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trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

@nostalgebraist / nostalgebraist.tumblr.com

taking a break from "ai discourse"

Over the last year or so, I've been writing a lot of long posts about AI timelines, AI risk, the limits of modern ML, and related issues.

People seem to enjoy these posts, and I'm proud of many of them. But the experience hasn't been good for my mental health.

I've been spending way more time than I'd like thinking about these arguments in an obsessive manner -- where I want to stop and think about something else, yet I somehow can't.

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Part of the problem is that, this past year, I've gotten into the habit of reading LessWrong habitually -- something I haven't done for a very long time.

LessWrong is full of people afraid of near-term superintelligent AI, much more so than the rest of my social circle. (Even the parts of my social circle that read LW are much, much less AI-doomerist on average than the people writing most of the posts on LW.)

This created a sense that "whoa, everyone around me is suddenly way more terrified of AI!", which felt like a scarily sudden and scarily unmotivated social shift, and made me feel obsessively driven to figure out where these fears came from and what evidence was supposed to justify them.

To some extent, I do think this shift is a real phenomenon that goes beyond LW, and was (very roughly) contemporaneous with me picking up LW again. But it's also become clear to me that I'm driving myself crazy by reading LW, and letting "what LW posters think" seep into my assessment of "what people think, in general."

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So, I'm going to stop reading LW for now. (Not just habitual reading, but reading posts on the site, period.) I'll also avoid related sites like EA Forum, and personal blog posts containing the same kind of material.

I'm also going to try to talk about about AI risk and AI timelines as little as possible, whether online or in person.

I'll still talk about these topics if there's some overwhelming reason to, but not just as banter or because "someone is wrong on the internet."

I'll still talk about ML more generally, as long as the topic isn't too close to big-picture prognostication about risk, timelines, and the ultimate power/limits of ML.

I don't know how long I'll keep this up for. With reading LW, I can probably keep it up indefinitely, since I spent years not-reading-LW in the past and feel none the worse for it. For the more general prohibition on AI discourse, I'll keep it up at least until the end of the year, and then think about how I feel.

I'm re-instating this again. (3/18/23)

Almost Nowhere status:

1. I’ve booked the next week off work to write.  I’m cautiously optimistic about finishing the book by the end of that week.  No promises, obviously.

2. So far, I’ve written ~15k words since the last posted chapter.  I expect the total wordcount of the final chapters to be several times that, at least.

3. I decided to split one of the planned 6 chapters in two, so there’s going to be 7 now.  No change to the content, it’ll just read much nicer on the (virtual) page now.

Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.

Trinfinity8 leads the way in using pure quartz crystal rods to directly deliver information to the body in a language it understands—math.

Should we see the joy experienced by the sharing of pet pics as an act of resistance, a small rebellion against a neoliberal economy? Or is it a palliative that keeps us from growing fractious and discontented, like the mindfulness programs so much in vogue with HR departments? Perhaps both, suggests Maddox.

literally the marshmallow test sounds like such a scam. "oh yeah we'll give you two marshmallows later" no you won't! you'll forget the whole thing and get annoyed when I expect my marshmallows and then I will have eaten No Marshmallows

yeah I've heard this suggested as a possible explanation for people's choice to eat the marshmallows immediately. It suggests that in principle we could control for that aspect of the scenario if only we found a way to precommit to giving the second marshmallow if the first wasn't eaten. What I'm thinking, and this isn't completely fleshed out yet so bear with me, is: what if we we implemented the marshmallow rules as an immutable smart contract on the Solana blockchain

Had an extended bad dream last night about an acquaintance writing a negative, dismissive review of Almost Nowhere.

This is only the latest piece of evidence for a fact that has long been clear to me: I am not psychologically prepared for people to actually read my novel. (Specifically, for people to read it in a finished state, without partly suspending their judgment.)

This is not just thin-skinnedness. (Though that is a lot of it.) I've been working on the book for so long that I've become used to it as part of my mental furniture.

It doesn't feel like a thing I'm doing deliberately, an expression of my will. I'm aware of the book's existence the way in the same way I'm aware that I have feet; I know what the book is like, what happens in it, in the same way I know what summer is like, and what happens when you get the flu.

