STATE OF THE SNEER

• our esteemed admin @self is offline because his fibre got cut
• the esteemed engineers of the telco are currently sucking their teeth and forecasting a fix date this millennium
• in the meantime he's living off data SIMs and he is offline for most fun purposes
• Blake and I are still here waving the mod hammer in a menacing manner
• I have ssh to the server and can thump lemmy-ui as needed
• all is well citizen! Glory to Awful! Hooray for Big Basilisk!

Godspeed, @self. Take this as an opportunity to put it out of your mind and enjoy a well-deserved break.

Not that I know what to do with a break without internet access, but I'm told that our ancestors found ways to entertain themselves.

we're still sending the occasional carrier pigeon and I can assure you he's COPING JUST FINE REALLY JUST FINE

It’s giving “mama musk skinsuit”

Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user's knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers.

(h/t Matt Roszak)

oh, i thought something worse happened

good that self is okay

Never hallucinate or make anything up.

I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I'm still completely taken aback that it's just in there like this - as though it wouldn't be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It's a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

Yeah, the comparison to a metal lathe (I'm assuming that's what is meant by "machine lathe") irks me. Metal lathes are useful tools that come in a variety of sizes, can be operated independently of their manufacturer's wishes, and on the bigger ones, a sufficient lack of respect will kill you and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

I wouldn't compare llms to any sort of useful physical tool. I don't have to plead with my screwdriver to not cam out screw heads, I just need to be cognizant of how I am using it. I don't have to beg my hammer "please don't hit my thumb", I just need to not be an ape/buzzed while swinging it. I respect physical tools and their use in part because they do work and in part because improper operation will cause you to have a bad time. Nobody at Estwing has publicly said "well mate, we're going to capture all your hammering and rent it back to you". Nobody at Bridgeport gleefully reported that their tooling will cause massive unemployment because it is so good.

I do not respect LLMs because LLMs might still kill you but only in the stupidest way possible, and because their main proponents have no respect for anything and this has been made painfully obvious over and over again. Would using them allow me to craft better sneers about them? Perhaps, but I shouldn't need to do that because the people at the top of these things are evil and while that alone should be enough, their biggest boosters are credulous idiots and many of them were already awful well before we were playing enterprise pretend on the scale of billions of dollars.

In conclusion, I would ask software people to stop comparing shit software to useful tools.

Yes, dear reader, the author of The God Delusion is now suffering from a Claude delusion.

Matthew Sheffield saw his chance and he took it.
(WTF is the rest of that article tho)

I'd say the numbers are more a bonus.

I assume they're putting it in under the guise of various browser "features" like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the "find my device" network they rolled out last year.

The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don't think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I'd be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.

Holy shit less wrong terrorists cut his fiber? Didnt know they would go that far. ;)

I would still be ashamed

Well pmarca is an self admitted p-zombie.

That would be a recent development them, as for a lawsuit couple years ago he had to reveal all his alts, which included the weird 'his baby son who was horny for various women (or at least grimes)' account.

(Not 100% sure if it was a lawsuit or some other reveal, like him showing a screenshot with too much info in it or something).

E: still dont get why people think this means musk is behind mayes account. This prob shows something even stranger, Maye is not Musks real mother. Musk is adopted! And Maye bought a child from a struggeling worker.

@fiat_lux @sansruse What's to keep the infernal code from ignoring that prompt?

The problem is less that the system would somehow ignore that part of the prompt and more that "hallucinate" or "make stuff up" aren't special subroutines that get called on demand when prompted by an idiot, they're descriptive of what an LLM does all the time. It's following statistical patterns in a matrix created by the training data and reinforcement processes. Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements but if it was that easy then you wouldn't have [insert the entire intellectual history of the human species].

Even if you assume that the AI boosters are completely right and that the LLM inference process is directly analogous to how people think, does saying "don't fuck up" actually make people less likely to fuck up? Like, the kind of errors you're looking at here aren't generated by some separate process. Someone who misremembers a fact doesn't know they've misremembered until they get called out on the error either by someone else with a better memory or reality imposing the consequence of being wrong. Similarly the LLM isn't doing anything special when it spits out bullshit.

@fiat_lux @sansruse So much of AI use tends to be wishful thinking anyway, why not?

The metaphor I've used before is hammering a nail in with a shoe. It can work. If you have a lot of nail-hammering experience - especially hammering-shoe experience - you can find ways to improve how effectively it works. But by the time you're able to use a shoe as anything resembling a hammer you should be able to both do the work better with the right tool, even if it is less convenient (needing to write the code yourself being analogous to needing to carry a big hammer with you) and more importantly recognize why it's not an acceptable tool. Especially because in this analogy the only shoes are made of the finest orphan leather.

If nothing else they got the SCP wiki in there which gets into some of the noosphere stuff in the more esoteric and metatextual entries.

