human-computer interaction

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

What is the 'Metacrisis' and How Do We Solve It? (AMA). Rewatch the live AMA conversation with Layman Pascal 

My Journey with Claude Code. The more I use Claude Code, the more impressed I become.

I keep throwing progressively harder problems at it, and whenever the problem is conceptually tractable, it can usually just solve it. Not with hacks or brittle workarounds, but by actually engaging with the structure of the problem.

I decided to push it further by combining two difficult problems.

Difficult in the sense that either one would likely take me years to complete properly on my own let alone together whether the interaction between the two is a kind of complexity in its own right.

With the exception of one genuinely catastrophic error that required intervention to recover from, the tool has kept going, iterating, and making real progress.

What stands out most is that it seems to understand what progress actually is.

It does not treat the number of passing tests as a sacred metric. It is willing to break tests if that moves the system forward in a deeper, more honest way. That is something many humans struggle with.

The mere fact that it can reason about progress at all, rather than optimising a superficial proxy for it, is pretty remarkable

And to think the tool over past few months has seen pretty consistent improvement at the cadence of weeks with no end in sight.

Will software development be unrecognisable a year or even 6 months from now, I do not know.

Please help me stay intellectually honest! I'm not a fan of generative AI in general, and LLM technology specifically. I think its capabilities are being drastically over-hyped. It's a perfect, sweaty example of a solution looking for a problem. I'm skeptical of many claims people are making wrt how it's helping them.

My experience is it's like having access to an idiot-savant intern. Awful at most tasks, but knows everything and can read incredibly quickly.

Publicly, I've taken on the mantle of a staunch critic of generative AI and a pro-human, pro-soul advocate.

And for the most part, I'm happy with that stance. I like it. It feels good to rail against something, and it feels good to contrast a thing that I hate against something I love. It throws the love into more relief.

Yet, I don't want to lose any babies in that bathwater, and I don't want to lose my intellectual honesty in the neurochemical rush of fighting for a cause. So I'd love to explore the best use cases of LLMs that you all are actually using, and actually finding beneficial, life improving, productivity increasing, all of that.

I'd love to hear your experience, and ideally, you'd to tell me how you're doing what you're doing with it in enough detail so that I can try it.

I'll start.

Absolutely most useful thing I've found for it so far, and it's not even close, is language learning.

I'm in a slow process of learning Japanese, and asking a chatbot to break down the grammar of a specific sentence is super useful. It's also great for generating content for flashcards. Say you have a set of characters, and you want some example words that use each particular character. It's so easy to generate stuff like that.

Outside of that, I use it in super basic ways (basically as google with one less step).

So please, give me your best use cases, things that you've not only been impressed by, in a "oh wow, that monkey can tap dance!" way, but that has actually improved the quality of your life.

Please help me stay intellectually honest! I'm not a fan of generative AI in general, and LLM technology specifically. I think its capabilities are being drastically over-hyped. It's a perfect, sweaty example of a solution looking for a problem. I'm skeptical of many claims people are making wrt how it's helping them.

My experience is it's like having access to an idiot-savant intern. Awful at most tasks, but knows everything and can read incredibly quickly.

Publicly, I've taken on the mantle of a staunch critic of generative AI and a pro-human, pro-soul advocate.

And for the most part, I'm happy with that stance. I like it. It feels good to rail against something, and it feels good to contrast a thing that I hate against something I love. It throws the love into more relief.

Yet, I don't want to lose any babies in that bathwater, and I don't want to lose my intellectual honesty in the neurochemical rush of fighting for a cause. So I'd love to explore the best use cases of LLMs that you all are actually using, and actually finding beneficial, life improving, productivity increasing, all of that.

I'd love to hear your experience, and ideally, you'd to tell me how you're doing what you're doing with it in enough detail so that I can try it.

I'll start.

Absolutely most useful thing I've found for it so far, and it's not even close, is language learning.

I'm in a slow process of learning Japanese, and asking a chatbot to break down the grammar of a specific sentence is super useful. It's also great for generating content for flashcards. Say you have a set of characters, and you want some example words that use each particular character. It's so easy to generate stuff like that.

