about risks presented by the country’s close alliance with an increasingly volatile US, especially in the context of a war in the West Philippine Sea/SCS that the US is looking more and more likely to lose. A few years ago, the US felt to me like a better partner than China after Duterte’s reconciliation efforts with Xi were largely rebuffed, and since then we’ve seen a major investment in new US bases in the Philippines, especially Luzon. However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.
First, there’s the simple fact that US naval construction remains deeply and utterly broken, as I’m sure most of us are aware, while China’s continues to grow at pace. The starkness of this disparity has grown in recent years and it no longer looks like the US has the state capacity to fix it. Consequently, the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan that goes badly for the US and leaves the region in control of China is higher than it used to be. Moreover, while the US can pack its bags and go back to Guam, the Philippines will forever be stuck less than 200 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Second, and much more recent, there’s the shift towards a more erratic and transactional foreign policy by the US. While US bases in the Philippines are of mutual benefit for now, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a rug-pull exercise whereby the US pulls its forces out in exchange for a concession from China. Likewise, it’s questionable whether the old ideals of loyalty would mean the US would help with reconstruction if the Philippines got hit hard by Chinese missile strikes in a Taiwan conflict. Additionally, many of the soft-power inducements provided by USAID projects in the Philippines have now been cancelled. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the Trump administration per se, but the reality is that US foreign strategy has undergone a colossal shift in the last two months, and that changes the incentives for its partners.
Third, while China wants its extravagant claims to islands in the West Philippine Sea to be recognised, and probably wants economic and political influence in the Philippines itself, there’s zero indication or historical precedent to suggest that China wants to annex any of the major islands in the Philippines. Consequently, it’s really not clear to me that the security advantages provided by US forces are significant enough to justify the very real and kinetic risks associated with hosting US forces. I’m particularly concerned about nuclear risks, where in a rapidly spiralling conflict China might judge nuclear strikes on US military targets in the Philippines to be less likely to escalate to all-out strategic nuclear warfare than eg attacks on US bases in Guam or Japan.
Fourth and finally, the current presence of US bases in the Philippines does offer them a bargaining chip. It seems to me that the Philippines could basically offer a “Finlandization” deal to China where it would commit to total neutrality in any conflict in the region and withdraw from Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US. Probably to sweeten the package it would have to make some painful concessions to China on disputed islands like Scarborough Shoal, but it could potential walk away with robust guarantees of long-term functional autonomy and non-interference, conditional on remaining neutral.
I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, though! Am I being too bleak, or missing some upsides to the alliance for the Philippines?
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4hr ago
How feasible is it to eat on food stamps
Confidence level: 20 hours of research probability I missed something major >90% Felt it was pretty clearly CW since SNAP benefits are pretty CW
Food stamps recently had a proposed cut that is probably going through. Of course it's hard to know if these will actually go through or not and will it really make a major impact.
I decided to look into how much food stamps actually cover I decided to run some numbers
First I had to pick "what an actual diet might look like"
I decided to use my "standard bulking diet" which I had laying around (notably it's got nearly complete nutrition. and input the numbers into a spreadsheet.
I got to $9.30/day. in costs. slightly below half of that were the fruits and vegetables (thank wal-mart for having frozen vegetables and canned salmon.) Man fruits and vegetables are expensive!
Now you could definitely reduce costs by say going down to 1/3rd of a can of salmon, but I found myself limited by getting enough Selenium, B12 and vitamin D while avoiding getting too much folate. Replacing some salmon with some more beans is definitely an option though. Tofu is low enough in folate that you could go with that instead.
The main issue though is that I don't see how you cut down on the fruits/vegetables department very well. previously fruits and vegetables made up $4.51/day so as far as major expenses go that's the 2nd main place to look But the price of food is definitely surprisingly constraining. Though I think if someone tried to be more thrifty than me they could definitely get costs down about 40%. The main constraints are the B12, vitamin D and choline. cutting meat consumption in half and adding more split peas is a good solution there, cutting walnuts for more sunflower seeds and replacing chia with flax and some soymilk may also be wise. As long as the soymilk is vitamin D fortified you can cut down on salmon even more. We're already on frozen vegetables though cutting the few fresh ones for canned/frozen seems like a reasonable option, you'd still be at about $3 a day in fruits/veggies though.
