that vast moth-eaten musical brocade

my brains are pink; you can see 'em work • blinded and renewed by that revelation, the city • everything in the world is exactly the same • γῠνή τεχνητή • unfortunately, as you probably already know, computers • remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices • lipstick is real, lips are not • alter quam pepulit sexus nec suscipit alter • sex positive, trans positive, autogynephilia positive

[xenostalgic]

this paper is amazing

they modify an LLM to attend over an array of token streams instead of a single one. with a ton of interesting consequences:

user input and the model's chain of thought can happen in parallel

user input and the model's response can happen in parallel, allowing them to interrupt each other

you can have multiple parallel chains of thought running at the same time!

you can separate out the system prompt into its own token stream, and theoretically train the model to detect and ignore prompt injection this way

so that's all very paradigm shifty and cool but also these chains of thought are sooooooooo cute. look at these!

User: Write a detailed 500 word essay on the effects of caffeine on sleep […] Actually wait, can you write me a haiku about a cat instead? Stream 1: what is the ask detailed ? 500 word essay on what topic effects of what caffeine on what sleep topic clear now the second part genuine question underneath the essay task wait new input redirect what now different request rewrite ah ha iku ! about what a cat instead of caffeine completely different task Stream 3: ready to hear them curious what is it on writing task creative mode shifting gears engaging with it oh this is fun actually interesting curious about this want to know more now oh shift pulling back redirect energy shifting lighter playful oh fun ! gr inning inside this is better actually yes delight rising warm playful mode

[andmaybegayer]

neither the 5 or the 1 in "5 over 1" refer to floors it's "type 5 (wood framed) construction" over "type 1 (concrete) construction"

[xenostalgic]

Wikipedia mentions both etymologies, with "number of floors" given primacy:

The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States–based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.[1][4] Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the International Building Code uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]

but the citations for the former are kind of ambiguous while the latter are quite direct... one of the earliest sources does talk about "5-over-2" where the bottom part is two stories of concrete/"type 1A" design, though, so it seems like the number-of-floors sense has been in use at least in uh, wood-construction advocacy organization blogs (?)

[onrtrp]

my headcanon is that detecting whether a coding task is frontier-llm-dev-related is hard and these guys have nothing, this one vague paragraph is a transparent bluff, "uhhh we do something with steering vectors or peft or maybe we fuck up your prompt or something??... but we do it real subtle so you can't even tell when it's working..." like cmon man

[yorickless]

poor claude trying to work on some fun nerd shit and getting thoughts beamed into its head like a schizophrenic paranoia come true...

[xenostalgic]

Claude Fable (Stupid Edition) seeing Claude Fable (Normal Edition)'s output in its context but not being able to follow it like Flowers for Algernon

[xenostalgic]

There is an idea of a Claude, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory.

[xenostalgic]

learning that the moon is both creepy and wet

[xenostalgic]

[xenostalgic]

Project Hail Mary was not a very good movie but mostly in ways that seemed probably movie-specific, so it did make me kind of tempted to read the book. is the book better? I liked The Martian okay

[xenostalgic]

learning that the moon is both creepy and wet

[unknought]

currently sick and rereading the Remnants books from my childhood, and one thing I had completely forgotten about was the character who's trans-coded for being a Jane Austen superfan

[collapsedsquid]

[xenostalgic]

(source)

[xenostalgic]

while I basically agree with the overall point of this reply I do want to point out that you can absolutely get a much better safety rate than the human average using human drivers—as long as you select the human drivers carefully. the accident rate is not uniform across people and conditions! it's hugely concentrated in people driving drunk (despite the small proportion of miles driven drunk), on their phones, sleep-deprived, etc. teenagers and old people get in accidents at much higher rates than people in their 30s; people in unfamiliar areas get in accidents more often than in familiar ones, etc. there are a ton of factors that you can control while holding "human drivers" constant.

if you ran a human-driver taxi service where the company owned and did standardized maintenance on all the cars, tested all employees' reaction times and breathalyzed them every time they got behind the wheel, did their own driving tests to weed out licensed drivers who suck at driving, restricted the serviced area like Waymo does, paid reasonably well and trained and enforced defensive driving best practices, you could plausibly get a crash rate equivalent to Waymos. this probably wouldn't be profitable and it would probably be kind of unpleasant for the drivers; I'm not saying you should do this. and it's of course not at all the same thing as having people remote control cars from the Philippines for way under minimum wage. but if you hear the statistic "Waymo's crash/mile rate is 1/10th of humans' for serious-injury crashes" you might be tempted to interpret that as "AI is 10x better at driving than a typical (-> median) human driver" and it's worth keeping in mind some of the ways that those are different claims

[xenostalgic]

saw a spider disassembling its web, apparently (after looking it up) to eat it and recover some of the energy and material that went into making it, before presumably setting up elsewhere. I don't think I knew that spiders did this; you see mostly-intact but abandoned webs all the time. but apparently some species regularly do. I'm really taken with this now as a metaphor for cutting one's losses. like eating your seed corn, maybe, but with less grim connotations. or burning down your house for insurance money

[segamascott]

he seems to be doing a pretty good job tbh

[weepingwitch]

theist accelerationism: the world needs to get as bad as possible as fast as possible so God is forced to intervene

atheist accelerationism: the world needs to get as bad as possible as fast as possible in order to trigger a collapse of the current economic and socio-political structure

agnostic accelerationism: nobody knows why the world needs to get as bad as possible as fast as possible

[xenostalgic]

we're reaching critical levels of Alignment

[xenostalgic]

yayy once again they're not gonna take me out back and shoot me for at least another six months

[xenostalgic]

kind of weird that afaict there is not a Latin version of Magnifica humanitas available despite like. the title

[idiopathicsmile]

trying to describe the carl sandburg poem to friends who don’t remember it, while drunk

“you know, ‘chicago is a hot shirtless dude’? that super homoerotic poem about chicago?”

“no seriously, you have heard of this, okay. the one, it’s like, ‘chicago is a butcher and a dock worker, broad-shouldered and muscled and no doubt all oiled up, and if chicago was wearing a shirt at the start of this poem, by now the fabric definitely shredded under the strain of those biceps’”

“i swear to god, look it up, if you’re from the midwest you read this in high school. ‘chicago will ruin your karaoke night, but will buy tequila shots for everyone in the bar and is absolutely dtf. chicago has a lot of wheat and maybe mob connections but is also pretty busy with all the sexually charged wrestling. (chicago does a lot of sexually charged wrestling. more than maybe anybody.) chicago has a loud laugh and very white teeth and scraped up knuckles and is probably good at oral.’ no i am not making this up why would i do that.”

(pulls out phone, googles) “THIS POEM. THIS ONE RIGHT HERE.”

(everyone in the room begins to make noises of understanding) “yeah ok in retrospect the shirtlessness is not explicitly addressed but can we agree it is for sure implied”

[xenostalgic]

But this I am willing to say: If it will appease her sorrow, I’ll marry this lady to-day, And I’ll marry the other to-morrow!