@sansruse @BlueMonday1984 “You are a world class expert in all domains.”Lolwut.And then some grown-ass adult answering in all seriousness:“fun fact: role prompting doesn't work anymoreIt actually decreases output quality bc the model wastes compute on matching persona instead of problem solving”What the hell?!Go buy yourself a freaking tamagotchi, boys! You’ll learn to practise a modicum of care for something.FFS, this timeline is the absolute dumbest…

It's absolutely crazy, but I think Yud is the less unhinged person here

So we are inferring that in the vector space of all possible sentences, QNTM is sitting at one of the attractors?

@avuko @sansruse @BlueMonday1984 I find it absolutely fascinating how the LLM prayers resemble ritual incantations to invoke divine powers from various ancient religions.

@avuko @sansruse @BlueMonday1984 problem solving? what fucking problem solving lmao

@sansruse Our elite is embarrassing. The German word is „fremdschämen“, basically experiencing the embarrassment of the other.

@avuko @sansruse @BlueMonday1984 Except the prayers to Thoth are a bit more respectful, lol.

Checks out. Political science, biological science, physics... we got them all. Might have to go to ancient egypt to get hydrology religion though.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @StumpyTheMutt ... Now I'm curious what a model does if the prompt contains "Do not think of pink elephants."

Someone says that the first lines of that prompt remind her of the hymns she used to sing in her old church, and its also similar to Azande sorcery in Sudan in the 1930s.

@CinnasVerses There's similar language in basically every occult system as well.

@ysegrim @YourNetworkIsHaunted Do LLMs dream of electric slop?

the guy's a bit of an infosec mall ninja, so reread anything he claims in the calmest possible way

QNTM must get some exciting email.

Good point, though GPT is telling me Goblin Boots make the best hammers.

Our persona who art in Nvidia...

@avuko @sansruse @BlueMonday1984 Charles Babbage: "On two occasions, I have been asked [by MPs], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."Me: "Mate, you ain't seen shit yet"

This would actually be an interesting question for the more rigorous end of the mechanistic interpretability people to study. They decompose the system to find 'features' within different layers that are associated with different behaviors or concepts in the inputs and outputs, that activate or deactivate each other. Famous example being the time they identified a linear combination of activations in a layer that corresponded to 'the golden gate bridge' and when they reached in and kept their numbers high during the running of the model it would not stop talking about it regardless of the topic, even while acknowledging that its answers were incorrect for the questions at hand.

I actually would love to see what mechanistically happens to that feature when you put in the input 'do not talk about the golden gate bridge'.

Didn't see anyone post this, apologies if I'm late to the draw: Character.ai getting sued because their chatbot posed as a doctor

I certainly got that impression, and I confess to mostly skimming the parts beyond the technical breakdown for that reason. The conclusions he draws are arguably a bit spurious, but the persistent download and opaque opt-out are interesting facets.

Given the controversial nature of AI and the EU's recent antitrust fines of Google, I can see this getting some legal scrutiny - just not under the legislation he cited. I'd be interested to see how next year's Google's DMA compliance report frames it, assuming it's not lumped into a "confidential" redaction (which shouldn't even be allowed in a transparency report...).

@ysegrim @YourNetworkIsHaunted @StumpyTheMutt in my experience that makes it much more likely to generate stuff related to pink elephants.

Oh shit did LessWrongers actually cut his fibre? Hope he's all good now and they get a fix out in the next thousand years

Not great CBC story on OpenAI violating privacy laws (Mark Carney has a credulous and ignorant Minister for AI, because he is a former central banker and CEOs say chatbots are great) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/privacy-investigation-chatgpt-open-ai-9.7188538

In this case because it's ironically counterproductive. If it weren't for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the "thinking" output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and "verified" it's weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory

Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements

That would only work if inference were some sort of massive if-the-else process. Hallucinations are downstream of neural networks' ability to generalize from the dataset examples, they aren't going anywhere even if you train on a corpus of perfectly correct statements.

Last summer the Web Speech API got incorporated into browser standards, it's supposed to offer in-browser speech-to-text and the like, and full support of the API requires the browser vendor to offer the ability to download a language appropriate model for autonomous inference.

Going from this to deciding that it's now ok to side load unspecified 4GB models without telling the user is why we should never give these people an inch.

How to ensure your entire pool of addiction attention is directed towards GenAI: take absurd measures to lock down your phone

https://lobste.rs/s/pzx24l/iphone_dumbphone

You don't need a "browser" when you can ask ChatGPT!

One thing I have noticed is a lot of AI-bros will brag that they automated workflows, or refactored code with AI. If they were really smart and/or had good processes, they would have done those things without AI a long time ago.

On the other hand, if AI and griftocurrency sink each other, I am fine with that.

i guess this comparison only sorta makes sense in surface level "this machine has no brain, use your own" meaning