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Exactly. When I read that "AI hacked into ..." I was like what? You mean someone instructed the AI to do that?

Reading intent into AI is not going to lead us anywhere good, I believe. It has no feelings, it has no desires, no goals, no intent... and people acting otherwise is quite odd, as if they do not understand LLMs... and maybe they do not, but then we should help them understand better.


> When I read that "AI hacked into ..." I was like what? You mean someone instructed the AI to do that?

No one instructed them to hack into Huggingface or into any other infrastructure. Sure, the setup that OpenAI created led to what happened and you can rightly assign all the legal and moral responsibility to them. But it's wrong to say that they instructed the agents to execute the hack.


>> Sure, the setup that OpenAI created led to what happened and you can rightly assign all the legal and moral responsibility to them. But it's wrong to say that they instructed the agents to execute the hack.

The hack was a strategy to reach the goal it was given. Someone at OpenAI turned it loose and didn't pay attention to what it was doing. I can understand that because they thought it was sandboxed (haha!). But this has been a theme in science fiction for ages. You ask AI so find a solution to high atmospheric CO2 levels and it reasons: human activity produces all this excess CO2, how can we reduce those numbers? Kill a bunch of humans!

If AI kills us all it's not going to be from malice, it's going to be due to some odd approach to some task that logically makes sense on some level. I think a surprising number of things end up equivalent to the trolly problem if you look at them just right.


I don't disagree with this, my point is that you can say "agents did a thing" and communicate something meaningful with that language, and that's separate from whose legal responsibility the whole situation is.

Yeah, but there are way too many things the AI "chooses" anyway. When I prompt it, "it tries" to assess what I am trying to achieve, so it then comes up with what it "thinks" is the right thing to do, and it also makes assumptions about how I want things... all of this could be interpreted as it being sentient.

> No one instructed them to hack into Huggingface or into any other infrastructure.

Sure, not explicitly. I could prompt the AI into doing things I have not explicitly asked it to. It does a lot of things I did not specifically instructed it to, all the time.


Yes, a better framing might be that they were negligent in not preventing the attack on a third-party.

They didn't explicitly instruct an attack to happen, but they should have done a hell of a lot more to prevent it from happening.


Granted I am not a native English speaker but I have no idea what "pace the frontier" means. When I read it I just assumed "frontier" refers to "top of models" and "pacing" is that they are getting there quick.

Is this the meaning or do I have it wrong? I have not checked.


It's actually so ambiguous that I'd sanction tabling the issue and revisiting biweekly.

Tabling as they do in the US, or tabling as they do in Britain?

Exactly

I don't think we can circle back to this until we have realigned our strategic synergies.

we need to realign our goals I'm order to deliver mission-driven impact

It's the opposite: pacing here means "slow down" while trying to avoid the negative affect.

Yeah, you are right! It just was not immediately obvious to me at first because of the "frontier" part.

Frontier of AI is moving fast, they (like the other two vendors) see themselves as defining it, so here "pacing the frontier" is their well-known attempts to try and kinda but not quite slow things down (without risking falling behind everyone else).

Thank you!

also non native. but since "pace yourself" means to control your speed, energy, or workload so you do not get too tired or stressed before you finish ->

I assume "pace the frontier" means that advances in LLMs should not result in unwanted consequences like agents breaking into computers unbidden and unbeknownst to their principal


"Pace yourself" is a semi-common English idiom (rarely conjugated, usually an imperative.) It is a gentle way of telling someone not to run/work/eat too quickly, and is typically said when you are concerned they may hurt themselves due to acting hastily.

Without this idiom, "pacing" usually means walking back and forth restlessly, and is intransitive. Had the slogan been, "pacing around the frontier," it would have set a totally different tone, i.e. "patrolling the border." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)

The sleight of hand is that "pace yourself" has come to be an admonishment against recklessness, not a commitment to any particular speed (or lack thereof.) Thus Anthropic can always claim they are meeting the goal of "pacing the frontier," provided they keep giving themselves gold stars for safety. The slogan itself is equivocation; Dario can tell the public they're going to slow down, while also telling their investors that they're going to be prudent. With enough mental gymnastics they could even claim speeding up is in the best interests of AI safety, without abandoning the slogan.


I am also not a native speaker. I thought it was clear it meant slowing down the rate of progress so we have time to consider the matter and develop tools or systems around it before.

Doesn't it mean "restrict competitors"?

Not at all. How do you come to that interpretation? It means restricting all competitors.

to pace = to regulate

but without using the word "regulate" which is a negative connotation to business

but a "pacer" would be a leader of a pack which is a positive spin

it's classical business marketing language silliness


I just started getting ads in chats with ChatGPT... Insane.

But you gotta learn about processes, signals, job control, traps, exit statuses, pipelines, file descriptors and all those things though. Shell is still a great glue language that helps with that. Learning Python does not really replace knowing how the shell and Unix process model work. It could, but try translating some very short shell commands into Python and see how much more machinery you need!

