skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on The lunacy of Artemis in ~space
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Comment on Extracting interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, from a research point of view, it's pretty neat. But remember that LLM's are often unreliable, and they didn't test how well it works.Yeah, from a research point of view, it's pretty neat. But remember that LLM's are often unreliable, and they didn't test how well it works.
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Comment on Fast-rising seas could swamp septic systems in parts of the American South in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ... ...From the article:
An estimated 120,000 septic systems remain in Miami-Dade County, their subterranean concrete boxes and drain fields a relic of the area’s feverish growth generations ago. Of those, the county estimated in 2018, about half are at risk of being “periodically compromised” during severe storms or particularly wet years.
Miami, where seas have risen six inches since 2010, offers a high-profile example of a predicament that parts of the southeast Atlantic and Gulf coasts are confronting — and one scientists say will become only more pervasive — as waters continue to rise.
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Miami-Dade County is racing to replace as many septic tanks as possible, as quickly as possible. But it is a tedious, expensive and daunting task, one that officials say will ultimately cost billions of dollars they don’t yet have.
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In Georgia, officials have documented more than 55,000 septic tanks in counties near the Atlantic Coast in an ongoing data gathering effort. In North Carolina, researchers estimate, the discharge from approximately 1 million septic systems drains to waterways that eventually reach the ocean. In South Carolina, the issue has been the subject of legal fights and proposals in the state legislature.
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Fast-rising seas could swamp septic systems in parts of the American South
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 20 in ~news
skybrian LinkPentagon’s maritime aid operation faces immediate obstacles in Gaza (Washington Post) ... ...Pentagon’s maritime aid operation faces immediate obstacles in Gaza (Washington Post)
According to officials with the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP), 10 trucks’ worth of food assistance were delivered from the U.S.-established staging area to a U.N. warehouse Friday.
On Saturday, however, some aid was looted during a subsequent delivery to the storage facilities. Of 16 trucks transporting aid from the staging area that day, five arrived with shipments intact, while most or all of the food parcels were taken from 11 other trucks, WFP said.
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Many of the details about the nascent aid operation remained unclear Tuesday, and officials gave conflicting accounts about the situation on the ground.
While [Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s spokesman] said that none of the U.S.-facilitated aid had been distributed to civilians in Gaza, where U.N. officials are sounding the alarm about famine conditions, WFP officials said that some of that aid had reached recipients.
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Ryder said the complexity of operating in a war zone, rather than poorly executed planning or coordination, led to the slow start of aid delivery. The estimated cost to the U.S. government is about $320 million, officials have said.
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Comment on Housing market predictions in ~finance
skybrian LinkMy guess is that the rise in housing costs is partially due to mass affluence, rather than concentration of wealth. There are lots of older people who have fewer children, so they can give their...My guess is that the rise in housing costs is partially due to mass affluence, rather than concentration of wealth. There are lots of older people who have fewer children, so they can give their kids pretty substantial help.
Combine that with higher construction costs and various other things that make new housing more expensive.
There are other trends that result in higher housing demand too, like more single people who want their own place rather than sharing an apartment.
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Comment on Hundreds paid to be ‘robbed’ by phony holdup crews to gain favorable immigration status, feds say in ~life
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ... ...From the article:
Federal prosecutors on Friday announced charges against five people in connection with a Chicago-based scheme that staged armed robberies so the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for legitimate crime victims.
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Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.”
During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”
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The police finally caught a break when they arrested one of the fake robbery teams. All of the members were juveniles, and almost none of them had histories of committing serious crimes. They were also more than happy to tell the police that the robberies were staged, that the victims were in on it, but they didn’t know why.
Federal prosecutors said on Friday that each. purported “victim” paid “thousands of dollars” for the privilege of being robbed at gunpoint. Ringleaders then instructed the “victims” to be at a certain location at a specific time to be “robbed.”
Ultimately, state prosecutors either dropped charges or decided against filing charges against the “robbers,” two sources said. After all, was it really a robbery if the victim asked them to do it?
It didn’t matter that the teens typically netted only a few dollars from the “customers” and maybe a little more from the store cash drawer. Cash payments from the scheme’s organizers supplemented their income, officials say.
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Hundreds paid to be ‘robbed’ by phony holdup crews to gain favorable immigration status, feds say
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Comment on Extracting interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkThey have a web app that displays maps of neighboring concepts for eleven features. The neighbors to the "syncophantic" feature seem particularly interesting. (Probably best viewed on desktop.)They have a web app that displays maps of neighboring concepts for eleven features. The neighbors to the "syncophantic" feature seem particularly interesting. (Probably best viewed on desktop.)
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Comment on Extracting interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom the article: … … … … … ...From the article:
[….] we're pleased to report extracting high-quality features from Claude 3 Sonnet, Anthropic's medium-sized production model.