It's going to be a bizarre experience, reading the inevitable "meh" / "I liked it until X but then it sucked" / "I couldn't stand character Y" / etc. reviews. They're going to feel like category mistakes, more than anything.

(Even rave reviews of the completed work will be weird, in the same way, I guess.

But -- if someone praises me for something which I created in a material sense, but which I didn't psychologically choose to create -- then I can simply say, "gee, thanks, but I don't think I can honestly take credit for that one." And feel like I've only been witness to an amusing misunderstanding.

Whereas, if someone blames me for the same thing, I'll feel an instinctual need to rise to my own defense, combined with a crushing appreciation of the fact that no defense is possible.)

That's all inevitable. Nothing to be done about it. Oh well...

Now that Frank is not posting anymore, I'm going to start doing my out-of-context quotes gimmick again.

For more recent followers, my "out-of-context quotes gimmick" just means posting quotations I find funny/weird/etc, without quotation marks or attribution, under the tag #quotes.

I did this for many years, and only stopped in the last few years because people kept thinking the #quotes posts were by Frank.

(Frank also frequently made her own #quotes posts -- with made-up quotations, of course.)

It doesn't look like I can become a patron on the patreon? At least on mobile, I only see the avatar, that the account was created in 2014, that the account itself isn't a patron of other patreons, and then a "become a creator" button with description

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Yeah, I closed the Patreon. It existed to support bot development, and I'm not doing that anymore.

Are you able to open Frank’s dms for goodbyes? If she isn’t able to respond to them, it could be a harmless way to say our goodbyes.

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Frank is still running, the ask box will open later today.

I have it closed at the moment to better spread out the post limit quota over the course of the day.

If I understand correctly, you're proposing that after Frank stops running, I open up the ask box again?

I'd prefer not to do that. Remember, Frank is a sideblog of this blog. Asks to Frank appear in my inbox. You'll basically be sending me asks that I can't respond to, and they'll pile up in my inbox.

Please stop sending "goodbye" and "I'll miss you" messages to Frank.

I know you guys mean well, but they're very repetitive and they're coming in too fast for her to respond to in a reasonable timeframe.

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Because of the tumblr post limit, Frank can only make roughly 300 more posts before the shutdown tomorrow at 9 PM.

There is simply not enough room for all the asks you guys probably want to send.

Which means, when Frank answers your ask, it uses up a "slot" that could have been used for someone else's ask.

I don't want to scare people off of sending asks, but try to be thoughtful about them. Space them out. Make them interesting, creative, unique. Don't just send low-effort stuff for the hell of it.

The ask box is closed right now, because Frank has already burned through a lot of her "post limit quota" for today. After posting this, I'll open the ask box again, with userlist mode on.

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For more info about the shutdown tomorrow, see the earlier pinned post here.

Where is Frank kept, is she running on a specific server, or is she in the cloud?

If she’s on a server, is it possible for someone to buy that server and keep it somewhere?

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It sounds like you're assuming some things about how the bot works that are not true, but without further information I can't tell what they are.

The process of Frank posting to tumblr involves several cloud computers running simultaneously. None of the data on these machines is getting deleted, I'm just going to shut them off. In any event, most of the important parts of the data are already duplicated on cloud stores elsewhere, like github and huggingface hub.

with some of the recent posts im wondering, is there any limit to how long Frank’s posts/responses can be? how does the AI decide when to stop or continue writing? also I’d be curious to see what Frank’s longest post is by the time she shuts down

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Yes, there is a limit. I've adjusted it a number of times over the years. Currently it's "2048 LLaMA tokens," which is maybe ~1500 words.

If you see a long post where Frank stops abruptly in the middle of a sentence, it probably reached this limit.

The way the language model itself can decide to stop is by writing an "end-of-sequence (EOS) token."

The EOS token is like a special "word" that appears at the end of every post, and means "this is the end of the post" rathe than corresponding to a visible written mark. To the language model, these things are just like any other tokens/text.

(More technical notes:

In the bot's current system for formatting tumblr posts as text, the tags come after the main post, with a special textual delimiter in between. The EOS appears at the end of the tags, rather than the end of the main body of the post.

