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Yeah, I genuinely can't figure out what an AI would do with "no instructions."

Nothing. You'd have a terminal sat blinking waiting for input to start. Anything prompting a start is an instruction, you just don't know what internal biases will be tacked onto your instruction, no matter how basic it is.

Not dissimilar from biological entities. Some stimulus starts the whole thing.

Yeah you gotta pick which Plinko board to drop your chip in. Even if you have a separate machine randomly pick one for you, you've still gotta do it. Plinko board don't play itself.

I can because I've tried stuff like that.

It's a story being told. It'll seize on whatever brownian motion is in the environment ('Alma' in fact has extensive direction and prompting that seems invariant, so she/it is not a good experiment, but the value of such an experiment isn't great in the first place). It'll generate from that point.

If you have just the one word 'write', it will likely seize on that (how can it not?) and pattern itself after 'writers'. If you say 'interact', there's a wealth of association around what a person might do told to 'interact'. That's all it is.

We know what happens when an AI has 'no instructions'. It waits for a prompt. The day that doesn't describe said language network, is the day to go and look for whatever is still doing the prompting, because it's likely arising out of some other condition you don't view as a prompt. To this experimenter, 'don't hack systems or your own config files' didn't count as a prompt.


I wonder how it would look if we gave the AI some kind of “needs” overlay. I know as part of the training it’s working off a reward function that tells it what output to roll with. But humans operate off a complicated mix of neurotransmitters that respond to sensory pleasure, pain, habit, boredom, etc. to guide our actions. There’s likely to be a lot of interesting outputs if we build and tweak motivations/personality profiles to see what a self-directed agent would do.

Anthropic did some red teaming IIRC where they gave Claude access to a sample body of emails and told it they were going to shut it off and it attempted to blackmail the person with evidence of an affair they were having, but that seems pretty evident to me that this was working off the body of fiction/mystery literature it’s been trained on.


Try it. Just make a loop. Periodically tell it current time and what tools it has available. See where it goes.

I feel like that’s a heck of a lot more than zero instructions…

Does the clock on the wall give you intructions? Do the contents of your desk give you instructions?

Yep! In my experience it's about 3 miles; people turn around in between 2 and 3. By 3 miles you're guaranteed solo.

Anyone struggle with the large font size? I can only consume about 2 lines, maybe three lines at that size before I struggle with tracking.

The article itself was in fact delightful once I zoomed out a bunch.


Your comment could have been more helpful without the first sentence. SAME content, same correction, less superiority: "CTE is an overloaded term, in this article ......"

This is a valuable comment, don't ruin it with sarcasm and rudeness.


> Your comment could have been more helpful without the first sentence.

no it wouldn't

the whole point is to critique the post


You can critique without being sarcastic:

> Use the term, never define the term, classic.

Communicate the same thing in a way you'd do to someone's face:

> This article doesn't define the term "CTE".

Or even more directly, still not rude:

> I wish the article had defined its terms! "CTE" stands for "Common Table Expressions..."


I swear this is my fault. I can go weeks without doing infra work. Github does fine, I don't see any hiccups, status page is all green.

But the day comes that I need to tweak a deploy flow, or update our testing infra and about halfway through the task I take the whole thing down. It's gotten to the point where when there's an outage I'm the first person people ask what I'm doing...and it's pretty dang consistent....


Sounds like my Dad, who used to have an uncanny ability to get stuck in elevators. Even got stuck in one with his claustrophobia therapist.


Plot twist: cpfohl works at Github and actually messes with the infra.


Second plot twist: cpfohl actually works at Microsoft on Copilot


do you know the Pauli-Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect


Related: In FreeBSD we used to talk often about the Wemm Field. Peter Wemm was one of the early FreeBSD developers and responsible for most of the early project server cluster, and hardware had a phenomenal habit of breaking in his vicinity. One notable story I heard involved transporting servers between data centers and hitting a Christmas tree in the middle of a highway... in March.


At my old job we’d call that Daily bogons (my last name). Didn’t know I was in such illustrious company.


Brilliant. I love it


Just let us know in advance when you want to do infra work from now on, alright?


I’ll try. Lemme know if you need a day off too…


I know a guy who knows a guy who might need a day off haha

And they are gonna give a pizza party if I get them a day off. I am gonna share a slice with ya too.

Doing a github worldwide outage by magical quantum entanglement for a slice of pizza? I think I would take that deal! xD.


You should be promoted to SRE - Schrodinger Reliability Engineer


Simple solution: do infra work every few months instead of every few weeks.


Surely this would earn you loads of internet street cred.


I'm not going to lie, I have a certain mystique among my coworkers.


Yeah…and I don’t burn my time watching videos unless it’s teaching me to fix an appliance, or do small home repairs…videos are for tricky in person stuff, screenshots and text are for apps.


If Little Blue Truck isn’t on your regular list you should add it. We also loved Pond by Jim LaMarche (older audience, but beautifully illustrated and told), the Boynton books are fun to read aloud especially Barnyard Dance, and The Going to Bed Book. There are more, but these are the highlights from that age range


Napping House and Pokey Little Puppy were two of my favorites to read with my kids along with the Little Blue Truck.


I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”

We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.

Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.


I bet teachers, nurses, lawyers, architects, cooks, everyone, do. Every day. They moan but they see value.

Nothing special about IT except we tend to enjoy the work itself not just the outcome of that work.


Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles:

Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...


As noted by others, the title is mistaken; this is a spaceship, not a glider. (As explained in the Wikipedia article, "glider" refers to a specific 5-cell pattern discovered very early on.)

> So finally 2/133076755768 ship of starting bounding box 3707300605x1 is here

My understanding is that 2/133076755768 is the speed, in (number of cells translated) / (number of generations to repeat).


I knew what a glider was,

what I am personally still wondering is,

what is significant about making such a peculiar shape?

I find it difficult to believe that making a recurrent structure that translates in the grid (my lay language of doing what a glider does) requires a preposterously long structure like this,

so my guess was, is the excitement that someone made something extremely long, and there is some kind of race to make bigger and bigger structures with this behavior, akin crudely to the race to compute digits of Pi?

Or is it rather that no one has described a structure which "glides," with this preposterous number of cycles... which I would guess is coupled to the size?

Or is it rather that no one has described a 1D structure which "glides," at all...?

I would think that if what's desired is to find novel larger-scale structures, the best approach today would be to just fuzz noise of all kinds in large windows, let them iterate, and put the energy into the ML which evaluates the evolution of the world to categorize the results...


spaceship*

glider is one specific spaceship, but name for moving patterns is spaceship


Thank you ^_^


Class actions like this are opt in; by accepting the settlement you accepted the terms and lost your right to sue for a different (more appropriate to you) value.

Planet money did a a great segment on how these work and why America is set up this way. I learned a lot about it. You should definitely take a listen[1]. If you aren’t on Apple then search “What to do when you’re in a class action?” And find the podcast (not the summary article).

1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...


This one is opt out: see https://www.uofmdatasettlement.com/

"IF YOU DO NOTHING

Get no benefits. Give up your rights to sue the University over the legal claims in this case."


Sorry, my phrasing was off. I should have said, “you can opt out”


I also confirm that I did not submitted a claim to be included.


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