Looking at how SNAP works, SNAP beenefits curve manages to avoid welfare cliffs! So for someone working a 20 hr/week job it covers about $5 a day. that's a little over half of all food costs absorbed by SNAP. There's probably a decent amount of room to reduce costs.
Though at the same time SNAP benefits basically give you a 30% tax on income <2k/month (roughly anyway) in fact in the state of california it seems that you'd need to be a family of many to qualify for SNAP. a single person house working full time literally cannot qualify with standard rent payments. A person working full time as the sole breadwinner of a 4 person household can get ~$400/month from SNAP if they make the minimum wage in california. Though I guess that's why it's only 1 in 8 people taht are even on the program in the first place.
Comparing this to the thrifty food plan by the us government (skip to page 38) I notice that they literally don't get enough vitamin E or D, I understand vitamin D but vitamin E? Come on sunflower seeds are cheap and have plenty of vitamin E.
Adjusted for inflation the thrifty food plan pays about $10.66/day compared to my 9.30 so my meal plan is actually a small step cheaper. (you have to divide their spending by 3 because the reference male eats 1/3rd of the calories of the family and then adjust by inflation)
Roughly speaking per day they were eating
1.7 lbs of vegetables a day 1/3rd starchy with a small amount of leafy greens also including a large amount of beans (counting those as vegetables!) 1.28 pounds of fruit per day of which 1/3rd was fruit juice. 0.67 pounds of grains a day, of which half are refined 1.97 pounds of milk a day, 3/8ths whole fat 5/8ths low/nonfat almost all from milk cartons 0,77 poudns of meat a day 0.33 pounds of misc a day
At the same time the govs plan eats about the same amount of vegetables standard bulking diet. counting the dried legumes as vegetables, I typically eat 1.5 pounds of vegetables a day, (they use a family of 4 but a male is expected to eat 1/3rd of the calories that the thrifty food plan has). They also devote most of the vegetables to the starchy variety rather than the cruciferous ones I mostly ate.
Fruit again was a deviation (as expected) I was eating a little over 1.25 pounds of fruit daily on my reference diet, while the Thrifty food plan is going on the same but the composition changed to be 1/3rd fruit juice.
They also include a good amount of pasturized milk which makes sense I guess. The protein requirements they had were also significantly lower than my standard bulking diet's requirements (70 g/day vs 120) presumably this allowed them to cut out a lot of the foods I ate.
In fact it appears that the majority of protein the Thrifty food plan gets comes from milk, as milk represents roughly 30% of the diet by weight.
I think the low amount of seafood in their plan reflects the lack of omega 3 DHA or EPA required. They only checked for omega 3 ALA which is relatively easy to obtain via Flax/Chia/Walnuts. DHA and EPA are the reasons I had to eat a whole half a can of salmon while on my bulk.
I wonder though, how far down can you actually go in cost of food while still maintaining a healthy diet? I think I could get below $6 but much lower than that and we run into b12 issues. 1 serving of canned salmon covers b12 and lentils/split peas/chia seeds/sunflower seeds can cover most of the rest. Though chia seeds are randomly pretty expensive...
The constraints would be
-
Must have 2300-2400 calories
-
must have at least 110 g of protein (I'm a lifter ok?)
-
must have no more than 16 grams of saturated fat
-
Must meet all the reccommended Dietary intakes for micros/macros on Cronometer without exceeding the upper limit (Except for the carbs/fat). Note that cronometer has no EPA or DHA requirement and only has a total omega 3 category sadly.
Some Questions about SNAP that I can't understand for the life of me even after researching it for 20 hours
Is it me or do people earning about 10k-30k/year have effective 50% marginal tax rates after transfers? Is there this weird tax range where your marginal tax rate falls down as you stop qualifying for federal aid but don't get pushed into the upper tax brackets?
Why was 30% of gross income spending on food chosen? It's such a strange number to me, A normal family of 4 should be spending like 8k/year on food? Most families I know spend <10% of their money on food, (shelter though oh god)
When I look at the federal gov's Thrifty food plan I don't see actual equations, I know they used a linear optimization program but I can't for the life of me determine its constraints. Why so much Milk? Why so many potatoes and so little leafy greens? Why nearly no nuts/seeds? Why couldn't it get vitamin D or Vitamin E and why was the USDA willing to just give up instead of manually editing the diet to incude enough vitamin A/D? (pretty easy to do with canned seafood, sunflower seeds and almonds)
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4hr ago
I'm baffled by perceptions of China and Chinese products in the West. There seem to be two camps:
-
Normie camp. China is the new evil empire. They spy on everyone and steal everything. Everything they make is fake and falls apart (Temu, electronics). Their "technical excellence" is just aping stuff America could do effortlessly a decade or more ago (lunar lander, Nei Zha 2, Black Myth Wukong) or it's kabuki theater (Deepseek is stolen tech and/or is a facade to hide massive investment and manpower to make it look like China is catching up). They cheat their allies on the global stage (crappy infrastructure built in Africa in exchange for minerals).
