Thanks for posting this. I mostly gave up on viewing the one or two Twitter feeds that interest me after nitter stopped working. It wasn't ideological, I just wasn't able to reliably view and navigate without an account, and when I made an account it just kept showing me like "black HS football player bad sportsmanship".
Look like I've got about two years of James Cage White story arcs to check in on.
I recall being flabbergasted the first time I saw someone watching (what I think was) tick tock. An adolescent boy a few rows in front of me at an amphitheater was watching what I believe was comedic content at full volume, but the jump cuts and sound effects were so jarring and constant that even when I focused for a minute and tried to force myself to understand what he was watching, I couldn't follow what was happening.
I can recall being that age and being overwhelmed and exhausted after watching a Pokemon TV show battle sequence, but this has nothing on what I assume is the worst kind of short form content today. "The weed is different now bro".
I'm reminded of the time GPT4 refused to help me assess the viability of parking a helium zeppelin an inch off of the ground to bypass health department regulations because, as an aircraft in transit, I wasn't under their jurisdiction.
The other side of this problem is the never ending media firestorm that occurs any time a crime or tragedy occurs and a journalist tries to link it to the perpetrator’s ChatGPT history.
You can see why the LLM companies are overly cautious around any topics that are destined to weaponized against them.
> You can see why the LLM companies are overly cautious around any topics that are destined to weaponized against them.
It's not that at all. It's money.
The law is currently ambiguous regarding LLMs. If an LLM causes harm it hasn't been defined if the creators of the LLM are at fault or the end user.
The IT companies would much prefer the user be at fault. Because if it's the other way then it becomes a minefield to build these things and will slow the technology way down.
But there have been a number of cases already from suicide to fraud related to LLMs. So it's only a matter of time before it gets locked down.
Of course removing safeguards on an LLM makes it quite clear that the person who did that would be at fault if they ever used it in the real world.
I mean, when kids are making fake chatbot girlfriends that encourage suicide and then they do so, do you 1) not believe there is a causal relationship there or 2) it shouldnt be reported on?
Should not be reported on. Kids are dressing up as wizards. A fake chatbot girlfriend they make fun of. Kids like to pretend. They want to try out things they aren't.
The 40 year old who won't date a real girl because he is in love with a bot I'm more concerned with.
Bots encouraging suicide is more of a teen or adult problem. A little child doesn't have teenage hormones (or adult's) which can create these highs and lows. Toddler suicide is non issue.
> Kids are dressing up as wizards. A fake chatbot girlfriend they make fun of. Kids like to pretend.
this is normal for kids to do. do you think these platforms don’t have a responsibility to protect kids from being kids?
Your answer was somehow worse than I expected, sorry. Besides the fact you don’t somehow understand causal factors of suicide or the fact that kids under 12 routinely and often commit suicide.
My jaw is agape at the callousness and ignorance of this comment. The fact you also think a 40 year old not finding love is a worse issue is also maybe revealing a lot more than you’d like. Just wow.
> The 40 year old who won't date a real girl because he is in love with a bot I'm more concerned with.
Interestingly, I don't find this concerning at all. Grown adults should be able to love whomever and whatever they want. Man or woman, bot or real person, it's none of my business!
>The 40 year old who won't date a real girl because he is in love with a bot I'm more concerned with.
I think on the Venn diagram of 40-year-olds only willing to date bots and 40-year-olds capable of actually dating real women, the overlap is incredibly small at this point in time.
The obvious difference here is that people arguing for those things wrt video games, porn, or ChatGPT are mostly claiming that all those influence people to do bad things. With guns, it's a matter of physical capacity to do bad things.
A more accurate comparison would be when ChatGPT is used to write malware etc. Which has some interesting analogies, because what is defined as "malware" depends on who you ask - if I ask ChatGPT to write me a script to help defeat DRM, is that malware? The content owner would certainly like us to think so. With guns there is a vaguely similar thing where the same exact circumstances can be described as "defensive gun use" or "murder", depending on who you ask.
