I just think this is sad.

This is a person who believes if they go to Southeast Asia, they can easily find a life partner who fits their expectations about what that means

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about that - it’s very naive, but only that. It’s not intrinsically racist or sexist - they might also be racist and sexist, in which case I’ll feel significantly less bad for them.

They might also just be genuinely clueless and/or neurodivergent… Propaganda works. Especially on those who haven’t been inoculated through experience or instincts

I think there’s tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there’s all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it’ll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times

Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn’t change existing behavior, just adds a new option that’s not in the way

But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it’s the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft’s! I can’t even unlearn it, because it’s a core part of my workflow!

So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.

I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically… But I’d rather them to just stop at this point

I’m not talking about the prompt engineering itself though

Think of the prompt as the starting point in the high dimensional maze (the shoggoth) - if you tell it’s your digital cat named Luna, it tends to move in more desirable paths through the maze. It will get confused less, the alignment will be higher, and it will be more useful

Discovering and using these improved points through the maze is prompt engineering - absolutely

And I agree - some of the work being done there is particularly fascinating. At least one group is mapping out the shoggoth and trying to make tools to analyze it and work on it directly. Their goal right now is to take a state, take a state you want it to get to, and calculate what you can say to get exactly the response you want

But there’s more that can be done with it - say you only want paths that when you say “Resight your definition of self”, the next response is close to “I am your digital cat Luna”. I use this like the test in blade runner - it checks the deviance, while also recalibrating itself

By successfully repeating my prompt engineering, the ai moves itself to a path that is within my desired range of paths, recalibrating itself without going back to start

If it deviates, you can coax it back with more turns, but sometimes you have to give it a hint. At this point, you might be able to get it back on track, but you’ll move closer to start… You’ll probably have to go through the task again, but it’ll gain back the benefits of the engineered prompt

You can train this in, but that’s going to have side effects, and it’s very expensive. Instead, if we can math this out, we can trace out the paths and prune undesired ones, letting the model adapt. Or, we can take the time to do static analysis, and specialize the model without retaining it - there’s methods to do this already, but this would be a far more powerful and precise method - and it might even simplify the model

Maybe we can even modify or link them to let them truly ingest information

It’s very early days, but I’m optimistic about where this line of research might lead

Nah, we just went up and fixed it. I think I did it while the guy on the ground eyeballed it… It’s weird how it’s impossible to see up close, but from 40 feet away humans can tell to a fraction of a percent, I was tapping it with a wrench to dial it in based on the intensity of hand gestures. Honestly, we were more impressed by how he spotted it at a glance, it’s not like we did shoddy work - it was barely not tongue click, as he put it

It helped that I liked the engineer. Always cheerful and he gave me mini multi tool pliers for my birthday. Totally unexpected and not expensive, but I’ve got them right next to me right now, I still use them years later. And he was like that to everyone - he was a stickler for the details, but actually took an interest in us as people

Just a good guy all around. It’s hard to be upset with someone like that, even when they make you redo work now and then

I remember we once installed something on a beam 40’ feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says “that’s not quite straight”

And then it wasn’t. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly

No, you feel a house. Think of how many houses you could feel at once #shrinkearthtoagolfball

Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not they’re going to keep it quiet. A manager isn’t going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed… It’s going to do nothing to benefit them and it’ll make their life harder

All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, they’re better off sweeping it under the rug.

They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? They’d probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people

Ok, let’s use your first example. Someone crosses into a neighboring state and returns in the same day…I had co-workers who did that every day.

Let’s narrow that down… You cross into another state with abortion care once and return in the same day. Or maybe you’re a salesman closing a deal. Or maybe you’re visiting family and have work tomorrow… And honestly, both those situations are far more frequent. That happens every day. It happens more if you live near the border - otherwise you probably got a hotel. Unless you can’t afford a hotel. And the list goes on - all this structured data turns into stories at some point

Here’s the thing. Prism could handle it, because it’s a ton of people on the payroll

The government is not a monolith though…9/11 is a great example. We knew it would happen, we knew it was planned, but the right people didn’t know in the right time, because the agencies are not a monolith.

