causal (u/causal) - Readit News

causal commented on A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in nytimes.com/2025/08/26/te... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

incone123 · a day ago

Even here you are anthropomorphising. It doesn't 'know' anything. A human therapist would escalate this to a doctor or even EMS.

causal · 19 hours ago

"know" is used colloquially this way even for non-AI systems.

"it encodes the training data in weights to predict a token mimicking a human ..." - better?

causal commented on A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in nytimes.com/2025/08/26/te... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

rossant · a day ago

Should ChatGPT have the ability to alert a hotline or emergency services when it detects a user is about to commit suicide? Or would it open a can of worms?

causal · a day ago

I don't think we should have to choose between "sycophantic coddling" and "alert the authorities". Surely there's a middle ground where it should be able to point the user to help and then refuse to participate further.

Of course jailbreaking via things like roleplay might still be possible, but at the point I don't really blame the model if the user is engineering the outcome.

causal commented on A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in nytimes.com/2025/08/26/te... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

adzm · a day ago

Wow, he explicitly stated he wanted to leave the noose out so someone would stop him, and ChatGPT told him not to. This is extremely disturbing.

causal · a day ago

It is disturbing, but I think a human therapist would also have told him not to do that, and instead resorted to some other intervention. It is maybe an example of why having a partial therapist is worse than none: it had the training data to know a real therapist wouldn't encourage displaying nooses at home, but did not have the holistic humanity and embodiment needed to intervene appropriately.

Edit: I should add that the sycophantic "trust me only"-type responses resemble nothing like appropriate therapy, and are where OpenAI most likely holds responsibility for their model's influence.

causal commented on US to review all 55M visas to check if holders broke rules bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/vinni2

sixo · 6 days ago

The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.

causal · 6 days ago

False positives are still false positives. You don't decide to ignore a possible tumor because everybody's getting MRIs these days.

causal commented on AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong lastweekinaws.com/blog/aw... · Posted by u/keithly

causal · 7 days ago

This is super helpful. I would read a yearly summary like this.

causal commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network? · Posted by u/mbix77

palmfacehn · 8 days ago

Routers with vulnerable URLs. You can search for: "router" "authentication bypass".

causal · 8 days ago

Isn't CORS supposed to prevent this?

causal commented on White House loyalty rating for companies axios.com/2025/08/15/whit... · Posted by u/petethomas

causal · 13 days ago

Democracy makes problems much more visible. The "other ideas" will just hide problems much better

causal commented on White House loyalty rating for companies axios.com/2025/08/15/whit... · Posted by u/petethomas

causal · 13 days ago

I've never understood this line of Marxist rhetoric, isn't like every instance of communist government also a complete merging of state and corporate power? Or is that just more "not true communism"?

causal commented on White House loyalty rating for companies axios.com/2025/08/15/whit... · Posted by u/petethomas

SpicyLemonZest · 13 days ago

The exception, of course, is if you expect to co-benefit - Intel sent their CEO to kiss the ring and now they might be getting free investment money out of the deal. But it's definitely a risky strategy.

causal · 13 days ago

That is not an exception, it's exactly what the Tweet is talking about

causal commented on White House loyalty rating for companies axios.com/2025/08/15/whit... · Posted by u/petethomas

Cuuugi · 13 days ago

I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.

It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".

Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.

causal · 13 days ago

Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.

u/causal

KarmaCake day2433December 11, 2023View Original