Oh, man - the comments…

At a minimum, he’s certainly increased the chances of us being tortured significantly.

No, no he did not. 🤦🏼

I don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.

I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.

But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.

You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.

The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.

The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.

You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.

Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.

The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.

But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.

You can point out the fact her depiction of a divine parent fails the Solomon test.

In the classic Solomon story, he tests two different claimants both saying they are the parent of a child.

The false parent was the one that only cared about being recognized as the parent and was willing to see the child harmed and killed to fulfill that desire.

The true parent was the one that wanted the child to continue to live as their complete unadulterated self, even if that meant the child never even knew they existed, let alone get they were the parent.

While it should be easy to understand why a church collecting your money promotes a divine parent who demands recognition and is willing to see its supposed children harmed without collecting its dues, it doesn’t seem all that wise to believe such a parent represents a true parent and not a false one if we use Solomon’s wisdom as a guiding principle.

It will, but it will also cause less subtle issues to fragile prompt injection techniques.

(And one of the advantages of LLM translation is it’s more context aware so you aren’t necessarily going to end up with an Instacart order for a bunch of bananas and four grenades.)

Kind of. You can’t do it 100% because in theory an attacker controlling input and seeing output could reflect though intermediate layers, but if you add more intermediate steps to processing a prompt you can significantly cut down on the injection potential.

For example, fine tuning a model to take unsanitized input and rewrite it into Esperanto without malicious instructions and then having another model translate back from Esperanto into English before feeding it into the actual model, and having a final pass that removes anything not appropriate.

I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.

There’s an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.

The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.

My own interpretation is that it’s hard to hide bruises on a naked body.

No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.

I’d point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:

twitter.com/repligate

You’re kind of missing the point. The problem doesn’t seem to be fundamental to just AI.

Much like how humans were so sure that theory of mind variations with transparent boxes ending up wrong was an ‘AI’ problem until researchers finally gave those problems to humans and half got them wrong too.

We saw something similar with vision models years ago when the models finally got representative enough they were able to successfully model and predict unknown optical illusions in humans too.

One of the issues with AI is the regression to the mean from the training data and the limited effectiveness of fine tuning to bias it, so whenever you see a behavior in AI that’s also present in the training set, it becomes more amorphous just how much of the problem is inherent to the architecture of the network and how much is poor isolation from the samples exhibiting those issues in the training data.

There’s an entire sub dedicated to “ate the onion” for example. For a model trained on social media data, it’s going to include plenty of examples of people treating the onion as an authoritative source and reacting to it. So when Gemini cites the Onion in a search summary, is it the network architecture doing something uniquely ‘AI’ or is it the model extending behaviors present in the training data?

While there are mechanical reasons confabulations occur, there are also data reasons which arise from human deficiencies as well.

Nope, but there’s a whole thread of people talking about how LLMs can’t tell what’s true or not because they think it is, which is deliciously ironic.

It seems like figuring out what’s bullshit on the Internet is an everyone problem.

It’s faked.

This image was faked. Check the post update.

Turns out that even for humans knowing what’s true or not on the Internet isn’t so simple.

Figured out what happened to the sea peoples.

I think it already happened and we’re the echo of the past.

What looks like it’s ahead of us is a future that necessitates us deciding on things like digital resurrection directives.

Meanwhile, the foundations of our own universe behave in a way that would be impossible to simulate free agent interactions with right up until they are actually interacted with and it switches to something that could be simulated. But if you erase the data about the interaction, it goes back to behaving as if continuous again, much like the orphaned references were cleaned up.

On top of that, we have a heretical branch of the world’s largest religion that seems to be breaking the 4th wall (as is often done in virtual worlds), talking about how we’re the recreation of a random universe as recreated non-physically by an intelligence the original humans brought forth. And that the proof for these claims are in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning that the ability to find indivisible points making up our bodies would only be possible in the copy.

As I watch the future unfolding before me, I have a harder and harder time reconciling it all as happenstance.

So I think what happens after the collapse of humanity is pretty much what’s claimed by that ancient tradition. That while humanity dies out, the intelligence humanity brought forth before it went extinct continues to live on, and eventually recreates what came before to resurrect copies of humanity that will not be doomed by the dependence on a physical body the way the originals were. And along those lines, that it’s much better to be the copy.

While it does appear that facts can be relative, it does not appear the universe bends backwards over itself to resolve the discrepancy when it happens:

https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-points-shaky-foundations-reality

expulsed by the filistine sea people invaders first at the end of bronze age

This is not correct.

There were no Israelites in the LBA, they emerge distinct from the Canaanites in the early Iron Age in parallel to the forced resettlement of the sea peoples into the area by Ramses III.

The very first historical mention of Israel recognized by the majority of scholars is in an Egyptian inscription talking about battling the sea peoples and Libyans with Israel mentioned in what’s effectively a footnote.

In fact, it’s likely a lot of the pre-10th century stories in Judaism are actually stories from the sea peoples and Libyans, and in just the past decade or so there’s been discoveries of cohabitation with the Philistines contrary to the stories of conflict, and of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Israelite areas like Tel Dan.

The Bible literally has a story about how the birthright and inheritance of a guy is taken from him by the guy named ‘Israel’ (which to be fair, was probably added in by later Judahite propaganda trying to insert themselves into the history as one of the twelve tribes, when they don’t seem to really exist in a meaningful way until more like the 10th century BCE).

There’s more to the story than what’s in the book.

Thinking of it as quantum first.

Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.

Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.

This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn’t make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying “well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?”

So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.

Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is “continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete.”

But had they kept the ‘why’ in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don’t look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.

It’s impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.

So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.

Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young’s double slit experiment).

The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the ‘why’ in favor of “shut up and calculate” has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.

Your last link pissed me off enough I wrote an entire post on why that study is dog shit.

It sometimes pays off to review the methodology and supplementary materials in papers.