Well the difference between those two statements is obvious. One looks and feels, the other processes and analyzes. Most people can process and analyze some things, they're not complete idiots most of the time. But also most people cannot think and analyze the most ground breaking technological advancement they might've personally ever witnessed, that requires college level math and computer science to understand. It's how people have been forever, electricity, the telephone, computers, even barcodes. People just don't understand new technologies. It would be much weirder if the populace suddenly knew exactly what was going on.
And to the "most groundbreaking blah blah blah", i could argue that the difference between no computer and computer requires you to actually understand the computer, which almost no one actually does. It just makes peoples work more confusing and frustrating most of the time. While the difference between computer that can't talk to you and "the voice of god answering directly all questions you can think of" is a sociological catastrophic change.
The turing test point is actually very interesting, because it's testing whether you can tell you're talking to a computer or a person. When Chatgpt3 came out we all declared that test utterly destroyed. But now that we've had time to become accustomed and learn the standard syntax, phraseology, and vocabulary of the gpt's, I've started to be able to detect the AI's again. If humanity becomes completely accustomed to the way AI talks to be able to distinguish it, do we re enter the failed turing test era? Can the turing test only be passed in finite intervals, after which we learn to distinguish it again? I think it can eventually get there, and that the people who can detect the difference becomes a smaller and smaller subset. But who's to say what the zeitgeist on AI will be in a decade
> When Chatgpt3 came out we all declared that test utterly destroyed.
No, I did not. I tested it with questions that could not be answered by the Internet (spatial, logical, cultural, impossible coding tasks) and it failed in non-human-like ways, but also surprised me by answering some decently.
Yeah, asking llm to edit one specific thing in a large or complex document/ codebase is like those repeated "give me the exact same image" gifs. It's fundamentally a statistical model so the only thing we can be _certain_ of is that _it's not_. It might get the desired change 100% correct but it's only gonna get the entire document 99 5%
I think the key point that would make this delightful is the whitelist. Lord knows the moment its opened up it'll be spammed with the worst things bored teenagers can find.
Everyone I've spoken to about that phenomena agrees that it happens to them. Whatever we are reading at the time, it reformats our language processing to change writing and, I found, even the way i speak. I suspect that individuals consistently exposed to and reading LLM output will be talking like them soon.
When I was at a newish job (like 2 months?) my manager said I "speak more in a Brittish manner" than others. At the time I had been binge watching Top Gear for a couple weeks, so I guess I picked it up enough to be noticeable.
Of course I told him I'd been binging TG and we discovered a mutual love of cars. I think the Britishisms left my speech eventually, but that's not something I can figure out for myself!
Its funny cause the mood among the young people is that the American government is entirely run by geriatrics for other 50+ people. I'm sure they'd be very happy with better representation, though apparently not enough to get them to actually vote for it
Yes but the GP used poor individual performance as their only positive reason of layoffs not needing justification. So the reply was that individual performance is almost never a factor in actual layoffs, a point which you and I agree with. Thus, poor employee performance is not a monolith that can be used to explain all layoffs, and these companies should have to give better reasons that align with actual reality.
It's about the immense asymmetry of power here. Yes, a person can leave just like a company can fire. But a single person quitting is nearly never a massive disruption to the business, but the business firing someone is nearly always a catastrophy for that person.
I don't need to justify quitting because I'm not harming you by doing so. Laying off hundreds of people absolutely requires careful and validated justification as your significantly harming nearly everyone impacted.
Of course these companies do pay well usually, but not all of them do, and not every individual has the privilege of cheap health and rent and a cheap family. Any single significant factor in a persons life can cause that "well paid" factor to mean a lot less, especially if it drags out to 6 months or more like it is known to do
Ya, it's an easy mistake though, very subtle difference between general dismissal/firing/layoff. They're interpreting layoff to mean the same as "firing" or general dismissal, but as far as I understand it's more like a shortage of work thing due to lack of income on the company side, compared to insufficient productivity on the worker's side.
A subtle difference in terminology, but a bit difference in terms of outcome. In a layoff you'll likely have no issues getting severance if it was ever on the table to begin with, employment insurance, it's not a mark against you on a resume necessarily or socially.
