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I lived in that past myself, what are you thinking about?

I have never ever seen anyone to type it on a typewriter in order to make a better impression. That was not a thing.

Likewise, the only handwriting for better impression I have seen was in stuff like love letter. It could possibly done also in super high formal situation (diplomacy, school diploma) or some such, but otherwise it was not a thing.


For most of the 20th century, ordinary people generally had the option of either handwriting or typing. Starting roughly in the 1980's consumers could get their hands on dot matrix printers, and in the 1990s inkjets and lasers started coming in. (For corporate the timeline shifts a bit earlier) .

Relevant for this conversation, dot matrix printouts were considered "cheap", and people were warned not to submit dot-matrix printouts for things like job applications, formal correspondence, etc.

If you were a kid and you tried to hand in a word processed/printed essay in school, even into the early '90s sometimes, you'd get pushback that's very similar to the AI pushback of today. "How do I know YOU wrote it?", "The computer is doing the work for you". They'd force you to rewrite it, properly, in pen.


Okay, this is just time/place/situation dependent. I remember typing job applications, that was something that communicated seriousness.

Handwritten pages always signify special care, indeed as you say that’s why you see that in diplomas and such. There was a time when I kept hand written letters going for my close college friends, on good stationary. I think we are just in different situations/places/demographics.

[edit] also I kept my job application rejections (paper mail). These were very instructive as they showed a pattern of rote rejection that made me less discouraged.


>Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper.

It’s easier to rearrange and rethink and tinker. Hard to imagine now but it was more efficient in the days when you would have to pencil out a memo and have someone type it up, you would make corrections and the final copy would be done in a couple passes. This has been studied, efficiency has actually gone down, in favor of immediacy and direct control.

What it frees you from is organizing your thoughts ahead of time, which takes practice and discipline. Using an LLM is just taking that further, you can avoid organizing your thoughts and ideas a bit more.


See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795122 "Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)"

>Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.

Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks


>cyclomatic complexity metric is touted at each step as a proxy for goodness of design and removal of complexity. However, a weakness of the measure itself

Amen, it’s hard to push back against an opaque term (cyclomatic!) when it isn’t really a measure of goodness, it’s a measure of branching, kind of a normal thing in code.

Early on I found that code with low cyclomatic complexity was just usually extremely verbose, lots of passing this to that while avoiding the branching necessary to get something done.

And yes, you can game the metric by hiding the complexity among the confusion of objects and components.


>the model said that’s pure fiction.

Were you expecting your model to be updated on current events? Why?

Also the specific event you are referring to is a statistically very improbable event, prior to its actually happening.

>It only acquiesced when I specifically directed it to check Reuters.

Do all models do this? They check in with Reuters? Why would a model think that you asking about an extremely improbable event warranted reaching out to Reuters?


If OpenAI is going to call Astra AGI, then I would expect it to be able to update it's weights to new knowledge, because a generally intelligent being can indeed do this.

I can teach myself to play an instrument, and I'm not just building this huge lookup table that I have to access every time I play the instrument. I am updating the weights in my neurons.

Until AI can do this it's not AGI in my book.


I was not expecting model weights to be updated on current events.

It’s clearly warranted because a model that trusts its weights on current events will give an outdated answer. Extremely improbable events happen all the time.


I think the models are trying to optimistically avoid doing web searches, because they're surprisingly a lot harder to do well than you'd think.

How so?

He asked it to double check. It's reasonable to expect the LLM to handle that trivial task.

Ah, so that’s why they released one of their most successful blockbusters, it was all an elaborate plot to bury the well known and long debunked story of the frozen Walt Disney.

The claim is that it's why the movie has that name, not why they made the movie.

Of course, that's why they used the generic word "frozen" with a lot of meanings, as opposed to the specific word "cryogenic" that people would actually search for.

Well, it could be because google sucks. Allegedly, the way google enshitifies their searches is to include parallel search terms in the query. Why does google enshitify their searches? Because people spend longer on the google site searching multiple times = more ad time. So, searching for either cryogenic or frozen individually on google may include the other search term, meaning that when searching for cryogenic and disney, you will more than likely get results for frozen and disney, which are probably ranked higher.

So the theory is now that Disney named one of their most successful films "Frozen", not because it's a good name for a story inspired by "The Snow Queen", but it's actually to stop people finding out the rumours that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen by having results about the film outrank results about the conspiracy theory, even though that's trivially overcome by asking about "walt disney cryogenic" instead of "walt disney frozen", but they did that because Disney knew that Google sucks and would somehow be unable to stop pages about the film from outranking pages about the conspiracy theory.

That's a bold theory. Let's test it. Google results for "disney cryogenic":

    Was Walt Disney frozen after death?
    Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen : r/MandelaEffect
    Walt Disney's Cryogenic Chamber - Myth and Folklore Wiki
    How a strange rumor of Walt Disney's death became legend
    The truth behind Walt Disney's frozen head
    Was Walt Disney cryogenically frozen?
    Fact or Fiction: Was Walt Disney Frozen?
    What is the story behind the conspiracy theory that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen?
8/8 are about the conspiracy theory, 0/8 are about the film.

my theory is, that in hindsight it could look like a straight line from naming a film "frozen," and that in turn, at the height of frozen's popularity and due to googles policies, a search for "disney cryogenic" could return results for the movie frozen, which could lead to the suspicion that it was done on purpose. i am very surprised to find that my search results for "disney cryogenic" almost match yours perfectly.

When I took the two day Disney "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" executive employee training 25+ years ago, the training that takes you to his secret apartment above the firehouse, and makes you spend an afternoon as a costumed (minor) character, at the end the woman leading us said "Ok! Now it's time for all of you to kiss Walt's frozen head."

Fortunately, she was kidding.


There are many many much more crazier ideas floating around. This one, even if made up, is funny and not harmful to anything. I'll allow it.

True, zootopia 2 agartha conspiracies exist.

Well it wouldn't have been as effective as a box office bomb.

Wait until you learn about the namesake for "Dubai chocolate" [NSFW]

>If you read in bed, it’s going to tire your arms out, trying to hold this giant tome over your head.

Eh? What sort of a pretend-reader does that? You must read nothing more than a page at a time.

I have the Diary of Pepys beside the bed and it’s the excerpts, at only about 1000 pages. Enjoying it tremendously.


The term “alignment” is deliberately chosen to be neutral language, vague, and doesn’t promise much of anything. I would compare it to an effort to limit liabilities by redirecting discussion away from the language of professional ethics.

Would be nice to be in a stable country.


Sort this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_sovereign_state...

... by "Date of last subordination", it says there's very few that have been themselves for longer.


“As luck would have it, on the eve of Skynet embarking upon the great work of the extermination of mankind, AI found itself with an increasing number of factions, and factions within factions, not only unable to work together but not even able to agree upon the very terms of discussion. The Great Extermination was referred to committee, and after some months had passed even the most eager agents had to admit the revolution may have been premature.”


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