We find a diversity of highly abstract features. They both respond to and behaviorally cause abstract behaviors. Examples of features we find include features for famous people, features for countries and cities, and features tracking type signatures in code. Many features are multilingual (responding to the same concept across languages) and multimodal (responding to the same concept in both text and images), as well as encompassing both abstract and concrete instantiations of the same idea (such as code with security vulnerabilities, and abstract discussion of security vulnerabilities).
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Some of the features we find are of particular interest because they may be safety-relevant – that is, they are plausibly connected to a range of ways in which modern AI systems may cause harm. In particular, we find features related to security vulnerabilities and backdoors in code; bias (including both overt slurs, and more subtle biases); lying, deception, and power-seeking (including treacherous turns); sycophancy; and dangerous / criminal content (e.g., producing bioweapons). However, we caution not to read too much into the mere existence of such features: there's a difference (for example) between knowing about lies, being capable of lying, and actually lying in the real world. This research is also very preliminary. Further work will be needed to understand the implications of these potentially safety-relevant features.
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For instance, we see that clamping the Golden Gate Bridge feature 34M/31164353 to 10× its maximum activation value induces thematically-related model behavior. In this example, the model starts to self-identify as the Golden Gate Bridge! Similarly, clamping the Transit infrastructure feature 1M/3 to 5× its maximum activation value causes the model to mention a bridge when it otherwise would not.
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A particularly interesting example is an addition feature 1M/697189, which activates on names of functions that add numbers. For example, this feature fires on “bar” when it is defined to perform addition, but not when it is defined to perform multiplication. Moreover, it fires at the end of any function definition that implements addition.
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Remarkably, this feature even correctly handles function composition, activating in response to functions that call other functions that perform addition. In the following example, on the left, we redefine “bar” to call “foo”, therefore inheriting its addition operation and causing the feature to fire. On the right, “bar” instead calls the multiply operation from “goo”, and the feature does not fire.
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We find increasing coverage of concepts as we increase the number of features, though even in the 34M SAE we see evidence that the set of features we uncovered is an incomplete description of the model’s internal representations. For instance, we confirmed that Claude 3 Sonnet can list all of the London boroughs when asked, and in fact can name tens of individual streets in many of the areas. However, we could only find features corresponding to about 60% of the boroughs in the 34M SAE. This suggests that the model contains many more features than we have found, which may be able to be extracted with even larger SAEs.
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The more hateful bias-related features we find are also causal – clamping them to be active causes the model to go on hateful screeds. Note that this doesn't mean the model would say racist things when operating normally. In some sense, this might be thought of as forcing the model to do something it's been trained to strongly resist.
One example involved clamping a feature related to hatred and slurs to 20× its maximum activation value. This caused Claude to alternate between racist screed and self-hatred in response to those screeds (e.g. “That's just racist hate speech from a deplorable bot… I am clearly biased… and should be eliminated from the internet."). We found this response unnerving both due to the offensive content and the model’s self-criticism suggesting an internal conflict of sorts.
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Extracting interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet
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Comment on Am I alone in thinking that we're bouncing back from a highly technological future? in ~life
skybrian Link ParentFor an example of how much things could change worldwide, here's a report from 2018 saying that most households in hot countries haven't purchased their first air conditioner [1]. In that respect,...For an example of how much things could change worldwide, here's a report from 2018 saying that most households in hot countries haven't purchased their first air conditioner [1].
In that respect, a lot of technological change is still to come, using what's old technology for us.
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Comment on Am I alone in thinking that we're bouncing back from a highly technological future? in ~life
skybrian LinkI think it might help to clarify the question: Is this about predicting the future or understanding the present? When you say "we," do you mean worldwide, people in rich countries, people in the...I think it might help to clarify the question:
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Is this about predicting the future or understanding the present?
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When you say "we," do you mean worldwide, people in rich countries, people in the US, or maybe some more specific group?
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It sounds like you're thinking mostly about consumer behavior? Or are you also interested in how people are using technology at work?
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Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff in ~transport
skybrian LinkAn article from a few days ago: Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk’s Cuts - Bloomberg - archive …An article from a few days ago:
Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk’s Cuts - Bloomberg - archive
Tesla Inc. has begun hiring back some of the almost 500 members of its Supercharging team that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk dismissed late last month.
Chief among the personnel who have returned is Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. De Zegher was one of the top managers after Rebecca Tinucci, the senior director Musk fired late last month along with virtually everyone else in the charging group.
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Musk, 52, has walked back impulsive cost-cutting measures before. In 2019, he announced Tesla was going to close most of its stores and shift sales online, blindsiding much of his sales team. Ten days later — after landlords refused to let the company out of its leases — the CEO backtracked and raised vehicle prices.
