PumpkinSpice (u/PumpkinSpice)

PumpkinSpice commented on Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? simonwillison.net/2023/No... · Posted by u/simonw

freedomben · 2 years ago

> As a user of GPTs I’ve realized that I don’t actually want to use a GPT if I can’t see its prompt. I wouldn’t want to use ChatGPT if some stranger had the option to inject weird behaviour into it without my knowledge—and that’s exactly what a GPT is.

> I’d like OpenAI to add a “view source” option to GPTs. I’d like that to default to “on”, though I imagine that might be an unpopular decision.

Agree 100%. I've found myself avoiding most GPT-based chatbots for this same reason. I don't want it to be subtly manipulating things without my knowledge based on custom instructions that I don't know about. Adding a "view source" option would make this feature from "meh" to "worth the money just by itself" for me. I've been considering cancelling GPT Plus since I find myself using Kagi a majority of the time anyway, but that sort of change would keep me subscribing.

Meta note: This is one of the best posts I've read in a long time. Outstanding work!

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

Sort of, but isn't the focus on prompts a bit myopic? The huge difference between earlier GPTs and ChatGPT was RLHF, which not only makes it better at following prompts, but also enforces a lot of hidden dogma. It certainly influences how ChatGPT talks about climate change or AI risks, for example.

PumpkinSpice commented on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021) marginalia.nu/log/19-webs... · Posted by u/ggpsv

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

This is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly not the case if you look at how most people use search.

What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.

What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.

PumpkinSpice commented on Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym gwern.net/tla... · Posted by u/telotortium

xeyownt · 2 years ago

I certainly do want to live in a world where people shows excess signs of respect than the opposite.

The same way you treat your car with respect by doing the maintenance and driving properly, you should treat language models by speaking nicely and politely. Costs nothing, can only bring the better.

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

Huh? Car maintenance is a rational, physical necessity. I don't need to compliment my car for it to start on a cold day. I'd like it to stay this way.

Having to be unconditionally nice to computers is extremely creepy in part because it conditions us to be submissive - or else.

PumpkinSpice commented on ARRL hails FCC action to remove symbol rate restrictions arrl.org/news/arrl-hails-... · Posted by u/7402

charcircuit · 2 years ago

Next the restriction on encryption should be removed

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

This is such a weird topic in the ham community. The reason this restriction exists has nothing to do with the retro-justifications used by the community.

For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications. It flat out shut down the entire service (!) during WWII. And it came up with the idea that you have to communicate in the open, and that no form of obfuscation or encryption is permissible.

And then hams came up with this roundabout explanation that actually, it's good that you can't have privacy. No matter that it holds back a hobby that is by all usage metrics dying, and that there are many countries where encryption is allowed and doesn't lead to any terrible outcomes.

Privacy is useful in hobby uses. Maybe you want to talk to your spouse without a nosy neighbor listening. Maybe you want to periodically beacon your GPS location without the whole world knowing. There are so many cool things you can do, and there is spectrum that is... quite frankly, largely dead right now, and if you don't encourage new uses, it will be reclaimed by the government.

PumpkinSpice commented on Electric heat to cost 77 percent more than natural gas, federal agency says denvergazette.com/news/bu... · Posted by u/alex_young

edkennedy · 2 years ago

This article was Sponsored by WhatTheFrack Drilling Company.

Fracking/Natural Gas follows the same playbook as big Tobacco, they hire experts and sponsor all kinds of studies that align with what they want people to believe.

The main cost here seems to be the energy monopolies, not the method of heating.

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

It's literally the playbook of every single business. Database vendors and graphics card manufacturers tout studies that show their product performs better. Pharmaceutical companies pay researchers who conduct studies that show their stuff works. If Safeway wants a zoning variance to open a new store, they will pay for an environmental impact study that says it's fine.

