"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." (VQGAN+CLIP seems somewhat obsessed with the mailbox.)
"You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar."
"You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, a wooden door with strange gothic lettering to the west, which appears to be nailed shut, a trophy case, and a large oriental rug in the center of the room. Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great anti..."
"This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left through either the north or west exits. Fortunately, there is still one chance for you to be a vandal, for on the far wall is a painting of unparalleled beauty."
"This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room."
"You have entered the Land of the Living Dead. Thousands of lost souls can be heard weeping and moaning... Lying in one corner of the room is a beautifully carved crystal skull. It appears to be grinning at you rather nastily."
"You are standing on the top of the Flood Control Dam #3, which was quite a tourist attraction in times far distant... The sluice gates on the dam are closed. Behind the dam, there can be seen a wide reservoir. Water is pouring over the top of the now abandoned dam."
• • •
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My main takeaway is that the richest do not dominate the economy as much as many assume, nor is there any post WWII trend towards them becoming much more powerful relative to the state.
Two days ago I (like most people) had never heard of SVB. That we tend to discover systemically essential points of failure by them failing is deeply disturbing, especially if we want to make a more resilient world.
In 1993 the world discovered the hard way that a speciality resin used to affix integrated circuits was mostly produced in a single chemical plant. That had an explosion destroying production and stores. apnews.com/article/8fe292…
Something similar happened in January when the main US supplier of potassium permanganate had a fire, causing big problems for water treatment plants. cen.acs.org/environment/wa…
Saying LLMs are just glorified autocomplete forgets that most human thought, action and speech is also glorified autocomplete.
Maybe the fraction that isn't autocomplete is the truly valuable part, but I suspect it is not a major fraction of everyday useful action.
I am pretty serious about this: the basal ganglia action pattern generators look like they are selected by softmax influenced by cortical stimulus fit. They get made/updated by RL rather than backprop, but very much a stimulus-response chain. med.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Ph…
This involves cognitive action selection: much of our thinking is also generating tokens in sequence, affected by other active tokens in the frontal-parietal working memory/attention system.
Forwarding this on behalf of Nick Bostrom since he’s not active on Twitter. He wants to explain his views and publicly apologize for an old email that somebody might put out to damage him. nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf
The context is a thread on a mailing list in 1995 talking about offensive communication styles where he did the classic freshman philosophy student trick of writing something deliberately offensive to make a point. It didn’t turn out well (it never does): he promptly apologized.
I can see why he would want to retrospectively apologize for the whole thing. It actually does not represent his views and behavior as I have seen them over the 25 years I have known him.
This is an important point. I *also* recall being super-skeptical about the JWST (I somewhat rudely asking John C. Mather if he could really get sigmas enough to handle the 344 single point failure - I owe him and the entire team an impressed apology). However...
So, clearly sometimes good planning and design can make things that are exceptionally reliable. This seem to happen mostly when (1) underlying physics and technology well understood, (2) designs optimized for reliability, (3) error correction mechanisms in production and use.
This does not bode well for AI or AGI at present. We do not have a great grasp of why many things happen (no 1). The product is not just due to design but also training (reducing 2). While error correction is key to training, it is less about reliability and more about function.
#FridayPhysicsFun – “Launch him/it into the sun!” My husband was griping over breakfast about the expression: surely this is not a good way of disposing of anything? tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.…
Is it actually possible to make something that will hit the “surface” of the sun?
The first problem of throwing something into the sun is that you need to hit it. Earth is moving 30 km/s, so you need to give the object this velocity in the opposite direction to make it fall straight in. That is a lot more than Earth escape velocity.