You can practically taste the frustration in the “prompt engineering” here. Just one more edge case bro, one more edge case and then the prompt will be perfect!

Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

Data and stats can tell you whatever story you want to promote

Seen this so many times at my work. There’s some bone-headed decision and the people in charge are like “look guys we ran the numbers”. But the methodology is messed up somehow, or they just ignored / misinterpreted the numbers while pretending they were following the data, or it doesn’t bear out in the real world; etc.

When data and common sense disagree you’d better be damn sure in the data.

When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don’t worry!) I’ll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.

My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice “You might want to check your blood pressure!” and “you still haven’t completed today’s tasks for Health+ points! But don’t worry, there’s still time!”

Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.

Couldn’t make it through the video, but this level of argument has been hashed and rehashed over literally the past thousand years. It’s in the training data out the wazoo. And yet the youtube commenters act like it’s the most insightful thing they’ve ever heard, and not copy-pasted from a mediocre philosophy 101 textbook.

each perspective is given its best possible representation.

This was a quite nuanced debate, better than what most humans are capable of.

I feel like we are nearing to the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves… – Hayao Miyazaki

Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.

Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(

Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”

Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.

The utter contempt doesn’t cost extra? Sweet!

But wait, there’s more!

AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI

Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)

AI party (apparently now defunct, if it was ever halfway serious in the first place): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/

Me: Mom I want AI mayor!

Mom: Shush now Saturn, we have AI mayor at home.

AI mayor at home:

https://www.ai-mayor.com/

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党

This is just weird. But I guess that’s to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.

Don’t worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I’m sure they’ll work that out.

I dunno about roads but the stoplights are intelligent and they hate bicyclists with their entire robot souls. I have been trapped and tormented in a left-turning lane by an evil robot demi-god that would never turn the left-turn signal green before. Harrowing.

What’s your P(moon)?

Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding,"

How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.

Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

Robots are becoming extremely capable – able to respond to very abstract commands like “move forward”, “get up”, “kick ball”, “reach for object”, etc.

Computers now have the cutting edge ability to-- *checks notes*– parse Zork text adventure style user input.

If you’ve done any reading on the history of AI you may recognize these sorts of commands as “blocks world”, which goes back to the '60s. Sure there’s been a ton of advancements since then, but just the basic act of a computer understanding “kick ball” is not exactly groundbreaking.

If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.

As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

“If I asked the guard to your left to evaluate the butt of the guard to your right would they say it is a lovely butt?”

I don’t know how this is the answer but this is definitely the answer.

Riddle: A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet silicon treasure inside is hid.

Answer: