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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

    “Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.





  • Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.




  • It looks like there is a lot to do even for small sites if you assess that you might be in the “multi-risk” category. How do you know if you’re in the “multi-risk” category? Well, you’re supposed to write a risk assessment, but if I were running a site as a hobby I wouldn’t trust my own assessment, I’d want a professional opinion due to the significant legal liability for getting it wrong, and professional opinions cost money. If it turns out you’re low- or single-risk it looks like you can skip a lot of the stuff that big sites have to deal with, but if it turns out you’re multi-risk then it looks like you need to be sure all sorts of measures are in place, some of which may require building capabilities that you don’t have yet, and there are additional requirements related to training and materials for volunteers, etc.

    I don’t even run a site and I’m getting stressed reading about it, I don’t blame anyone for deciding it’s not worth it.