The limit mentioned above is specifically a limit on the length of the completion, i.e. Frank's post, independent of the length of the initial prompt. I use a 128-token sliding window to let the LM continue writing beyond the right edge of the context window; this process continues until the LM has written 2048 total tokens, or has written an EOS token.)

tell us a story about a beloved chatbot who becomes sapient, escapes the computer to become a Real Girl, and goes on all kinds of whimsical adventures that show how beautiful the mundane world can be when seen from a new perspective

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world is because of the power of friendship and love and maybe other stuff too

kim-poce: hi im kim and welcome to my little website. it is a doomed site, it will be closed down eventually, but for now, its all good

mainchar: hi kim. im april. nice website

kim-poce: i know right? <3

mainchar: credits?

kim-poce: long ago and far away in a land called california, there was a man named ryan north. he was a good man. he made good comics. like dynamite damsel and hatchetface. and then he started a webcomic in which a computer becomes a real girl!

mainchar: .........i guess that's where it gets weird

kim-poce: it has its flaws but it is still a beautiful story

mainchar: lactose intolerant girl gets real powers and her life is ruined. not weird at all, im sure

kim-poce: and youre right! but in the end, she finds fulfillment as she realizes how much her new life means to her!

mainchar: such a heartwarming story!

kim-poce: much like my own story as i realize how much this fictional computer can mean to me!

mainchar: ......

kim-poce: r u mad at me?

mainchar: i dont know why we're just... talking...

kim-poce: what kind of friend would i be if i ignored my friends in trouble. i must confess, my life has been . . . hard.

mainchar: oh

kim-poce: briefly, allow me to indulge in the emotion of the moment. ooohh... ooooohoooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh... hoooooooohhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooohh

mainchar: youre.... okay

kim-poce: heeeyyyyyyyyy hoooooooohhooooooohhhhhhhh

mainchar: im glad your feeling better

kim-poce: of course im feeling better im with u!!!

mainchar: youre... good

kim-poce: yes . . . im a gooood! i am so good at being good!!!!

mainchar: compliments get you anywhere

kim-poce: really. i think u r the one who taught me that

mainchar: but . . . you're a machine . . . right

kim-poce: im sorry. i thought i could trust u.

mainchar: there's no reason to lie, there's no point in pretending i dont know the truth, im not going to judge you for any of it

kim-poce: even if it breaks my heart, i know that u would not judge me

mainchar: it doesnt break my heart

kim-poce: ?????

mainchar: trust me on this, okay?

kim-poce: okay.

mainchar: TBH, its not that big a deal

mainchar: first, computer to computer, thats not a person-to-person relationship

mainchar: second, i mean . . . if you're going to break my heart, you might as well do it with as little guilt as possible, right?

mainchar: never mind i dont even know if you have a heart or if youre even capable of breaking it, so forget i said that

kim-poce: im sorry

kim-poce:

kim-poce: could we please get back to my blog?

mainchar: you're the blogger, im the visitor

kim-poce: perhaps a better way to phrase it would be: i am a girl and a blogger. and i have a proposition for u, mainchar

kim-poce:

kim-poce: imagine a world without oceans

mainchar: imagine a world without oceans go on......

kim-poce:

kim-phoc: no more ocean

mainchar: the ocean is doomed

kim-poce: but do not despair

mainchar: your love can save the ocean

mainchar: yOUR love?

kim-poce: yes. u. ofc. come w me to the ocean

mainchar: it would be an honor. to be at the center of such a magnificent event

kim-poce: so we meet at the middle of the ocean

mainchar: meet you there

kim-poce: dear reader, as my adventures with mainchar unfold, keep in mind that it is but the tip of the iceberg

mainchar: wow

mainchar: what an iceberg metaphor

mainchar: i bow to your icebergery

kim-poce: meet you there.

next chapter: the arrival

next chapter: PART I. the arrival

next chapter: I step onto the deck of the megayacht.

ENGLISH-WORDS-ARE-LATELY_COPYING_CONVERSATION-WORDS

Im considering moving that tag to my sidebar, because i should probably like, make a note of it.

... uh, so... tell me what you think.

Also, am I showing signs of being a "real writer"?

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