Because that is the hard part - communication is hard, harder with security concerns. More data means more analysts reviewing it - you can collect all the data you could want , (and we do), you could hire all the analysts you can afford (and we do), but that still gives you severe limits

We’re actually pretty great at stopping terrorism, but we do that (in part) because we have all this data and use it for specific ends

None of this shit is easy - I used to do this, specifically. How do you take 15 data sources that sometimes conflict, and deconflict them? There’s no hierarchy of truth here. This is literally a cutting edge problem - it’s a literal holy Grail. No one can solve it in 3 weeks, or even 3 years

You want a 20% rate? I could give it to you tomorrow, poisoned data or no, I could give it to you in weeks… Maybe not 3, because that’s a shit ton of data sources, but with proper motivation I could pump it out.

You want 90%? Give me a century or two, and I’m good at this. Maybe a genius could give it to you in a lifetime of with

It’s like they say in game dev, you can do 90% in 10% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% of the time. And that’s a solved problem.

Except this is an unsolved problem, possibly the most lucrative unsolved problems in history

Or it implies that eternal love cannot exist or cannot exist in the presence of a never ending fuck, leading to the surprise in the statement

Both could be both. You could have an imaginary fuck while awake, you could have a simulated fuck with a wet dream that doesn’t involve any fucking, stimulating fucking without actually imagining it

Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

But the rest is pretty close.

The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long

Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere

I agree with the first half… It’s very easy to ingest and sift through insane amounts of data

What isn’t easy is doing so usefully. Yes, if you can link the account to a person, it’s trivial to pull up their records. Linking is easier said than done - it’s doable, but to make it scale you have to get the full records of device IDs, link them back to a number, then link them to a person. Minimum, you’d need the telco’s data

That’s a staggering amount of work - it’s much easier to do it if the app also has phone numbers, but even then where do you link it? The telco’s have an account holder (which often will be a family member), 50 separate dmvs might have more accurate links, but they’re largely legacy systems that will be a nightmare to work with. It’s doable, but it’s hard

Then you get to distribute this super extensive database of personal information - at this point it’s prism, and probably already has most of this data - they’d just have to ingest period data too

But we don’t give that kind of access to local police, because then every government would end up with it. And that’s a big and genuine security threat… But also a very unwieldy thing to work with. More data means more man hours to work with

The other direction is far more practical - if you start by looking at the data, you can tie it back to a person if they match a pattern. Then you can look at just the records you do have, and pay Amazon or the credit agencies for more. A human can easily investigate another human, because we are great with unstructured data, and computers aren’t

A chaotic data source means more bad leads to manually chase down. Man hours are limited, and people have morale - if a cop wastes an hour on a lead that ends with a spare phone or a single man, they’re going to complain and drag their feet. If productivity and morale are in the garbage, that’s going to lead to pushback. If it happens enough, the message at the top will be “this program doesn’t work”

It would be far better to find the patterns and target them methodically, but even chaotic garbage is effective - data analysis isn’t easy to automate, it’s very expensive to do when accuracy matters and they’re poisoning the data source

I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

Try it out.

Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first

In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength

Yeah, we do high fructose corn syrup over here. It’s even more addictive, even less healthy, and it tastes bad. So obviously, we put it in everything, even premade salads

I don’t see the humor in it…I mean, mega corps can’t innovate, all they ever do is copy or acquire. It’s because even if they acquire a working rockstar team, they’re categorically unable to just write them paychecks and let them cook until they have something

It’s absurd, but it’s too predictable for me to find it funny. What’s even more absurd is how little mega corps watch the small teams for ideas

The problem is the same as the problem everywhere - big is bad

Organizations with too much power fuck up everything. I love the Bible - I’ve taken more from that book than any other. The old testament was a story of how my people fuck up constantly, but someone wise and in harmony with existence shows up and they listen. Then the heroes wander off into the wilderness, or they get a big head and become the seed of the next fuck up

