Honestly I’m kinda grateful for people who dig into and analyze the actual data in seeming ignorance of the political context of the people pushing the other side. It’s one thing to know that Jordan “Crimieux” Lasker and friends are out here doing Deutsch Genetik and another to have someone cleanly and clearly lay out exactly why they’re wrong, especially when they do the work of assembling a more realistic and useful story about the same studies.

Very good read actually.

Except, from the epilogue:

People are working to resolve [intelligence heritability issue] with new techniques and meta-arguments. As far as I understand, the frontline seems to be stabilizing around the 30-50% range. Sasha Gusev argues for the lower end of that band, but not everyone agrees.

The not-everyone-agrees link is to acx and siskind’s take on the matter, who unfortunately seems to continue to fly under the radar as a disingenuous eugenicist shitweasel with a long-term project of using his platform to sane-wash gutter racists who pretend at doing science.

Here’s the bottom line: I have no idea what motivated Cremieux to include Burt’s fraudulent data, but even without it his visual is highly misleading, if not manipulative

Well, the latter part of this sentence gives a hint at the actual reason.

And the first comment is by Hanania lol, trying to debunk the fraud allegations by saying that is just how things were done back then. While also not realizing he didnt understand the first part of the article. Amazing how these iq anon guys always react quick and to everything. Also was quite an issue on Reddit, where just a small dismissal of IQ could lead to huge (copy pasted) rambling defenses of IQ.

The author is also calling Richard out on his weird framing.

They (or the LLM that summarized their findings and may have hallucinated part of the post) say:

It is a fascinating example of “Glue Code” engineering, but it debunks the idea that the LLM is natively “understanding” or manipulating files. It’s just pushing buttons on a very complex, very human-made machine.

Literally nothing that they show here is bad software engineering. It sounds like they expected that the LLM’s internals would be 100% token-driven inference-oriented programming, or perhaps a mix of that and vibe code, and they are disappointed that it’s merely a standard Silicon Valley cloudy product.

My analysis is that Bobby and Vicky should get raises; they aren’t paid enough for this bullshit.

By the way, the post probably isn’t faked. Google-internal go/ URLs do leak out sometimes, usually in comments. Searching GitHub for that specific URL turns up one hit in a repository which claims to hold a partial dump of the OpenAI agents. Here is combined_apply_patch_cli.py. The agent includes a copy of ImageMagick; truly, ImageMagick is our ecosystem’s cockroach.

Pretty sure this guy has some serious mental health issues.

she’s great

She also said she basically wants to focus less on the sort of ‘callout’ content which does well on yt and more focus on actual physics stuff. Which is great, and also good she realized how slippery a slide that sort of content is for your channel.

(I mentioned before how sad it is to see ‘angry gamer culture war’ channels be stuck in that sort of content, as when they do non rage shit, nobody watches them. (I mean sad for them in an ‘if i was them’ way btw, dont get me wrong, fuckem for chosing that path (and fuck the system for that they are now financially stuck in that, and that they made this an available path anyway (while making it hard for lgbt people to make a channel about their experiences)), so many people hurt/radicalized for a few clicks and ad money))

A fairly good and nuanced guide. No magic silver-bullet shibboleths for us.

I particularly like this section:

Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific “inventor of the first train-coupling device” might become “a revolutionary titan of industry.” It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.

I think it’s an excellent summary, and connects with the “Barnum-effect” of LLMs, making them appear smarter than they are. And that it’s not the presence of certain words, but the absence of certain others (and well content) that is a good indicator of LLM extruded garbage.

Doing a quick search, it hasn’t been posted here until now - thanks for dropping it.

In a similar vein, there’s a guide to recognising AI-extruded music on Newgrounds, written by two of the site’s Audio Moderators. This has been posted here before, but having every “slop tell guide” in one place is more convenient.

Although I never use LLMs for any serious purpose, I do sometimes give LLMs test questions in order to get firsthand experience on what their responses are like. This guide tracks quite well with what I see. The language is flowery and full of unnecessary metaphors, and the formatting has excessive bullet points, boldface, and emoji. (Seeing emoji in what is supposed to be a serious text really pisses me off for some reason.) When I read the text carefully, I can almost always find mistakes or severe omissions, even when the mistake could easily be remedied by searching the internet.

This is perfectly in line with the fact that LLMs do not have deep understanding, or the understanding is only in the mind of the user, such as with rubber duck debugging. I agree with the “Barnum-effect” comment (see this essay for what that refers to).

The response has a high probability of being evasive bullshit, but will be worth archiving no matter what.

Get their asses

The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.

Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.

Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!

This sense – which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life – is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.

We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.

Just decide to be sane

That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.

Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.

Also discussed in last week’s Stubsack.

One part in particular pissed me off for being blatantly the opposite of reality

and remembering that it’s not about me.

And so similarly I did not make a great show of regret about having spent my teenage years trying to accelerate the development of self-improving AI.

