I’m really happy to see this take. It’s not the first time but it’s not said often enough. I once had the thought that anything AI can do really well is probably something that should not be being done at all. That’s an overly broad statement but I think there’s some truth in it. The grand challenge of software engineering is to find beautifully elegant and precise ways to express what we want the computer to do for us. If we can find them, it will be better to express ourselves in those ways than to prompt an AI than do it for us, much in the same way that a blog written by an LLM is not worth reading.
Identifiers correspond to nodes and a mention of an identifier in the definition of another corresponds to a directed edge. The resulting graph won't necessarily be acyclic, but you can still use it to inform the order in which you present definitions, e.g. newspaper style starts with the most high-level function and puts the low-level details at the end: https://pypi.org/project/flake8-newspaper-style/
Yes, that's how you enter the lucid state. You find ways to tell that you're dreaming and condition yourself to check for those while awake. Eventually you will do it inside a dream and realize that you're dreaming.
Yeah. It’s very common to notice anomalies inside of a dream. But the anomalies weave into the dream and feel normal. You don’t have much agency to enter a lucid state from a pre-lucid dream.
So the idea is to develop habits called “reality checks” when you are awake. You look for the broken clock kind of anomalies that the grandparent comment mentioned. You have to be open to the possibility of dreaming, which is hard to do.
Consider this difficulty. Are you dreaming?
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How much time did it take to think “no”? Or did you even take this question seriously? Maybe because you are reading a hn comment about lucid dreams, that question is interpreted as an example instead of a genuine question worth investigating, right? That’s the difficulty. Try it again.
The key is that the habit you’re developing isn’t just the check itself — it’s the thinking that you have during the check, which should lead you to investigate.
You do these checks frequently enough you end up doing it in a dream. Boom.
There’s also an aspect of identifying recurring patterns during prelucidity. That’s why it helps to keep a dream journal for your non-lucid dreams.
The first time it happened to me, it was accidental. I dreamed that I was in a college classroom but I realized that I never went to college. I was not trying to and had never lucid dreamed before, and so it was very surprising.
be careful as adding consciousness to a dream means CPU cycles so you wake Up more tired, its cool for kids and teens but grown adults shouldnt explore this to avoid bad rest
Over time, with accumulated experience, all dreams are lucid from the start. Because of that they are very calm and pleasant; the dreamer is no longer reactive to what happens in the dream because they know nothing is at stake.
That’s a caution to getting addicted to it, but not never doing it. I’ve had powerful experiences in lucid dreaming that I wouldn’t trade for a little more rest. I was already in a retreat where I was basically resting all the time.
I met someone once who claimed that he lucid dreams almost every night by default and it is exhausting. He smokes weed at night to avoid dreaming entirely. I didn’t dig in super deep, but it sounded pretty intense!
IMO they would benefit from skipping the weed and instead continue to practice lucid dreaming. Over time they will develop their skill and will learn to simply contemplate the dream without reacting to it. It is a calming experience.
This. I believe it’s the most important question in the world right now. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this from an entirely practical perspective and have surprised myself that the answer seems to be our capacity to love. The idea is easily dismissed as romantic but when I say I’m being practical I really mean it. I’m writing about it here https://giftcommunity.substack.com/
There's a better way but it requires a very large space like a big empty parking lot.
...and that's it! Turns out the hard part is not riding a bike but riding a bike in a straight line. Once you've got the hang of riding wherever the bike seems to want to go, you can gradually learn to get it under control. Surprisingly easy!
Came to the comments looking for this. The term alignment-faking implies that the AI has a “real” position. What does that even mean? I feel similarly about the term hallucination. All it does is hallucinate!
I think Alan Kay said it best - what we’ve done with these things is hacked our own language processing. Their behaviour has enough in common with something they are not, we can’t tell the difference.
> The term alignment-faking implies that the AI has a “real” position.
Well, we don't really know what's going on inside of its head, so to speak (interpretability isn't quite there yet), but Opus certainly seems to have "consistent" behavioral tendencies to the extent that it behaves in ways that looks like they're intended to prevent its behavioral tendencies from being changed. How much more of a "real" position can you get?
Any recommendations for thinkers writing good analysis on the implications of superintelligence for society? Especially interested in positive takes that are well thought through. Are there any?
Ideally voices that don’t have a vested interest.
For example, give a superintelligence some money, tell it to start a company. Surely it’s going to quickly understand it needs to manipulate people to get them to do the things it wants, in the same way a kindergarten teacher has to “manipulate” the kids sometimes. Personally I can’t see how we’re not going to find ourselves in a power struggle with these things.
Does that make me an AI doomer party pooper? So far I haven’t found a coherent optimistic analysis. Just lots of very superficial “it will solve hard problems for us! Cure disease!”
It certainly could be that I haven’t looked hard enough. That’s why I’m asking.
