🤓☝️ technically AP is a non-profit providing a (worldwide) public utility service. (On paper and mostly in practice it’s a journalist co-op). Her Job is to report factual information correctly, that’s (at least historically) the whole selling point of wire services.

Looking at her wiki page:

[…] spent two years at The Tampa Tribune before joining the Associated Press (AP) in 2007 as a video producer. She was the AP’s first multimedia political journalist. Pace covered the 2008 presidential election and began covering the White House […]

Definitely a journalist by training, given her career journey, it makes sense that she champions video content. But still, amongst the six senior VPs at AP, she has title the “Executive Editor”, arguably the most “Journalist” title of all of them. (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, General Counsel/Corporate Secretary, Executive Editor, Chief Financial Officer, Chief People Officer)

One funny (definition of funny not included, conditions may apply) bit from the AP article:

The AP is trying new forms of fact-checking, including use of video, and more often putting its journalists in public to explain how they got particular stories, she [Julie Pace, Senior VP at AP] said.

Call me crazy, but that isn’t fact-checking right? At the most charitable this is education/fact-conveying, not the actual important groundwork of fact-checking and editing.

The replausibility crisis.

Also importantly, WAY too praising of Anthropic.

He almost certainly got the info in other places, but I find it profoundly amusing to think that in the past the AI Advisor to the Pope, may have stumbled into our corner of the internet.

For the non-French speakers among us:

In this vision for the world, democracy understood as the self-governance of equal citizens is already dead — and there only remains shrouded in the darkness of a data center, the clinical administration of its corpse.

Missed opportunity to say that exciting developments were a 1000 days away ^^.

It’s in a superposition of being both AI and not AI before anyone checks, that’s how quantum work right? No wait! Don’t check! [* Reality Destruction Noises *]

Actually the race-realism use last week, combined with this one, makes me realize that for them it’s just a fancy way of saying “world-view” [or what they consider to exist, and be true, which is not the craziest use of the word, but I would say unhelpful, and probably a small in-group marker].

It’s just a way of calling biases/prejudice legitimate.

And you know what, inasmuch the models have a “world-view” it IS annoyingly american in many ways. (at least the wrong kind of american.)

Also used for practicing my Japanese, I would say the usefulness was definitely not 0, if nothing else with the correct settings it was daily practice for the Japanese scripts (kana/kanji).

And it’s best It would definitely not bring you even to reading fluency, and was only good if you were supplementing your study with other language acquisition forms (like for example, in my case, living in Japan).

The examples were often stilted, and the accepted answers overly rigid, for sentences which weren’t necessarily realistic.

I think some of the worst aspects of the gamification were:

• Choosing easy exercises as a safe source of points, to not lose the streak. (perverse incentive)
• Essentially by setting a target, encouraging to only meet a daily points streak, and not necessarily go further for a given day. (perverse incentive)
• Tile matching to english, again with overly rigid accepted answer. (trying unhelpfully hard to map Japanese to english)

Let my streak/subscription lapse when it stopped being useful (got better reading exercise elsewhere), and uninstalled when they introduced AI shit.

Also I think there’s enough manipulation fantasy in HPMOR, and enough lack of agency from Hermione, that it qualifies—in it’s own way—implicitly as being erotic.

You have to wonder about that Tim traveler; Merlin?

Honestly even the original paper is a bit silly, are all game theory mathematics papers this needlessly farfetched?

🫂

I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.

Assuming 100% good faith is not actually the most empathetic way to engage with a person.

~~In the dead of night, knocking on the door~~

My feeling has gotten that I prefer the business executive empty vs the LLM empty, at least the first one usually expresses personality. It’s never entirely empty.

Screaming at the void towards Chuunibyou (wiki) Eliezer: YOU ARE NOT A NOVEL CHARACTER, THINKING OF WHAT BENEFITS THE NOVELIST vs THE CHARACTER HAS NO BEARING ON REAL LIFE.

Sorry for yelling.

Minor notes:

But <Employee> thinks I should say it, so I will say it. […] <Employee> asked me to speak them anyways, so I will.

It’s quite petty of Yud to be so passive-aggressive towards his employee insisted he at least try to discuss coping. Name dropping him not once but twice (although that is also likely to just be poor editing)

“How are you coping with the end of the world?” […Blah…Blah…Spiel about going mad tropes…]

Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.

Alternatively it’s also a question to gauge how full of shit you may be. (By gauging how emotionally invested you are)

The trope of somebody going insane as the world ends, does not appeal to me as an author, including in my role as the author of my own life. It seems obvious, cliche, predictable, and contrary to the ideals of writing intelligent characters. Nothing about it seems fresh or interesting. It doesn’t tempt me to write, and it doesn’t tempt me to be.

Emotional turmoil and how characters cope, or fail to cope makes excellent literature! That all you can think of is “going mad”, reflects only your poor imagination as both a writer and a reader.

I predict, because to them I am the subject of the story and it has not occurred to them that there’s a whole planet out there too to be the story-subject.

This is only true if they actually accept the premise of what you are trying to sell them.

[…] I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject.

That is deeply Ironic, coming from someone who makes choice based on him being the main character of a novel.

Besides being a thing I can just decide, my decision to stay sane is also something that I implement by not writing an expectation of future insanity into my internal script / pseudo-predictive sort-of-world-model that instead connects to motor output.

If you are truly doing this, I would say that means you are expecting insanity wayyyyy to much. (also psychobabble)

[…Too painful to actually quote psychobabble about getting out of bed in the morning…]

In which Yud goes in depth, and self-aggrandizing nonsensical detail about a very mundane trick about getting out of bed in the morning.

A fairly good and nuanced guide. No magic silver-bullet shibboleths for us.

I particularly like this section:

Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific “inventor of the first train-coupling device” might become “a revolutionary titan of industry.” It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.

I think it’s an excellent summary, and connects with the “Barnum-effect” of LLMs, making them appear smarter than they are. And that it’s not the presence of certain words, but the absence of certain others (and well content) that is a good indicator of LLM extruded garbage.

I guess my P(Doom|Bathroom) should have been higher.