Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498240

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

In a previous life, I'd been a writer for the original You Don't Know Jack game (the UK variant), where the job was to crank out as many funny quips about a topic as you could, and then use a handful of them in the recording of the game itself. Some of the later JackBox games are like that, but for the players -- you're given a set piece, have to come up with little funny improvisations within a time limit.

As an experiment, I tried the set-up lines with the OpenAI API, and see whether it could come up with some responses. Of course, 90% of them were unfunny or incoherent, but 1/10 were not bad, or even pretty good.

I'm not sure that would have been impressive to anyone else -- but remember, I'd had this as a job, and sat in a writer's room, where everyone did this, for hours. In that environment, you expect a large proportion to be duds: the discipline is keep pumping them out, and not flagging creatively until you find a rich vein. I realised that this was a tool that would have been the perfect complement to that work -- and it was a pretty good JackBox player too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298682

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Also, I thought the response by Benn Jordan on Bluesky was informative. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

He posted a general update today on LinkedIn which I think gives the wider context:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7463481...

> Not even half-way through this hashtag#curl release cycle we are already at 11 confirmed vulnerabilities - and there are three left in the queue to assess and new reports keep arriving at a pace of more than one/day.

> 11 CVEs announced in a single release is our record from 2016 after the first-ever security audit (by Cure 53).

> This is the most intense period in hashtag#curl that I can remember ever been through.

See the definitions of "O" and related glyphs for a good example[2].

[1] https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL

[2] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/packages/font-...

> Do we really think things will move this fast? Sort of no - between the beginning of the project last summer and the present, Daniel’s median for the intelligence explosion shifted from 2027 to 2028. We keep the scenario centered around 2027 because it’s still his modal prediction (and because it would be annoying to change). Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly. So maybe think of this as a vision of what an 80th percentile fast scenario looks like - not our precise median, but also not something we feel safe ruling out. [2]

I don't think this changes your observation that he is "personally invested" (i.e. believes this trendline will continue), but I'm pretty sure when AGI doesn't appear in 2027, many people will believe that this invalidates the arguments being made here (or in the report). The actual report was intended to give a feel for what a near-future "disaster" AGI scenario, and settled on a date to give that some concrete immediacy. The collective review that gave that as a possible, but not inevitable date is still ongoing (they originally pushed their best estimate out a bit further, but now they think, judging by the goals that are being hit, their scenario was a little too conservative). [3]

[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-offering-scott-alexa... [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027 [3] https://blog.aifutures.org/p/grading-ai-2027s-2025-predictio...

Lewis is right that most of these principles were described before the manifesto, but I can vouch for the near-impossibility in many contexts of convincing anyone who wasn't a coder (and a lot of coders too) why these might be sensible defaults.

For every person burned by a subsequent maladaptive formalization of these principles, there was someone horribly scarred before the agile manifesto by being forced to go through a doomed waterfall process.

I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?

I repeat what Aaron’s friends and lawyers said at the time: we were going to fight that case, and we were going to win.

I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.

[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190

I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.

But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.

(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47430487

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.