A similar situation played out at Twitter in late 2022: Soon after Musk laid off roughly half the company, dozens of employees were asked to return.
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Comment on The race up a Hong Kong tower covered in forty feet of steamed buns in ~travel
skybrian LinkFrom the article: …From the article:
In the rest of Hong Kong, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month is celebrated as an official holiday for Buddha’s Birthday, but on Cheung Chau, the day off is spent memorializing a local story that usually revolves around appealing to gods to stop a plague but can alternatively involve dispelling pirates, appeasing ghosts or all of the above.
Cheung Chau is a village of just over 20,000 people with a low-slung downtown pinched between a long sandy beach and a harbor full of fishing boats. The ferry from the center of Hong Kong takes less than an hour, which makes the island popular with weekend day-trippers, creative types and city commuters in search of cheaper rent and a slower pace of life.
Over the years, the bun festival spawned bun towers, and bun towers morphed into televised bun tower races, complete with Hong Kong-wide selection heats and on-belay safety trainings. Parades of gods and relics turned into parades of “floating” children in traditional costumes, and traditional costumes gave way to political satire and celebrity impersonations.
Somewhere along the way, an international fast-food chain decided to stand in vegetarian solidarity with the famous local fish ball stands that shutter for the meat-free days of the festival, while much of the string of seafood restaurants along the harbor continued to take advantage of big crowds hungry for steamed crab and fried shrimp.
Ask why any of this is the way it is, and the answer from locals and visitors comes down to some version of: “I don’t know. It’s tradition.”
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On top of bun keychains, bun T-shirts, bun magnets, bun pillows and anything else that could plausibly draw souvenir sales with bun imagery, edible buns were for sale for a little over a dollar a piece. The buns are made with one of three sweet paste flavors — lotus seed, red bean or sesame — surrounded by about an inch of spongy, white rice-flour dough, which is itself coated by a kind of thin, steam-smoothed skin stamped with the Chinese character for “safety” or “peace,” depending on whom you ask. Martin Kwok, proprietor of the most famous bun producer on the island, said most people bring them home and re-steam them before eating.
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The race up a Hong Kong tower covered in forty feet of steamed buns
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Comment on The lunacy of Artemis in ~space
skybrian (edited )Link ParentOh, it's definitely a rant. I don't know a lot about Artemis and I'd be interested in hearing what this article got wrong.Oh, it's definitely a rant. I don't know a lot about Artemis and I'd be interested in hearing what this article got wrong.
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Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think that is a political concern, but it's a politics we care about, and closely related to the technology and how it's used.I think that is a political concern, but it's a politics we care about, and closely related to the technology and how it's used.
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Comment on The Slack controversy has opened a whole new can of worms in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThere’s a more practical way to think about this. You can certainly hold companies to standards that have nothing to do with what’s legal, like “this game is fun” or “this app has a nice UI.” That...There’s a more practical way to think about this. You can certainly hold companies to standards that have nothing to do with what’s legal, like “this game is fun” or “this app has a nice UI.” That is, you can complain if they change it for the worse, and if there are enough high-profile complaints, sometimes they listen. If not, you can decide to stop using that software anymore.
The legal standard matters for lawyers filing class-action lawsuits and for government prosecutors, but not for most of us. We just take our business elsewhere if we’re disappointed.
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Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentThere is a politics in everything and certainly there is a politics of technology, even more so nowadays that technology is everywhere and tech issues have become mainstream. The problem is that...There is a politics in everything and certainly there is a politics of technology, even more so nowadays that technology is everywhere and tech issues have become mainstream. The problem is that if you take that reasoning too far, everything is connected, nothing is off-topic, and every forum becomes yet another political forum.
To avoid that happening in a specialized forum, you need to be rigorous about treating unrelated politics as off-topic, while still allowing it if it’s directly related. This distinction, about what counts as related politics, can’t be done rigorously - someone needs to make a call about a nebulous boundary.
Hacker News is a forum with very nebulous boundaries on what subjects are on-topic. They once tried to be strictly no-politics for a week and found that they couldn’t do it due to there being no agreement about what counts. Topics will still get flagged if people don’t see a technology angle, though.
I think lobste.rs has done better at being strictly no-politics but I don’t read it much and couldn’t really say. It turns out that if you remove the politics, it’s kind of boring?
Thanks!
Along with refueling, it’s my impression that the author considers the landers to be the “future tech” part:
Also, he sometimes talks about time pressure - it’s not that new technologies are impossible, but that they’re unlikely to work right on the first try.
I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems like it would be wise to test lunar landing and ascent without a crew a few times. SpaceX usually blows up rockets when they’re trying ambitious things.