Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 7m

I don't think it's going to take decades to get long horizon RL. The reason you can't stack hours is that people don't know how to make general planners like MCTS work well with LLMs.

1 2

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 14m

You can also start with intrinsically short tasks and then train your generalist agent to perform progressively longer tasks.

1 1

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 14m

Okay but you can evaluate whether or not your action succeeded at doing something, and implicitly whether it helped you do other actions that come later. If you have a planner then you can preconmit to plans or have expectations over plans and see if actions get you in a place to do step N.

1 2

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 17m

Who said you needed one timescale of reward? Or one source of verifiable reward? Tasks are made of parts and you can evaluate the parts.

1 2

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 18m

Okay but what if you checked for intermediate task completion, say using unit tests you write in the moment to see if your action succeeded? And then what if you guided your search using a model trained on those boolean outcome labels and you used that as a dense reward over the other blocks?

1 2

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 24m

Do you? Are you sure?

1 2

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 6h

There's a reason I put "real" in scare quotes but there absolutely was a rash of cases like this, the most famous being Columbine where the shooters made a doom map of the school as practice or whatever.
bsky.app/profile/keyt...

1 1

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 6h

The default thing is that kids will ask it to do their homework and make meme edits of silly middle school in-jokes. Come on man "AI psychosis" is clearly an exceptional thing that's more like video games causing kids to shoot up schools or novels causing psychosis, "real" but extremely marginal.

1 2

Reposted by John David Pressman

Key 🗝 🦊✅ @keytryer.net · 9h

For the record, I think the video game panic and the AI panic are exactly alike:
- They were both based on newer technology.
- They were both claimed to be massively addictiv.
- All stories were about young people.
- All stories were anecdotal, extreme outliers, and poorly supported by data.

Key 🗝 🦊✅ @keytryer.net · 11h

It is republicans promoting this moral panic btw

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 14h

Draft bill being circulated would ban chatbots for minors www.axios.com/2025/10/14/h...

3 3 20

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 9h

Okay but what does that have to do with the kinds of issues a typical normie-ish Linux user is going to encounter like e.g. configuring Wine?

1 1

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 9h

I mean, you should in fact keep regular backups and be very wary of any command involving deleting things or "rm". It's not like Linux forums don't include trolls who will literally tell you to rm -rf things for the lulz.

4

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 9h

I got access to the full text a minute ago and it seems to be a misleading headline and it's actually about not letting minors access chatbots that do porn, which could be problematic since jailbreaks aren't solved but isn't quite the same thing as a total ban no.

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 9h

Use Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc. You don't have to use weird hipster distros, just ask ChatGPT for help if you have to do stuff with the terminal.

asa @anglesideangle.dev · 10h

how have i only seen zorin and omarchy mentioned in relation to windows 10 going eol... we are truly never going to have the year of the linux desktop

2 11

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 10h

This is dumb, ChatGPT would have been an incredible help when I was learning to program as a teenager, would have accelerated my career by literal years.

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 14h

Draft bill being circulated would ban chatbots for minors www.axios.com/2025/10/14/h...

Exclusive: Hawley circulating draft AI chatbot bill

Sen. Josh Hawley is turning up the heat on AI chatbot companions.

www.axios.com

4 1 22

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 11h

I would definitely include like, some norms and thoughts about what is considered a faux pass. e.g. Using AI to write something for you and presenting it as a communication from yourself is generally considered rude. I think a lot of anger is because we haven't established norms yet.

6

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 11h

Wasn't saying it was SSC, just that this is a handy link for the overall concept. All things become crab, all ideologies become Roman Christianity, which itself started off as a poor persons religion and then became kind of an inversion of Jesus's teaching.

1

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 11h

Pointed out and elaborated on at length as the carinization of ideology here.
slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/g...

Gay Rites Are Civil Rites

I. I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world’s biggest Easter celebration. I wasn’t even there for Easter. I was three weeks early. But already the roads we…

slatestarcodex.com

1 3

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 11h

I reject your metaphor and substitute my own.

1 9

Reposted by John David Pressman

🌱🐝🌧️ @cwonus.org · 22h

realizing that it's not even been 10 months of trump

it feels like years, at this point

Manifold Alerts @manifoldalerts.bsky.social · 22h

Market: Will the second No Kings protest outnumber the first?

manifold.markets/Sketchy/will...

Will the second No Kings protest outnumber the first?

28% chance. Resolves according to the estimate for total turnout on Wikipedia, according to whatever count is cited the most prominently (this includes the organizer estimate, if most prominent). For...

manifold.markets

1 15

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 1d

Increasingly capable AI agents ushering in the return of solo developer projects and small teams, but I know that's a very unpopular answer.
bsky.app/profile/doll...

Doll @dollspace.gay · 3d

github.com/dollspace-ga...

It has now reached a minimal functional level to the point it is satisfied in saying it is proof that AI coding can be used to build viable products.

It will now be accepting human assistance if anyone wishes to help contribute ^_^

GitHub - dollspace-gay/PublicAppView: A third party Appview for ATproto

A third party Appview for ATproto. Contribute to dollspace-gay/PublicAppView development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

1 1 11

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 1d

I made a Manifold Market for this.

Manifold Alerts @manifoldalerts.bsky.social · 1d

Market: Will Pritzker, Newsome, or any other state governor attempt to have the state police arrest ICE agents by July 2026?

manifold.markets/JohnDavidPre...

9

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 1d

So like, do you deliberately write like ChatGPT manually as a parody or do you edit your draft with ChatGPT and then edit it? If the latter I think you might benefit from a system prompt or something that makes it less ChatGPT sounding, just because people are allergic to the style.

Reposted by John David Pressman

ghost malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 1d

apparently i revert back to like c. 2006 muscle memory for default website displacement activity absent social media, i've had to stop myself twice from absent-mindedly checking Andrew Sullivan's blog

13 2 140

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 1d

What model is this? It looks fun.

1

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 2d

Some people don't understand that there is no amount of polite argumentation that will make a clinical narcissist stop acting like a clinical narcissist.

1 6