Outside of that, I use it in super basic ways (basically as google with one less step).

So please, give me your best use cases, things that you've not only been impressed by, in a "oh wow, that monkey can tap dance!" way, but that has actually improved the quality of your life.

Isn't It Ironic? . Don't you think? 

A little toooo ironic. 

I really do think. 

This site where we are upping trust lets users post under a pseudonym. 

Every time I see a post or comment from a pseudonym, screen name, handle, what have you, after first wondering if it's another godforsaken AI bot stealing my eyeballs away from human creations, I remember a line from the Tao Te Ching; 

To give no trust

is to get no trust. 

v.17, Lao Tzu x Ursula LeGuin 

If I'm stunned by Claude's clarity and insight in response to my posting Nithya and my takes on Atisha... Is that a reflection of Claude? Me? Nithya? Atisha? Humanity’s wisdom? Something else? (OP)

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT 

Web Discussions: Flat by Design (2012). web archive (original URL is broken)

A web discussion about threaded versus linear web discussions. I recommend reading the article and many of its comments. I think the two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive and that the best design will be something that includes both. Our tree view is an experiment in combining the two.

Who should date me? I get really pumped about what can be possible for online dating in UpTrust.

For example, someone having high current trust scores from a majority of his exes.

Or me going through all my single friends who are the gender I date and posting on their Dating Recommendations tree posts like I adore him as a friend and would totally want to date him if we wanted the same lifestyle! He gives the best hugs and is someone whose opinion I value highly when I make major decisions. I’d like to see him with a woman who embraces spirituality and likes throwing Superbowl parties.

So here’s my personal test-drive. Feel free to populate this tree with your opinions on my dating life, recommendations, questions, etc. <3

We need new gender categories, while preserving the distinctness of "man" and "woman". I don’t mind using different pronouns—I’m happy to love someone with whatever language they prefer.

But I’d like to propose that deconstructing traditional genders is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful.

Not necessary

• It’s not necessary because we’re free to create as many new genders as we’d like, while preserving the standard ones.

• This is the transcend and include approach, as far as I can tell. The current approaches I’ve seen are either all transcend (reject the historical categories) or all include (reject the creativity and proof-by-existence of new genders).

• I believe this will better honor the person who was misassigned a gender at birth, because their life experience is very different from someone who was assigned the gender they identify with. Eg: if I’m a trans-woman, I didn’t grow up with all the social pressures of being a woman, or going through a menstrual cycle, or whatever; I grew up feeling like a woman but getting the social pressures of being a man, going through the hormonal changes associated with male-body-ness. Which is a totally unique experience, that I will find more belonging and support from other people like me, not from trad-females.

Harmful

• It’s harmful because the people who want acceptance into the traditional category are never going to get it. Eg: If i’m a trans-woman, I was assigned male at birth, and I probably have some male parts and hormones and stuff, so when I try to identify as a woman and join in those discussions and groups that are for women I’m likely to always feel outside, different, and to a certain group of cis-women, threatening.

• This further divides society and polarizes certain populations against including the reality of the trans-experience, which then polarizes the trans-supporters, which begets the vicious cycle.

• Sex differentiation started around 1.2 billion years, so the male-female experience has ancient roots that are in our bodies and impacting us every single second. Denying this altogether is destroying massive chesterotn fences— denies tons of wisdom that is passed down not only culturally over the past 200,000 years, but instinctually for a billion.

What about bathrooms and sports?

Instead we can just have single stall bathrooms and locker-rooms. Or trad-male, trad-female, and a third for whoever of whatever gender, which is much larger than the trad lockerrooms and bathrooms. We can have a third category of sports—all gender. We’re creative, we’re growing, we have plenty of people to populate them and who will want to win, why stick with a binary?

I’m sure I’m missing something, and I apologize to the new-gendered people who I’m sure I’ve insulted or missed somehow. But, leaning in to potentially contentious convo…