> I don't see why not. They see that good behavior gives a better outcome. They'll do good behavior in the future.

Suppose Anon says, "I'm going to rob a bank next Monday."

Police respond, "We will be ready there next Monday, and you will be arrested."

Anon replies, "Ah, I see! Never mind, then."

We can certainly say it's good that Anon changed their mind after being met with promises of consequences. But, in my opinion, saying something like "Anon is a fine, upstanding citizen, worthy of praise, unlike those other criminals that actually went through with it! Now that Anon understands it's bad, they'll surely never think to plan something so dastardly in the future!" is leaving reality behind. Anon has done the bare minimum, and likewise deserves the bare minimum of praise. In terms of incentive, I think such a response would only teach Anon to be sneakier, now that they've earned some trust.

I'm not saying we should say the company is overall good. Just that the decision to backtrack was good.

Similarly, we wouldn't say that Anon is overall upstanding, just that the decision to not rob that bank was good.

My point is that we should treat the company better if it backtracks. And similarly we should treat Anon better if he doesn't rob the bank. It doesn't make sense to give Anon the exact same punishment whether he robs the bank or not. If we do that, he has no incentive not to rob the bank. "If I'm going to jail either way, I might as well actually rob the bank."

I'll preface by saying I fully agree that psychics aren't providing any non-placebo value to believers, although I think it's fine to provide entertainment for non-believers.

> Or, better, solving the underlying problem that the placebo "helps".

The underlying problems are often a lack of a decent education and a generally difficult/unsatisfying life. Systemic issues which can't be meaningfully "solved" without massive resources and political will.

If we look back over the last century or so, I think we've made excellent progress on that. The main current barrier is that we've lately let people with various pathologies run wild, but historically that creates enough problems that the political will emerges. See, e.g., the American and French revolutions, or India's independence, or the US civil war and Reconstruction.

Actually, I'd go one step further and say they are harmful to everybody else.

It might just be my circles, but I've seen Carl Sagans quote everywhere in the last couple of months.

"“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”"

reddit was also open source at one point, so at least in theory anybody could run their own copy. I agree Stallman is far from reasonable but AFAIK he's consistent with his unreasonable standards.

> Any test you can device for this, ChatGPT would reliably pass if the medium was text, while a good fraction of humans might actually fail.

That's clearly untrue unless you qualify "test" as "objective automated test." Otherwise, "convince Stallman you have intelligence according to his definition," is a test that ChatGPT hasn't passed and which every human probably would:

> I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.

Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators.

edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does sometimes output names like that. So the pattern is probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM almost always prefers to use actual separators like underscore.

The tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"):

    lower|case|un|se|parated|name

FB maintains a distinct version of Thrift from the one they gave to Apache. fbthrift is far from dead as it's actively used across FB. However in typical FB fashion it's not supported for external use, making it open source in name (license) only.

As an interesting historical note, Thrift was inspired by Protobuf.

It's not a question of whether it can be applied retroactively, it's whether the existing license is revocable. Open source licenses are not revocable as it would defeat the purpose if copyright holders could simply revoke the original license at will.

> I mean if someone says “be kind to animals get a dog” you already know they don’t quite know what “being kind to animals” is. If they say “all humans end up where I am” (even just in terms of age) you already know they don’t quite know what “all humans” is.

Oh come on. We can quibble about the quality of the post and OP's character, but you're just blatantly misrepresenting their words. They did not say "get a dog," they said there are "few joys like having a dog." More importantly, it is incredibly obvious that when they say "all humans end up where I am," they're referring to facing death, not the specifics of their age, background, or present circumstances.

Why is your premise that this state of society is intrinsically caused by technological progress? The issues you describe seem to me a product of general economic trends.

Perhaps he has chosen the best use of his last few years to his own satisfaction, and doesn't feel the need to share every last detail about himself on the internet.