Eliezer literally has multiple sequence about his foolish youth where he nearly destroyed the world trying to jump straight to inventing AI instead of figuring out “AI Friendliness” first!

I did not neglect to conduct a review of what I did wrong and update my policies; you know some of those updates as the Sequences.

Nah, you learned nothing from what you did wrong and your sequence posts were the very sort of self aggrandizing bullshit you’re mocking here.

Should I promote it to the center of my narrative in order to make the whole thing be about my dramatic regretful feelings? Nah. I had AGI concerns to work on instead.

Eliezer’s “AGI concerns to work on” was making a plan for him, personally, to lead a small team, which would solve meta-ethics and figure out how to implement these meta-ethics in a perfectly reliable way in an AI that didn’t exist yet (that a theoretical approach didn’t exist for yet, that an inkling of how to make traction on a theoretical approach for didn’t exist yet). The very plan Eliezer came up with was self aggrandizing bullshit that made everything about Eliezer.

Screaming at the void towards Chuunibyou (wiki) Eliezer: YOU ARE NOT A NOVEL CHARACTER, THINKING OF WHAT BENEFITS THE NOVELIST vs THE CHARACTER HAS NO BEARING ON REAL LIFE.

Sorry for yelling.

Minor notes:

But <Employee> thinks I should say it, so I will say it. […] <Employee> asked me to speak them anyways, so I will.

It’s quite petty of Yud to be so passive-aggressive towards his employee insisted he at least try to discuss coping. Name dropping him not once but twice (although that is also likely to just be poor editing)

“How are you coping with the end of the world?” […Blah…Blah…Spiel about going mad tropes…]

Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.

Alternatively it’s also a question to gauge how full of shit you may be. (By gauging how emotionally invested you are)

The trope of somebody going insane as the world ends, does not appeal to me as an author, including in my role as the author of my own life. It seems obvious, cliche, predictable, and contrary to the ideals of writing intelligent characters. Nothing about it seems fresh or interesting. It doesn’t tempt me to write, and it doesn’t tempt me to be.

Emotional turmoil and how characters cope, or fail to cope makes excellent literature! That all you can think of is “going mad”, reflects only your poor imagination as both a writer and a reader.

I predict, because to them I am the subject of the story and it has not occurred to them that there’s a whole planet out there too to be the story-subject.

This is only true if they actually accept the premise of what you are trying to sell them.

[…] I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject.

That is deeply Ironic, coming from someone who makes choice based on him being the main character of a novel.

Besides being a thing I can just decide, my decision to stay sane is also something that I implement by not writing an expectation of future insanity into my internal script / pseudo-predictive sort-of-world-model that instead connects to motor output.

If you are truly doing this, I would say that means you are expecting insanity wayyyyy to much. (also psychobabble)

[…Too painful to actually quote psychobabble about getting out of bed in the morning…]

In which Yud goes in depth, and self-aggrandizing nonsensical detail about a very mundane trick about getting out of bed in the morning.

tl;dr i don’t actually believe the world is going to end but more importantly i’m Ender Wiggin

It’s very meta for Yud to write a story all about how the story isn’t all about himself.

I forgot to mention it last week, but this is Scott Adams shit. The stuff which made him declare that Trump would win in a landslide in 2016 due to movie rules. Iirc he also claimed he was right on that, despite Trump not winning in a landslide, the sort of goalpost moving bs which he judges others harshly for (despite in the other situations it not applying)

So up next, Yud will claim some pro AI people want him dead and after that Yud will try to convince people he can bring people to orgasm by words alone. I mean those are the ‘adamslike’ genre tropes now.

Saying that at age 46 you are proud of not reenacting tropes from fantasy novels you read when you were 9 is something special. “He’s the greatest single mind since L. Ron Hubbard.”

His OkCupid profile also showed a weak grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality.

Do we know when he transitioned from Margaret Weiss and Lawrence Watt-Evans to filthy Japanese cartoons?

The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.

A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.

Something intensely satisfying seeing this the same week as id software becoming a union shop.

This is offensively stupid lol

I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

Sure John, let me know when you’ve got that set up. Something that retains my entire search/chat history, caches the responses as well, and pulls all that into the context window when it’s time to generate a job referral. Maybe you’ll be able to do something shotgunning together remaindered hardware this time next year? I’ll be waiting.

What, that doesnt even make sense. I dont type what im thinking. (My only real usage of llms was trying to break them, so imagine the output of that. And you could then imagine what you think I was trying to attempt in messing with the system. But then you would do the work. Say you see mee send the same message twice. A logical conclusion would be that I tried to see if it gave different results if prompted the same way twice. However, it is more likely I just made a copy paste error and accidentally send the wrong text the second time. So the person reading the logs is doing a lot of work here). Ignoring all that he also didnt think of the next case: people using an llm to fake chatlogs to optimize being hired. Good way to hire a lot of North Koreans.

favorite one so far! It’s like graduate-level 1-900 Hotdog

can wallstreet cook a potato so hot that even they wouldn’t be able to hold it?