BioMan

But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn't a paradox) 'If they could be here they already would be here'. (The 'solution' incidentally is obviously 'interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems' and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)

But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.

The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it's incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They're not living in space, they're glamping.

I just ran a test and after a few google-gemini-assisted searches about satellite launch rates and a few back and forth questions about orbital debris and relative masses of different spacecraft to prime the system, I was able to evoke from gemini a massive unhinged rant about orbital goblins and their culture and effects on the global climate with a single instance of the word "Goblins!" at the end of a prompt.

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'.

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

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

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

Not really part of the back and forth but I find this illuminating of their recent travails, regarding it not being a step to far to prevent them from posting:

"This isn’t super relevant since it’s not like the standards are super high but ever since the enormous onslaught of LLM psychosis posters, the default of people who try to post to LW is to get rejected from posting here"

Sounds like the mods have had to deal with a lot of unbalanced people lately, and are not having it.

The link to the guide to setting up a retrofitted boxtruck to continue AI alignment research in with local copies of the internet archive after civilization collapses in 2025 is fun

Uh oh

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/

Going on a media tour now

“So how does the Epstein drive work? Very well."

― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

Is the crappy dragon fursona related to Peter Thiel being an anagram for "the reptile"?