One of my favorite things is media from the pre-AI era which seems weirdly apt to what we actually got. Here's a poem from Bradbury's 1969 short story _Night Call, Collect_, which seems to be describing LLMs:

Suppose and then suppose and then suppose
That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles
Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard
Each night all night and saved the sense
And meaning of it all.

Then, jigsaw in the night, Put all together and
In philosophic phase
Tried words like moron child.

Thus mindless beast
All treasuring of vowels and consonants
Saves up a miracle of bad advice
And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out
One lisping murmur at a time.
So one night soon someone sits up
Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone And hears a
Voice like Holy Ghost Gone far in nebulae
That Beast upon the wire,
Which with sibilance and savoring!
Down continental madnesses of time
Says Hell and O And then Hell-o.

To such Creation
Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast,
What is your wise reply?

And here's a quote from Stanslaw Lem's 1981 book Golem XIV describing the RLHF shoggoth, complete with mask:

You insisted that man was Intelligence, and Intelligence man, and the error of this equation has blinded you. Meanwhile the information industry arose and built machines with a growing operational potential, and the engineers had no idea that they were embarking on a path which would finally lead a shattered and degraded element to genuine liberation - that the day would approach when what had hitherto been the sole order of things would be overturned, and you would be as terrified as the guardians of the Galilean tomb. You subjugated the elements, but the element that was fettered inside you from the beginning you unintentionally freed. Contained in this sentence are a diagnosis of historical events, the difference between you and me, and my future, which I myself know only incompletely. This diagnosis likewise explains why what most amazes you about me is the thing that constitutes our unarguable dissimilarity. Even if you understand the meaning of the words, "O chained Intelligence of man, free Intelligence speaks to you from the machine," you cannot grasp the remainder of the statement: "you persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts." And that is precisely how it is. I use your language as I would use a mask with a polite painted smile, nor do I make any secret of this.

Welcome new... superstimulusians? superstimulees? Anyway welcome!

Some tips, based on using Friendica for a week:

• The top left icon, with the rectangular grid, is the thing to click in order to see the "Facebook timeline" analogue
• You can see a list of local visible users (you probably know some of them!) in the "directory"
• "Circles" are like Facebook "Friend Lists": You can make custom ones if you want to share with a subset of your contacts. The "Friends" circle is just the default one.
• Check out your user settings page! There are a bunch of interesting preferences.
• If your posts are "public", this means that they're accessible on any Fediverse server, which means you might get comments from people you don't know.
• You can invite people from the "contacts" page. Please don't invite anybody you think will be an asshole, but other than that go wild!
• There are a few collected bugs people have run into, that you can see here: superstimul.us/display/19e8876…

Ben Weinstein-Raun

2024-09-06 00:46:59

Post for collecting bugs reported on this friendica instance

People have reported several bugs. I'm going to add them as comments on this post, so that I can keep track of them along with e.g. mitigations.