-
Contrarian camp. China is the new techno-cyberpunk future of the human race. Drone swarms shaped like dragons. Everything on your smartphone. Technical excellence matching that of America but at less cost (Nei Zha, BM:W, Deepseek). Futuristic Chinese cities. Transhumanism unfettered by Christian hangups. They offer their allies purely aboveboard transactional deals with no moralizing strings attached.
I even see it on this forum. My info is a bit dated now, but I used to be heavily interested in China and hooked in to Chinese culture and politics. My takeaway from my time over there living with and working alongside Chinese people was that China could never truly be a more attractive partner than America on the world stage because their core civilizational ideas are just not attractive or reassuring to non-Chinese. Most Americans see themselves as part of a universal brotherhood of nations due to America's enlightenment roots, but China see itself as the "middle kingdom" that should rightfully be at the center of Asia, and ideally the world. It is a civilization founded on ethnic chauvinism and an inward orientation. Barbarians ways are not to be understood or mimicked save for instrumentally in order to gain some advantage that furthers the Chinese race. Deals with other nations are entered into not out of any sort of altruism or common ground, but as purely transactional interactions, and deals only need to be honored so far as they continue to benefit China and the Chinese -- as soon as all the juice has been squeezed, the contract can be shredded and discarded, and former partners can simply be gaslit about the prior agreement.
The obvious counterpoint is that America's foreign policy establishment is just as ruthless and amoral, and perhaps even moreso since they distract from their misdeeds with platitudes about universalism and human rights. I think this is a fair point, but I would counter that the American establishment does actually have some true believers and that it is at least somewhat constrained by what the American voting public can stomach. China has no such checks. I would also counter that America's amoral foreign policy is a deviation from its core civilizational values, one from which (hopefully) it is beginning to course correct, while the ethnic chauvinism of China is core to its civilization self-identity and is thus much more deeply ingrained and less likely to change. I think we may see a few countries defect toward China, but I wager after a decade they will learn their lesson and either return to the American fold or take some sort of third-worldist position.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5hr ago
to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific
Why do it in a roundabout manner ? The cold-war with China is in full swing. It's 10 years too late for appearances.
the adults actually have everything under control at all times
Has that ever been true? Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq were net negatives for the US. The country has a storied tradition of wasting money in ways that 'adults' would deem unwise.
this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap.
Same here. Trump (and those who he listens to) is a tactical genius and strategic buffoon. He's good at bullying as a means of getting small wins. But, he lacks the patience for grand games. His evaluation of the world is simple and myopic.
<semi_rant_begins>
China's rise and its inevitable challenge to America's supremacy had kicked off by 1978. Their current momentum has been half-a-century in the making. It took the half-century before that for America to build Pax-Americana into what it is (was?) today. Even at full-throttle it will take America ~2 decades to craft a new public image of itself. Trump wants to draw new cards. But, the old cards were good, and it may take a few draws before America finds itself with good cards again. In the short term., change will likely be for the worst And if the cards don't work out, the long term might be doomed as well.
Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place. The first world wanted nothing to do with China. There was balance.
Western Europe, Japan, SK & America were aligned in keeping China at arms lengths from their markets. BRICS nations were seen as long-term possible contenders to the first world. South Africa is aligned with the west. India didn't get along with China. Brazil's location makes it naturally align with America. Russia allied with China, but had delusions of grandeur that kept it from ever being subservient.
In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella ? Iran, Pakistan, Russia, SEA, Africa & some South American countries ? That's the grand alliance ? What did America have to fear ? Between South Asia, Poland, Turkey & HispanAmerica.... the 1st world had enough mid-industrialization partners for outsourcing low-margin industries. If robotics automation stayed on track, the 1st world's requirement for offshore labor would've ended right as these aforementioned nations became too expensive for outsourcing. Biden ran a cluster-fuck of a govt. But, the pre-2016 neolib consensus seemed to be doing just fine.