Lack of access to guns definitely does make a significant difference though. Even though the psychos still go psycho, they use knives instead of guns which are far less effective.
For example the most recent psycho attack in the UK was only a few weeks ago:
He stabbed 11 people and none of them have died (though one is - or at least was - in critical condition). Ok that's comically incompetent even for stabbing, but even so he would have done far more damage with a gun.
And don't give me that "but other people would have had guns and stopped him" crap. It rarely works out like that.
I remember when it first came out, I was watching an Agatha Christie movie where somebody got chloroformed and was trying to ask GPT4 about the realism of if. Had to have a multi-turn dialog to convince it I wasn’t trying chloroform anyone and was just watching a movie.
Idk, I get weird refusals sometimes when I'm trying to mock something up quick. "I don't need all these system variables and config files, just let me hardcode my password for now, I'm still in the testing phase" "Sorry, I cannot help you to write insecure code". Doesn't happen all the time, but I run into dumb stuff like this quite a bit. GPT is particularly stupid about it. Claude less so.
Technically in their airspace though so you might be in bigger trouble than parking.
If you tether it to an asphalt ground hook you can claim it’s a tarmac and that it’s “parked” for sake of the FAA. You’ll need a “lighter-than-air” certification.
There's that maniac who is building a quad-copter skateboard contraption who got in trouble with the FAA who successfully reported that he was flying, but got fined for landing at a stoplight.
If the spirit of a law is beneficial, it can still be hacked to evil ends.
This isnt the failure of the law, its the failure of humans to understand the abstraction.
Programmers should absolutely understand when theyre using a high level abstraction to a complex problem.
Its bemusing when you seem them actively ignore that and claim the abstraction is broken rather than the underlying problem is simply more complex and the abstraction is for 95% of use cases.
"Aha," the confused programmer exclaims, "the abstraction is wrong, I can still shoot my foot off when i disable the gun safety"
Is the title an intentional mirror of Carver's short story collection "What we talk about when we talk about love"? If so, can someone smarter than me explain what the author means by this connection?
This might be the wrong place to ask these questions, but this comment caused me to think about the situation. Russia and/or Putin has been sold to me as "crazy" since the 90s. I don't really believe that, and presume it's because it's an explanation for their behavior which doesn't require America to consider how seriously we've been dicking over Russia. This is not to say Russia wouldn't dick us if they could (they most certainly would).
The Ukrainian war has been presented to me as a mad man trying to take over the world a la Hitler. I think it's more complicated and concerns about NATO expansion, the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, and Russia controlling warm water naval access make sense as motivations for the war, even though they are also be tools of propaganda. It seems clear that Russia believed they had the opportunity to establish themselves as a great power once again alongside China and the US in the "new multipolar world" they harp about.
My question is this: In light of this information, why has the Ukrainian conflict become seemingly (based on resources allocated and increasingly provocative drone incursions into NATO territories) existential for Russia? Are the us sanctions crippling long term without Ukrankan resources? Why are they willing to sacrifice so much if they already have Crimea free and clear?
The current Russian regime believes in sphere of influence, and they view Ukraine, the baltics, at least some parts eastern europe, and probably more as a natural part of their sphere of influence.
This crashes with the western view where countries and populations have a right to self determination. Some of the countries that Russia want to fall under their sphere are also members of the EU, which make this even more problematic.
Seen from Moscow, EU and western countries have encroached on their turf and this is a problem for them. Seen from the western side, this is wrong, and if Russia is such a bad neighbor that its neighbor join defensive alliances to get out from under their thumb, that is their own fault, and the way the world is supposed to work.
Russia also has a geographic vulnerability where there is no geographic chokepoints from at least Poland and straight to Moscow, which historically has given Russia problems.
Give this, there is actually a rational for what Russia is doing, personally I think it is a bad rational, but there is logic in the madness, even if from my perspective, it is based on a deeply wrong world view.
> This crashes with the western view where countries and populations have a right to self determination.
It’s really time to retire this type of statement. For example, are you aware the CIA or US government has officially acknowledged its involvement, or declassified documents pertaining to coups, overthrows, and assassinations in Iran, the Congo, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Afghanistan?