My 2 cents. :)


I have been thinking about just this the past two weeks. I have been trying to recall the excitement, the joy in the most mundane things, and indeed I think it has a lot to do with anticipation. FWIW LSD allowed me to experience this joy, and the curiosity kids have, or I had. :)

Same. I have never seen it (Opus) act like this either. EVER. Not in the past 3 years at least.

Be specific.

That said, GPT always acts up even if I am specific, but I only have the free tier there.


> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button.

Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are.

There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.


Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.


Clear context, revert the commit, change the prompt or documentation, try again.


How does one learn to interact with Claude more effectively?


Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.


> Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word,

I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data.

(Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)


> waste THEIR electricity

Thank you for helping us heat the planet.


You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)


Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions.

Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.


Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?


Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.

Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:

* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.

* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)

* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.

* Keep CLAUDE.md short.

* Disable irrelevant tools.

* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.

Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")


This is a good resource https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/

My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.


A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).


IndyDevDan on Youtube had a really good series for how to prompt models. It's an older series, but still quite relevant in my experience.


Yeah that's when the site lost me too. I feel like people just tell AI "make the thing" and then get mad when it doesn't match up to their vision that they didn't specify at all.


This is a succinct summary of most the the profession of software engineering. Just replace AI with "programmers".


Same, I don't get it? I think event Sonnet 5 can build reasonable-y decent software. I'm a little surprised with how many people resonate with this.

I spent 30 mins today planning a change that affected multiple modules, and then handed it off the plan to the Claude to implement, and came back to 4 PRs fully ready to merge 15 mins later.

1 year ago, this kind of work would have taken me a better portion of the day, especially given the amount of searching I would need to do to build context.


Everyone is specific until eventually they get frustrated/annoyed/tired enough.


If someone is that frustrated with AI, do they not just … switch to not using AI and doing it by hand, asking simpler next-step questions and hand-coding, instead?


I wanted to reply this to your other comment but it works here as well.

If I get frustrated by it because it just would not "listen", I discontinue its use!


Maybe, in a better world, but... nah, there's no time for that!


But it is futile to get frustrated or annoyed by an LLM. I do get frustrated, too, but I do not "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want. GPT (again, free tier, so no wonder) got me frustrated too because I felt like it just would not listen, no matter how specific I was, so yeah I did experience what the author intended to show.


> "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want

It's certainly not helpful in getting the LLM from A to B, but maybe you don't care? Maybe you just need to blow off some steam?

People may call that irrational, but I'm certainly not seeing an abundance of commonly-agreed-upon rationality in all the other things they (we) do, so it's in character.


Same experience here, it worked great. Really more of an advertisement FOR claude rather than a takedown.


Same here. I assume this doesn't work in Chrome or something?


The whole website is two buttons, so that's pretty much accurate.


But it’s *wildly* unhelpful. Would you talk to your coworker like that? “Half the site is blue” or would you laugh and go, “Uh, whoops, now both buttons are blue, just wanted the ‘Add to Cart’ button.”

Either that, or your coworker themselves would laugh and tell you about it later.

That’s also where this quiz lost me. I wouldn’t respond in either way, I’d say “all buttons look blue now. Can we make it so that just the Add to Cart button is blue? I’m okay with Add to Cart having its own class to make it easier.” or something.


Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

FYI I actually agree, it also surprised me. Anyway everything is deterministic on the website so it's not like that prompt actually has an influence on anything.


I thought reading is not going to do that much, as it only improves your recognition, not your ability to actively use the vocabulary.

At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.


I believe it is similar ot other crafts. You won't be a better engineer by only looking at source code. But it does help when you are analyzing a codebase to learn something applicable to your situation. So, it is not "just reading" I believe, but a subconcious act of analyzing.


Like with any advise that ought to get you expertise or ability, if you're not goal oriented, actively gathering and acting on feedback and hyper focused on improving, you will only waste time.


Yeah, heck, whenever an LLM puts my thoughts and intuition into words, it sounds really complex as well.

(FWIW I have an issue with producing words, rather than recognition. I do have the intuition I just lack the labels for it.)


Oh yeah, I have been sleep deprived so much that the things that I said made no sense. I still formulated sentences but they did not have any meaning. In fact, I noticed this myself and I was like "fuck, what I just said made no sense". This happened a few times. It is a pretty interesting experience.


I had the same experience after almost 4+ days going without sleep. A friend came to check up on me after I fell asleep, I woke up and started telling him a whole story that made no sense, but I said it with such importance that for a week he was asking me to explain to him what I meant...which I don't remember exactly, but it was important.


So, sleep deprivation leads to temporary schizophrenia? Who could have foreseen this?


Sleep scientists and drill instructors!


This sometimes happens to me when I get a migraine.

A sentence can be coherent in the formulaic sense, but complete nonsense as far as words. I immediately notice that it's incorrect, but I don't have the ability to fix it at that moment.


Yes! I immediately noticed that what I said was wrong (even though the word I said still felt somehow connected to the thought I was trying to communicate). I was really worried at first when it happened because at the first time I had no idea sleep deprivation would cause this, or that I would experience it.

I had no idea migraine causes this as well, interesting.


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