In 2025, I'm not so sure.
Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here. Europe could make their money go further if they opened up to Chinese shopping portals like Temu and embraced Chinese electronics (Huawei, Xiaomi). Chinese belt-and-road style loans might start looking tempting to feudal countries if their elites weren't America educated (and therefore America aligned). Small nations would get on their knees and suck Xi off if China offered to divert the fire-hose of Chinese tourists to their nations. India could adopt a China-style make-everything-in-house strategy going forward. It wouldn't take it to first-world-dom, but it could operate within its means. India is poor, but 1.5 billion is a lot of consumers.
America dominates many sectors, but it is especially powerful in Tech and Entertainment. Guess what, both sectors are trivial to disrupt. Semi conductors, Pharmaceuticals and Heavy engineering take decades to build excellence in. But tech and entertainment can be disrupted overnight.
It would take less than 2 years for China to offer full replacements for O365, AWS and Windows. They already have competent alternatives for Facebook, Google, Tesla & Apple ready to go. Where would that leave the magnificent 7? With NeZha 2 & BlackMyth, they're already showing technical excellence in entertainment. Yes, America tells better stories, but that's only because American stories resonate. If Trump continues being a bully, will anyone want to see the next Rocky 4 or Captain America ?
I still don't get what was so broken about America that Elon & Trump needed to turn everything on its head.
<\semi_rant_ends>
jkf
5hr ago
I don't think it's not within their potential capabilities, I just don't see any reason why this would be added -- if you were to do so, it clearly would need to be specifically trained on audio tokens which seems to me to amount to embedding a Whisper model into your LLM. I just don't see any reason to do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to just call a transcription model (which as you know are pretty good these days) and throw the resulting text at your LLM?
anti_dan
5hr ago
Its also plausible that 4 more years of aimless Trump would have had the Democrats doubling down on all their worst ideas, just doing them while out of power. Dozens of impeachment attempts instead of 2, relatively focused federal prosecutions. Even more state prosecutions, now of a sitting President. All in trans crazy activism writ large, etc.
All in all, I don't think Trump 2024 is even that much for normie Dems to worry about. Perhaps they lose some percentage of USAID, PEPFAR, etc slush funds permanently and semi-permanently. That reduces their federal dollars advantage from what? 1000-1 to merely 100-1? They also still have all the universities, and ending DEI doesn't mean you are ending funding for higher ed, which is simply funding for leftist propaganda, as a rule. And they still have captured the k-12 teachers and unions, so unless the public ends all public funding for all public education, there is Trillions of taxpayer dollars flowing into Democrat coffers still. You'd need to redirect like 40% of all public funds spent nationwide to get Republican orgs to parity when it comes to slush funding.
Plus you have inherent "get out the vote ;)" advantages baked in.
So the normie Dem that isn't worried is the correct one. Protect a bit of the status quo that you can, keep running milquetoast candidates like Biden that can pretend to be moderate. Perhaps not one who has been senile for 4 years. The institutional advantages are still overwhelmingly in your favor. Carry on, and maybe stop transing the frogs (and the kids).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
Trump pauses aid to Ukraine after fiery meeting with Zelenskyy:
The Trump administration is pausing all aid to Ukraine, including weapons in transit or in Poland.
The pause comes days after a contentious meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Donald Trump in the White House.
I guess that settles the question of his authority over this matter!
One analysis I've heard is that everything -- both the reduction in US aid and the increase in European defense spending -- is part of an elaborate pre-constructed kayfabe to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific. These types of "actually everything is under control, it's just nation-states acting in their own rational self-interest" stories always strike me as just a bit too convenient. Certainly many would like to believe that the adults actually have everything under control at all times -- but that doesn't make it reality. I have no trouble believing that this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap. I mean, he might be. But he also might not be.
In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.
Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.
"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1894419042150027701
How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.
This reminds me of a very good joke:
A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "
The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."
Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.
Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.
At this point, the goalposts aren't just moving, they're approaching relativistic speed headed straight out of the galactic plane.
This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.
It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.
Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.
This is the classic, tired, and frankly, lazy argument against LLMs. Yes, LLMs are trained on massive datasets of text and code, and they predict the most likely output based on that training. But to say they are merely "next likely text" generators is a gross oversimplification.