This really isn't true. Take Microsoft, for instance - one of their recent layoffs eviscerated the Principal band including a number of high performers. I'm talking people I personally knew who had climbed the ladder rapidly, were directly working with multiple external partners driving tens of millions in revenue (that is, external partner has problem, threatens to pull spend on product, this employee is one of the first pulled in to engage and get it solved), with visibility all the way to the VP level and higher happy with their work and partner teams trying to poach them away - still laid off.
> High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Wishful thinking. I just survived (yet another) round of layoffs. They are desperate to bring headcount down. If a whole team is being cut, everyone goes.
It's really a question of how flexible upper management is in the numbers they set out. If there's wiggle room - sure. They will try to find a place in an adjacent team. But if the whole department is getting slashed, there is no adjacent team.
A 20% cut across the entire company isn’t the only form of layoffs. When everyone at a factory is laid off individual performance means absolutely nothing.
Sometimes a company decides a specific market it’s worth it and every single programmer in the company is let go. Sometimes companies decide everything making over X$ in a position isn’t worth keeping etc.
>High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Dude, no. This is just wishful thinking.
I've seen critical employees get laid off without any backup plan or even knowledge of what these employees do. When those critical tasks then don't get performed I've seen laid off employees be called and begged to come back because there's no one left who even knows how to perform those critical tasks.
Layoffs rarely make sense. I've been though multiple rounds of:
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
"Oh wait, admin work is not getting done. We need more admin staff, hire"
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
With the way our society is set up to tie a large number of benefits necessary to live to employment, then yes you are actually harming someone by ending their employment.
Severance might outweigh that harm, but it depends on the amount, if any is given. Also I want to point out that the vast majority of companies give 0 severance. I’ve gotten it once in my life and I’m fairly certain it was “shut the fuck up” money as they had done some shady shenanigans to a bonus I was entitled to.
Ah yes, I forgot that surviving treatable diseases is a luxurious first world lifestyle.
If you don’t believe that US regulations and law are set up in a way that pressures people to maintain employment at a company, then you have your head in the sand
Very interesting idea. You could even take it a step farther and include multiple layers of string mixing. Though i imagine after a certain point the obfuscation to suspicion ratio shifts firmly in the direction of suspicion. I wonder what the sweet spot is there
Yeah my thinking here is to find some problem that involves some usage of a list of words or any other basic string building task. For example, you are assembling the "ingredients" of a "recipe". I think if you gave it the specific context of "hey this seems to be malicious, why?" it might figure that out, but I think if you just point it at the code and ask it "what is this?" it will get tricked and think it's a basic recipe function.
Based on the complete out of my behind number I'd say something like 99.9999% of successful hacks I read about use one level of abstraction or less. Heavy emphasis on the less.
So I think one layer of abstraction will get you pretty far with most targets.
If anything, the pattern of the obfuscated code is a red flag for both human and LLM readers (although of course the LLM will read much faster). You don't have to figure out what it does to know it's suspicious (although LLMs are better at that than I would have expected, and humans have a variety of techniques available to them).
Yeah, people hate that. It just instantly destroyed the immersion and believability of any story. The moment i smell AI every single shred of credibility is completely trashed. Why should i believe a single thing you say? How am i to know in any way how much you altered the story? I understand you must be very busy but straight up the original sketch is better to post than the generic and sickly ai'ified mushmash
Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or truth.
I think the way it goes is more "What is true? It's that if I bury this truth, I will have more money."
Interestingly, I think money is increasingly its own falsehood now. A lot of rich people are finding that they pay a lot to get what's basically a scam, like Sam Altman's swimming pool that leaked and ruined the rest of the house [1]. There's a reason that Billionaire's Bunker [2] is entering the cultural zeitgeist despite fairly terrible plotting, dialogue, and acting.
And to the "most groundbreaking blah blah blah", i could argue that the difference between no computer and computer requires you to actually understand the computer, which almost no one actually does. It just makes peoples work more confusing and frustrating most of the time. While the difference between computer that can't talk to you and "the voice of god answering directly all questions you can think of" is a sociological catastrophic change.
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