I'm not saying this to convince you should trust this study. But I think it's important to recognize it's absolutely happening everywhere, not just in the industries we don't like. Most of the research we read was paid for, and an overwhelming majority of it reaches the conclusion that aligns with the views of the researchers or of whoever is footing the bill.

PumpkinSpice commented on OpenAI offers $10M pay packages to poach Google researchers theinformation.com/articl... · Posted by u/choppaface

VirusNewbie · 2 years ago

I find it hard to believe it’s the case for an average researcher, we know their pay package for most L6 engineers is a bit under 1m. But maybe a “fellow” or distinguished engineer?

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

Yes, it probably applies to the most qualified hires, so probably folks who are already around $1M total comp where they are.

But the most important point is, you don't get that money now, and maybe never. The most likely scenario where you get that kind of a payday is if they go public and if the pre-IPO pie-in-the-sky valuation holds for a good while.

It might. But it's far more of a gamble than your FAANG stock.

PumpkinSpice commented on America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That's Not a Coincidence theatlantic.com/health/ar... · Posted by u/chapulin

jp0d · 2 years ago

Is it because of the work culture being too focussed on long working hours and lack of annual leaves? I don't really have any data to back it up. Just wondering if it's getting worse.

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

The work culture isn't putting kids in front of computer screens and discouraging outdoor activities.

It's not even something you can control as a parent. My kid, 16 years old, walks to school on his own - but he's always back right after classes. And it's not that he's an outcast. That's just how they roll in the SF Bay Area. Other kids go home too, or they are shuttled by their parents to some organized after-school activities.

PumpkinSpice commented on Bangladesh saved lives by getting lead out of turmeric spice vox.com/future-perfect/20... · Posted by u/apsec112

boxed · 2 years ago

> It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric.

All customers always checking all food for poisons is not reasonable at all.

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want.

And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.

PumpkinSpice commented on Cathode-Retro: A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal github.com/DeadlyRedCube/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

bane · 2 years ago

I love the current infatuation with modeling old CRT display systems. Old graphics and videos from the "time before" rely a bit on how those display systems and signals worked in order to make low-color and resolution artifacts look "better" in terms of smoother color gradients and softer edges and diagonals. The shift to modern displays mades everything form that era look blocky and chunky.

The thing that makes this all really "meta-interesting" is that everybody who remembers that time remembers it differently and so there's no "correct" way to do this. We all had different TVs, monitors, different manufactures from different time periods. Some of us played color 16-bit games on tiny black and white TVs, or remember the flicker of the Atari 2600 on a giant RGB front-projection TV.

As a result we have literally thousands of filters like this that try to reproduce or at least model how these old systems looked to give back some semblance of what we remember, even if it's all entirely wrong.

I found after experimenting with a bunch of this that what seems to be more important than all the phosphor glow, scan lines, and shadow mask stuff, is that the display has to be curved for it to finally click with me. And then having reflections of the screen in the bezel are chef's kiss. It's so subtle, but just those two effects alone seem to do more for me personally than the rest.

The Megabezel project is dedicated to what I'm talking about.

http://www.megabezel.com/

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

I'd go a bit further with this claim. Most of what's being done in this space is about inventing new retro aesthetics, not about faithfully approximating how things worked in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, color TVs of that era didn't really have pronounced scanlines. They also didn't have thick, lightly-colored, reflective bezels.

I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.

PumpkinSpice commented on Bangladesh saved lives by getting lead out of turmeric spice vox.com/future-perfect/20... · Posted by u/apsec112

surfpel · 2 years ago

The free market absolutist response to these events is typically that market forces from consumer preference will drive down leaded turmeric sales, and “who’s to stop me from consuming lead if I want to.”

The core issue I have with free market absolutist arguments is their reliance on perfect information across parties and perfectly rational actors. Those constraints make any system of governance viable, and in my view, are a defining feature of extremist ideologies.

PumpkinSpice · 2 years ago

I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric.

This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.

Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.