It's like saying humans are just “meat computers firing neurons". That is trivially true, but I'm afraid you're letting the "just" do all the heavy lifting.
The power of these models comes from the fact that they are learning statistical correlations in the data. These correlations represent underlying patterns, relationships, and even, dare I say, concepts. When an LLM correctly answers a complex question, it's not just regurgitating memorized text. It's synthesizing information, drawing inferences, and applying learned patterns to new situations.
LLMs have concepts. They operate in latent spaces where those are represented with floating point numbers. They can be cleanly mapped, often linearly, and interpreted in terms that make sense to humans, albeit with difficulty.
These representations can be analyzed, manipulated, and even visualized. I repeat, they make intuitive sense. You can even perform operations on these vectors like [King] - [Male] + [Female] = [Queen]. That isn't just word tricks, they’re evidence of abstracted relational understanding.
If you're convinced, for some reason, that tokens aren't the way to go, then boy are AI researchers way ahead of you. Regardless, even mere text tokens have allowed cognitive feats that would have made AI researchers prior to 2017 cream in their pants and weep.
There really isn't any pleasing some people.
Edits as I spot more glaring errors:
Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on.
Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot, it's just an expensive process.
While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.
There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational
Besides, have you ever tried to get an LLM to do things that its designers have trained it, through RLHF or Constitutional AI, to not do? They're competent, if not perfect, at discarding "bad" inputs. Go ahead, without looking up an existing jailbreak, try and get ChatGPT to tell you how to make meth or sarin gas at home.
It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes
I don't think that Anthropic, strapped for compute as it is, is going to take a fun little side gimmick and train their SOTA AI to play Pokémon. If it was just some random dude with deep pockets, as you assumed without bothering to check, then good luck getting a copy of Claude's code and then fine-tuning it. At best they could upgrade the surrounding scaffolding to make it easier on the model.
The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to.
There is a profound difference between "struggling" to do so, and being incapable of doing so.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I can imagine a Brazil which is a first world country over the entire place, albeit with welfare transfers to the north and a high crime rate. Brazil easily has the human capital for (south)Western European standards. Corruption, socialism, and neighborhood are the things holding it back.
ajuuiomml
12hr ago
That is not our beef with China. China runs a market closed to American business - it forces the transfer of ownership and IP, while our market is relatively open. China systematically spies on American businesses and academia to steal IP for the purpose of competition (not national security). China was the main supplier of synthetic opioids to the US.
Since you did your own meta study which took a lot of time, could you go ahead and link it here for us?
Many of the ivermectin believers have done or contributed to their own meta-study with extensive and totally transparent results and discussion. Apparently, you classify this group as "intellectually lazy" who "don't take the time to verify [their] own opinions," which is beyond ridiculous.
You're wrong about ivermectin, but that's fine. You may find their work unconvincing and that's fine, too, but this is just ridiculous.
Scott Alexander is doing fantastic work with such reviews but I am afraid that even he doesn't have enough time and substitutes quality with quantity
Scott Alexander's comments on every topic on Covid, including ivermectin, during the hysteria were wrong and he was corrected at the time. The people he relied on like healthnerd, sheldrick, the fraud squad, gidmk, were wrong too and were corrected at the time, too. AlexandrosM did like a 15 part series carefully explaining their flaws and bad arguments. Despite all of Scott&Co's copes about why they were wrong about the most important thing in their alleged fields of study in likely their entire lives, this should fall on deaf ears (and do) to all but those who were also wrong and want to join in on the excuses.
These people were wrong when it mattered, there were plenty of reasons which were pointed out to them why they were wrong, and yet they persisted and only relented when it was safe to do so. They regularly attacked and threatened the people who were right the entire time to boot. It was reprehensible behavior and they should never be allowed to forget it.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
13hr ago
I thought he was going for military-adjacent without transparently pretending to be an actual soldier.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14hr ago
I'll admit imprecision here was a mistake.
I should've said that the group organization mechanisms present in prison are what "pure" or perhaps "raw" male organizational systems look like. You are correct that the general character flaws of most prisoners are not representative of society at large.
Widening the aperture to the military, we see the patterns continue; explicit hierarchies with unambiguous leadership. Strict behavioral codes that, when transgressed, are met with physical violence or, at least, extremely high tension verbal intimidation. College fraternities reduce the propensity for physical violence (mildly) because they still exist in the context of civil society - if you beat up your Frat Bro, you're still probably getting arrested.