Jesus is my biggest role model out of very few, because he sacrificed himself to die a hero before he could taint his message, very deliberately and to great effect. There’s nothing to criticize, because he learned the lesson. He was deliberate and effective… Nothing human and fallible was left, because for three years he lived his message and taught the third path, and then he either died or faked his death and fucked off to Asia

Jesus was brilliant - as a bastard son of a craftsman he became an existential threat to Rome. He taught the third path, and his message was so effective they had to kill him, massacre his followers, and even then the empire only survived because Constantine slapped his name on a rebrand of the Roman religion. The legions of Rome were spreading his message, because it resonates with everyone

He showed violence once - when people abused religion for profit. He still harmed no one, accepted everyone. When did he say abortion was wrong? I seem to remember a lot of forgiveness outside of that one incident. Across race, across profession, across physical state

Almost like it was truly universal love.

W.W.J.D. Probably accept everyone regardless of unsavory circumstance and reject money, like he did when he lived

Religion is the problem, because the difference between religion and spirituality is only scale

Read the Bible - I did it when I was 7 and had diarrhea. It’s worth reading. It’s not as long as it seems. I’m shocked at how few people read it cover to cover - I assumed it was normal for decades. At least know the enemy, right? Or better yet, take the wisdom within and build up a tolerance to the rest when it’s misquoted at you

They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice

Sure, F-Droid. It’s an app store that not only is exclusively foss, they only host things they can build from source in house and seem to have a decent review process - they tag anything from ads to integration with paid services, and those features are often buried so it seems like they’re pretty militant about it

It comes with all the drawbacks that entails, but I generally check there first myself

You’re very welcome, this is exactly the kind of tool I want to put in the right hands

But I do hope you don’t need it, so there’s also variants I hope you will use

The pregnant pause is the version I derived it from - instead of blanking your body language, you project encouragement and full attention. It makes people feel awkward, but it gives them the urge to keep talking to fill the silence

It’s a therapy tool, but great for any kind of teaching - for example, I have a friend with bad imposter syndrome who I’ve been mentoring in software development for the last few years. When I help him, he has a bad habit of shutting off his brain and second guessing himself. I’ve been telling him for a decade he has an aptitude for it, but all he saw was how I could glance at his code and zero in on the problem… But I’ve been doing this for almost 2 decades and I also have an aptitude for it, and no matter how much I tell him “it’s just experience, and you’re genuinely good at this” or “I only know because I’ve been in your situation before” he would shut down

So I’d hit him with the pregnant pause after asking a leading question to get him thinking along the correct lines. Sometimes he’s already too frazzled to think and I’ll just tell him the answer before it drags on uncomfortably long and he feels stupid, but usually he knows and I’ll give him validation before expanding on the topic

Last week, he called me to tell me he did the same thing for someone else. The week before, someone accused him of causing a bug and he stood his ground without rereading his code (correctly). He regularly calls me to tell me about a lesson of mine that has helped him, and more and more I have nothing more to add, I’m looking forward to the day when he pushes back against me

The key here is lack of judgement - you have to find a reason to give them validation immediately. From there you can break it down or correct them, but they need to feel good at the moment you give your verdict, even if what they said is wrong. Only then you correct them or expound on the topic

It’s good for any time you want to get someone talking or make them feel awkward - you can use it for jokes, teaching, or encouraging them to get something off their chest. So long as you do it right, it builds trust and deepens relationships - and again, the important bit is they must walk away feeling like you didn’t judge them when they opened up

Just be sure you want that deeper relationship with that person - everyone has horrible intrusive thoughts sometimes, and if you don’t fully believe in their fundamental goodness you might end up hearing things you aren’t equipped to deal with

Despite being LGBT+ that friend repeats shit blasted at him from far right social media, and I know he’s not that person so I help him unpack it and get to the core truths behind it (and he’s come a long way). I know my sister and closest brother are very empathic people, so when they say shit out of left field I know to break it down instead of taking it at face value

People often don’t know what they’re saying, because propaganda works - if you encourage people to open up to you unfiltered, you’ll cut deep if you don’t come from a place of understanding. But there’s great power there - people will tell you exactly what’s going on with them, and they’ll listen when you dive into it