February 14, 2023
Solving Puzzles in the Dark
slyt
Lies and the lying AIs who tell them
An explanation by AI safety researcher Robert Miles on why making Large Language Models like ChatGPT tell the truth is a more intractable problem than one might think. While Robert Miles usually goes into the more wide-reaching ramifications of developing general artificial intelligence (summary: Step 1: Invent an AGI, Step 2: Apocalypse), here he talks about the seemingly simple task of training a language model to tell the truth. [more inside]
Watch an AI have an identity crisis
One week ago, Microsoft unveiled Bing Chat, a web search interface based on a “next-generation” version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology (previously). Now Bing Chat is getting weirdly defensive and lying when presented with evidence about its own nature. [more inside]
Living Freedom Through Louisiana's Maroon Landscape
Trees nourish each other through interconnected root systems; underground networks created by mycorrhizal fungi link individual plants and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. In an analogous manner, maroons shared what they had, supporting and protecting each other during times of need, while carving out complex yet sustainable ways of using the wetland forest.These landscapes were places of danger, beauty, and secrets, two worlds at once — neither solid nor submerged; not completely safe from slaveholders and slavecatchers, but not easily navigable by them. By Diana Jones Allen.
Why Sabine Hossenfelder lost faith in science
Dianne Feinstein: Will she stay or will she go?
If they don't film it this year, we'll all be 1 year older when they do.
Winter 2023-2024 will be the first in 74 years without a brand new Warren Miller ski movie. All future Warren Miller Entertainment films will be created from existing footage. [more inside]
Begun The Coffee Wars Have
In another "tell everyone your crazy office story" submission request, Ask A Manager proprietor Alison Green called for the craziest stories regarding workplace caffeination. The readers did not disappoint. [more inside]
A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan.
What Did He Mean? Yusuke Narita says he is mainly addressing a growing effort to revamp Japan’s age-based hierarchies. Still, he has pushed the country’s hottest button.
[As I read the article, it was impossible not to remember Soylent Green, launched exactly 50 years ago.]
What is grief, if not love persevering?
What you learn about beauty and grief as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Bringley writes about going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother shortly after his brother’s death. They each gravitated toward a single painting. Bringley found himself before a medieval Adoration of the Christ, depicting Mary tender and peaceful with her newborn son. His mother, meanwhile, went to an early Renaissance Lamentation, in which Mary cradles her son’s tormented corpse. They each stood before their paintings, the way I had stood in the lovely May garden with my mother, and they wept." [more inside]
Can every baby be a Gerber Baby?
A century of American baby contests and eugenics. The 2022 Gerber Spokesbaby Contest, for example, erupted in controversy on Instagram with criticisms on their choice of winner – baby Isa, an adorable eight-month-old from Oklahoma who happens to be missing a femur and fibula in her right leg.
Man steals 200,000 eggs, is caught.
Mr Joby Pool, a sheep owner from Tingley, appeared in a Worcestershire court and pled guilty of stealing almost 200K of Cadbury Creme Eggs and other chocolates. Early reports stated the stash was worth almost £40K ($49K US) though this has since been mysteriously rounded down to £31K.
US balloons in Chinese airspace?
God did the world a favor by destroying Twitter.
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. God does the wrath thing a lot in the Old Testament, punishing humans who would challenge divine authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But having lived through the past couple decades of the internet, I believe the story carries a different lesson. I’m an atheist, so take this theory with a grain of salt, or maybe even a pillar: God wasn’t keeping us out of heaven, smiting us for our arrogance. God was protecting us from ourselves. [more inside]
liminal space
Hey, you. Feeling a little tense? Take a long, restful stroll down a thread of starship corridors. [via: Twitter user @artoftrek] [Bonus: Star Trek Corridor Wiki]
They Are in Love. Fuck the War.
“The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly - most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire - but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.” [more inside]
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