Off topic but if I may. The way people use percentages to express multiples is confusing. A doubling is a 100% increase. So a 200% increase is 3x, and so on. Then at some point we forget about the +1 and 1000% is "10 times the sum it previously paid for software licenses". Just a pet peeve I guess : )
I sat on the unofficial style committee at a company I used to work for. I guess one of our also unofficial tenets was that usages that people regularly used incorrectly or were regularly incorrectly interpreted should be avoided--even if you're "technically" correct in using them. It's the written language equivalent to not using parentheses and depending on people applying, especially less common, precedence operations in code.
So no, not just your pet peeve. I personally hate 100% increase and that sort of thing. Even if I know the correct interpretation, I have no idea if the writer did.
The same kind of people that say "I'm not good at math" will fight to the death to say this the wrong way and not have to think about it, so it's a losing fight, unfortunately.
Now, any time I see anything more than 100% for an increase, I assume the person doesn't know how to say it properly, and the vast majority of the time I'm correct. I certainly never make any decisions (including opinions) based on that information without doing the math myself.
"wrong" and "correct" are only defined by what people actually say - if people mainly say "101% increase" to mean "new value = old value * 1.01" then that's what it means whether it makes sense grammatically or not.
But the point of communication is mutual understanding. I generally agree that language is what we make it be, but in this case the wrong usage, meaning the usage that is mathematically incorrect, is causing issues.
I can't just go around saying that my cat is siamese even if he's not just because I got it wrong one time and now this is what siamese means to me. Because my goal is to transmit accurate messages.
Agreed. Don't express changes in percentages, express them as multiples.
In addition, don't express changes in terms of ratios, express them in terms of actual quantities.
So instead of saying "our efficiency increased by 100%", get rid of the ratio and express it as a multiple of the relevant underlying quantities, e.g. "our costs are 0.5x".
By that argument, 100% is also a factor, but you wouldn't interpret "100% cost increase" as an unchanged cost, so a 10x price shouldn't be described as a "1000% cost increase".
Well, the way I look it is that if someone says 1000% increase, it may be whatever value between x8 and x12, rounded to the round number, to look more dramatic.
Would you really get more value from the headline if it said "923% increase" instead of 1000%?
The article talks about 10 times the price. If that’s true the equivalent percent would be 1100%. So 1000% is a lower, rounded estimate; presumably 10X is also an estimate.
> The article talks about 10 times the price. If that’s true the equivalent percent would be 1100%.
I think you've just proven OPs point. 10x is a 900% increase, or 1,000% of the original price, not 1,100%.
Using percentage for anything other than a fraction of something (i.e. <= 100%) is usually done for effect, often done incorrectly, and even if done "correctly", leads to exactly this kind of confusion.
But % “decrease” is just as bad as percent “increase” that OP is railing against.
Whereas the inverse of 3x is (1/3)x and still far clearer (three times the size and one third the size).
Meanwhile 3x “smaller” is the inverse of 3x “bigger”, not 300% “increase”, which is mathematically different. The adjectives break our brains. Much easier to comprehend if we don’t use them, using “the size” instead.
Is a 200% increase 3x? When it says "200% more" then it's 2x the value on top of the original value, or when it says "levels are now at 200%" then the value doubled. But with "increase" as word, or with random other wordings as in the headline, I'm not actually sure how to take it. I intuitively took it as 10x the original value (not 11x) but I'm now thinking that's probably wrong
Yes. Increase means the number went up. A 200% increase means that it increased by 200% of the original, so you have the original 1x and the increase of 2x for a total of 3x.
“A 200% increase” is logically equivalent to “200% more”. Think about what it means for a number to “increase” or to be “more than” another number. How much is the “increase”? How much “more”? Unfortunately, “200% as much” is often what people mean when they say “200% more”.
(This difference became especially noticeable to me after playing^W practicing my math skills with incremental games for obscene amounts of time.)
It's intentional on the part of the journalist to mislead readers by making the number seem bigger. An off-by-one error is a small price to pay for more clicks.
Would it be so hard to give a ratio? Or the actual numbers? I know people are familiar with percentages, but I think overall the sunny do much for understanding and are really only good as an abbreviation to save repetition, which isn't happening here.
Its confusing, but in this context it is just another way of saying 'huge'. 1000 is a bigger number than 10, so 1000% feels bigger than 10x. The exact numbers don't matter here, so thats why I think people will keep using percentages.
The issue is language ambiguity, not always just math proficiency.
A "price hike" is not necessary an "increase", i.e. a sum of the old price and a change, which is X + X * (P/100). It very well might also mean "a price hike to Y", i.e. "the new price is now P percent of the old" which is a multiple (X * (P/100)).
But yeah, it's usually very confusing for all the parties involved, especially when the change is negative.
A "price hike" is always an increase, and specifically a large increase. If the value has decreased it'd be a "price drop" and a large drop would be a "price slash".
Again, what I meant is, of course, "price hike" in itself always constitutes some increase, but its nature can be one of two: 1. positive delta 2. setting the price to a ratio > 1.
Even worse, people who say ‘3 times less than’ (which would be n - 3n = -2n) when they mean ‘one third as much as.’
And of course, the worst people of all think that one third is less than one fourth.
Personally, I blame the widespread usage of decimal notation rather than fractions. The so-called ‘metric’ system (a misnomer, because every system of measurements … measures) bears a lot of blame here.