Maybe this enlightened point of view is promoted by Western academics and (some) think tank types. But that is not how Western governments have been acting for at least the past 75 years.
It's the idea that fraudulent elections in former Soviet states were not merely the result of fed-up populations, but were actually western backed conspiracies with the aim of eroding the Russian sphere of influence.
Because they thought they could take Ukraine in one week, so why not? And when they realized the mistake it's impossible to back down without losing face and life by the hand on the next leadership. So yes, it's existential, but not for Russia the country. Frankly who cared about Russia and who will care about it again if it goes back into its borders?
Putin is a typical strong man/tribal leader: his support depends on his machismo (it's something Trump tries very hard to emulate with his constant punching down). The problem is that strong men don't lose wars. Putin knows that conceding defeat in Ukraine will bring about his downfall in Russia.
Putin's goals are not peace, they are restoring the soviet union (his vision of what it should have been, not what it ever was). All call that crazy. That should not be confused with insane: he has a sharp mind, just he has turned it to things that I consider crazy to consider.
Ukraine matters to NATO because they are turning more and more to our classical liberal values of freedom, and that is something NATO wants to encourage in general. (in general - note that Turkey and Hungary are part of NATO that don't want to encourage this, and there are other countries not sure)
We can only guess why Russia/Putin thinks Ukraine is existential to Russia. Our best guess is because they were a historical part of the Soviet Union that they are trying to restore. Putin cannot fulfill his vision without Ukraine. NATO countries like Latvia were also part of the Soviet union and so we expect they are next.
I recall seeing a clip of an interviewee who is a cave diver. He was giving a description of the time he came closest to death while cave diving, and it came down to someone in his group losing it, and him attempting to prevent that person's death, and then being stuck without a guide line and functionally blind in a muddy cave underwater after the person freaking out sped out of the cave. He said he was able to get out by slowly crawling back and forth upside down on the surface of the cave with his face pressed against it trying to find a thin crack he remembered led back to the surface.
What struck me the most was him saying "calm the f down cowboy, calm the f down or you're going to die", and his face when he said it. I can't imagine the sangfroid required. I also can't imagine the conversation when they both reached the surface.
A few years back I decided to finally learn correct cursive so I was able to sign my name to documents correctly. When I discovered there were multiple types of cursive, I landed on Kurrent (the predecessor of Sütterlin) and now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.
I'm sure there's some sort of point I'm making about the absurdity of a signature being used to verify anything (when the nice old lady volunteering at the polling station makes me sign again because it doesn't quite look like my signature even though I have photo ID and have arrived in person at the correct polling location I want to do a backflip, but I of course don't because I want to be nice to the old lady), but mostly it just makes me smile.
Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.
> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.
When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.
Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.
A friend of my uncle used to sign his cheques "Mickey mouse"
My understanding is that under English law (probably inherited by the US) anything you intend to act as you signature is legally your signature. So the joke was on him, because his signature was Mickey Mouse.
This goes back to the days where people were illiterate and would sign by writing an X. But that was fine, because they only had to sign a handful of legal documents in their entire life and could remember each one.
For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.
I don't get the punchline. Are you not named that? Did they care that you signed by writing a random person's name, or were you imitating a specific person you knew or so?
The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.
I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.
But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.
I've never had to sign while voting. This seems bizarre. How do people with Parkinson’s vote? Or other motor issues? I have the motor skills of a spastic five-year old, and my signature ("signature") never matches exactly.
i learned kurrent out of interest but also to improve my handwriting. the straight lines and sharp corners are a lot easier to write than the round lines of regular hand writing so i got good results with less effort than with regular handwriting which eventually motivated me to improve my regular hand writing too. i also had access to a collection of old dip pens with various types of nibs allowing me to really duplicate the writing style of the time, if only at primary school level. eventually i adapted my signature too, but unlike you i never got any backslash for that.
"To be shot" murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile."
"Bravo!" Cried Ivan delighted.