The point is this is how men organize themselves when female organizing principles are absent or extremely muted. I'm not an expert on how, say, the eastern Saudi tribal folks organize their extremely patriarchal societies, but I'd be willing to guess we can see some continue through lines there as well.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18hr ago
(tagging @jeroboam as well)
It gets even worse when we consider nerdy economist concepts like marginal utility and opportunity cost.
Those of means who contribute more to social security than they will receive from it are also not using their monthly payroll contributions to social security to invest in other areas. Likewise and conversely, those who do not contribute much to social security during their "careers" but then receive disproportionate benefit should they make it to 65+ are often - date I say - engaged in activities that may be net socially negative. This ranges from the pleasantly degenerate (drinking to excess, casual illegal gambling with friends, other high risk activities) to the actively and proudly felonious (violet semi-organize criminal activity).
We take meaningful amounts of money out of the hands of the pro-socially engaged and demonstrably more capable in capital allocation during their highest earning years in order to subsidize the poverty-lite elderly years of people who have had a rocky relationship with society and community for, perhaps, decades.
I'll admit I'm painting with broad strokes here and will further confide that I spent too much time this past weekend looking at how taxes, transfers, and social programs actually shake out in the US. I, therefore, am still riding a hell of a rage high on this particular topic.
Still, the basic (and good!) arguments against social security still fail to adequately capture just how perverse it has become. It is no longer a "help out the small amount of old folks who make it to such an advanced age" program. It's a multi-generational ponzi scheme complimented by a massive DEFECT, DEFECT, DEFECT incentivized prisoner's dilemma. Throw in the deadly sisters of housing, education, and healthcare costs and the picture gets even more grim.
The economic tragedy in America is that, today, the dutiful "middle class" career person or family who pays all of their taxes, saves responsibly but without being monkish about it, and tries to setup a self-sufficient future is actually the RUBE. The equity owning elites use the various tax loopholes to keep cash that isn't income but "dividends" and the devotees of social degeneracy simply enjoy a taxpayer subsidized orgy of irresponsibility from their earliest adult years all the way through silver years' death, if violent calamity does not land on them in the intervening decades. The government pursues monetary and fiscal policy that inflates the dollar to oblivion and takes yet more of those dwindling dollars out of the hands of the earnestly, albeit naively, pro-social.
This is raised in-game. That's why
In terms of the game, you're stuck
Here
19hr ago
After you sign a contract and pay your bill
I think that's the issue though, no? The Europeans haven't paid their bill. The transactional approach is falling apart because there is no transaction - just one-sided behavior.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
19hr ago
My being forced to say trans person (instead of the quicker, more natural and poetic tranny) in this den of witches seems about equal to the suffering trans people suffer when someone misgenders them.
As a purely-descriptive point, while SJ now hates the word "transsexual", theMotte still tolerates it, including as a noun. Or at least, I've never seen anyone (including me) get in trouble for using it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
19hr ago
Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table.
I feel obliged to note that the sign of this effect is actually in question, not just its magnitude, because "desist and become happy with birth sex" and "never become dysphoric in the first place" are much better than "transition". If desistance rates are high without permitting transition, then we're doing dysphorics a disservice on average by tolerating them. Alternatively, if dysphoria rates scale with trans awareness, then raising such awareness is staggeringly -EV because it massively raises the incidence of the problem it's trying to ameliorate.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
20hr ago
No. You seem to be implying I'll ban you for saying something I don't like. We're pretty transparent about our bans, and we don't ban people for arguing with us or expressing discontent, or claiming we're "effectively banning" a particular point of view. We ban people for breaking the rules in the sidebar, and generally being abusive. So if what you want to say is "You're a shitty mod and I hope you die," yeah, you should probably keep that to yourself. But if it's something more like "I think you're a crypto-woke who's protecting Jews," well, I've heard it. I'm just speculating here since you are being so vague, but when I've told you I'm not going to ban you and you insist I will, I dunno what to say, except at this point I think you're just making up whatever "prohibited viewpoint" you are hinting at because you have a general discontent with moderation (which usually boils down to "I want to hate on my enemies more and you won't let me").
It could (maybe), but this is drifting even further from how current LLMs work -- the previous discussion on this was around an example where (if the model were doing this rather than working from a transcript and hallucinating) it completely failed to account for pronunciation, much less tone.
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