John Q Public

I recall someone (probably you) saying that the two failure modes of LLMs are recitation (reproducing the training data exactly) and hallucination (failing to reproduce the training data exactly)

And it not like the staffer class got 100% turned over or very recently had a lot of people from less elite backgrounds, but I think the group polarization dynamic has made them all more like themselves

A party consisting disproportionately of college grads whose leadership is ~all college grads with a large number of advanced degree havers will include more people whose instincts run genteel

Hiro Protagonist vibes

“Bari Weiss dated Kate McKinnon” also

* if

There certainly are some ideological fellow travelers with MDs

I wonder who it anyone prescribes it to them

Gets awkward when it’s like biology

Immunology (PhD) and immunology (MD)

There must be a literature on prompted embeddings? Give a context for the texts you want to embed specifying what semantically about them you care about, then compute the embedding from everything after this prefix

I like this idea and think the hard part is what “semantically well separated” means

Unless it‘s your ex anyway

Or some other disease, etc etc, you could probably also do something nasty to the right brainstem neuron. that is, things that won’t cause noticeable differences until later but will eventually do so

Good way to think about it!

Reminds me of a time travel hypothetical: you can make one sub-cellular change in Hitler’s body in 1913. Can you affect the modern world macroscopically?

I think yes: concentrate some heat at just the right place in the nucleus of one of the few anti-smallpox B cells

It’s very likely more than just “there are N neurons, here’s the matrix of their synaptic connections” but I dunno how much more and answering that probably involves specifying what you care about

Certainly that vs the state of every molecule in every cell’s cytoplasm is a very large difference

Depends on how much that info matters though no? Every molecule has at least position and velocity to worry about (lots of ways to be 98.6F in terms of water molecule microstates) and almost none of it matters

But how much is “almost none”?

Depends on how high-fidelity the reproduction is I’d think? If we want to accurately reproduce the quantum state of every particle in me (leaving aside that you can’t do that), it’s galactic

“Behaviorally indistinguishable“ is smaller

“Denies being a different person subjectively” is smaller still

now I wonder how my MLD changes if it has to include me knowing it

is this more like a contraction mapping having a fixed point or more like ”this sentence is false”

without any kind of assurance at all it seems hard to believe there’d be such an open industry

Is the deal that the feds have elected not to enforce this against marijuana businesses that comply with the laws of the state they’re in?

Prosecutorial discretion iow

my only minor disagreement is that it's not weird at all, if he believes in heaven he's absolutely right to think he's not going there

Live shot of America in 2025:

is causing aircraft to crash nonviolent?

also every word of what he says here is true

well, it's not either/or: that's what maga wants and they're working to bring it about. they're not all the way there yet.

so there's some fascist elements in the government now, but not as much as a properly classically fascist state like 1920s Italy or 1930s Germany

personally I'd say

o) MAGA is a fascist movement, but
o) they've had only partial success and America isn't a fascist country yet

if it were, people wouldn't be posting on here because it'd get you a visit from the secret police

well, right, I agree competition is beneficial here and monopolies aren't, but "economic scale" doesn't imply a monopoly!

less-than-perfect competition with fewer players large enough to afford the new technologies is still more productive than more players who can't use them

well given economies of scale it’s mostly beneficial to society. Food is cheap now. about 2% of the public works on farms.

Used to be food was expensive and most people were subsistence farmers. Scale in agriculture benefits you personally in that you don’t have to be a small farmer

Local news monopolies which sustained a more-than-competitive level of journalism were great, the internet killed them, and now politicians just lie all the time

Yep! The thing that was exciting about him in the primaries was his biography and the pitch it let him make. Hillary had a lot of advantages otherwise

the same group membership can be both empowering and disempowering: Barack Obama obviously would not have gotten elected in 2008 if he were white, but being black in 2008 still wasn't (isn't!) an asset in dealing with the cops