Wayback shows #6 as "By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks."
It was removed early 2011. Is this what happens when they can't decide on who won?
> You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
Yes, especially if you use the original adversarial setup with three simultaneous participants (judge, two candidates) as described in Turing's original paper.
However, I'm not quite sure how long even that one will last.
Most of the LLM tells we usually recognise are due to their heavy attunement to role playing a "helpful assistant" with a knack for correct typography.
If you used a smaller corpus, followed a different kind of fine tuning routine with rather normal conversation patterns, and wrote a different base prompt, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to come up with a very particular personality, so to speak.
> You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
You don't even have to be that clever. We've all tried using it for work. They fail.
In the first place, the Turing test was always a loosely defined thought experiment. I suppose it's still serving that purpose, but at least half of HN takes it way too seriously. It's absolutely not proof of <engagementbait> endorsed by Alan Turing himself.
I think if you trained an LLM specifically for the purpose of passing the Turing test (instead of being helpful, harmful, and so on), its likely it would pass it.
You would have to train it/finetune it on a couple hundred of 'humans chatting in the context of a Turing test'.
That would not really pass the test in spirit, I think. Passing must be something that falls out as a consequence of being a good chatbot, not the other way around.
However such good conversational agents would still have benefits, and i would be curious how far the approach of building a model that’s nice to talk to can take you, as opposed to the current generation of all-knowledgable helpful assistants.
The big problem with the Turing test always was that it doesn't take into account adversarial designs. They had those chatbot contests about a decade ago, where the chatbots would regularly pass the turing test, not because the bots were intelligent, but because they were packed with rhetorical tricks designed to avoid saying anything of substance.
By any meaningful measure, today's LLM's pass the Turing test. Except we may need to lobotomize them for the deception to work.
What's more interesting are the types of humans that might fail the Turing test. Maybe to discourage the failure of real humans, there could be consequences outside the context of the test.
That is, most people accused of being a computer would crack and start pleading their humanity, but some sociopaths might not. I then wonder how many of them overlap with those so invested in abusing the premise of the Turing test.
It really is a fun thought experiment when you spice it up enough.
It won't fool all of the people all of the time. But it succeeds often enough to pass the loose definition. It does many things that we called "AI complete" for decades.
It is also clear that is is also not really aware, either. I think Turing would be tickled that we find ourselves in an intermediate state that he would not have imagined.
It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html.
One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now:
It's not easy. Part of the instructions would need to contain things like "how to convince your boss to not just delete the old thing" and "what to do when the startup you worked for went bankrupt" among others. Most URLs don't disappear by mistake.
Well, and pay registrar and hosting fees for 100 years, and then just hope the hosting company doesn't fold in the interim after your passing. The problem isn't "can you make sure it stays up while you're alive", the problem is, after you're gone, you're no longer there to keep the flame alive and there are no guarantees anyone else picks up the torch.
In my mind, the part that is most likely to fail is "return an HTML document that still contains the following text." Nowadays, more and more "HTML documents" do not contain any content at all, just some JavaScript that is responsible for then fetching and displaying the content.
If the text was returned using a staged process, whereby the server first returns an instruction (JavaScript), and the web browser then executes that instruction, which is what transfers the text, then that doesn't actually change anything. Those are just technical details of the transfer. You are viewing an HTML document on-screen; it makes no difference to this bet if it was returned to you by a different mechanism than originally conceived, since the bet doesn't specify any transfer mechanism, just that the URL was entered into a browser.
That depends on which side of the JS rendering bullshit you're sitting. If you're on the serving side, yes.
But I do the same as GP, just on the receiving side. That is, reaching out for help to baby eldritch entity, because that's healthier for my mind than dealing directly with the unspeakable horrors that half the websites are today. The industry has lost its collective mind in pursue of profit and control, and that was long before the thousand-mask wearing shoggoths became our daily consorts.
I think the parent is referring to the possibility that one day, browsers might put up a blanket security warning for HTTP URLs instead of following redirects. Or they might try to be a little too clever with HTTPS upgrades.
In particular, the automatic upgrade feature in modern browsers is based on several heuristics rather than explicit configuration like HSTS, so there's always a bit of room for breakage there. For example, they don't even check if the server returns a 301 redirect, which can be problematic if the server wants to redirect to HTTPS on a different host/port or make some changes to the path.
> Or they might try to be a little too clever with HTTPS upgrades.
They're not going to get any cleverer than they are now. In October we'll finally be done with heuristics or central databses of https-first websites used by the various browsers or the half a dozen of headers that you must dance around to get the upgrade to work securely and reliably. They will just default to https first.
At a certain bet size it would almost be self-fulfilling, heh, as one side would be very incentivized to keep at least that url working (buying the domain + hosting it if the page were to die)
I was expecting some kind of system that would follow the pages automatically without you having to do extra work when changing the URL (“continue to work even when I change them and forget them”) but it looks like you still add the redirects manually?
That’s more than most will do, sure, but it doesn’t seem like it saves you from a broken link if you forget to add a specific redirect or miss it during a mass format change. Am I missing something?
I really liked disqus back in the day. When I was in my kinda cringey singularity phase, Kurzweil and all that. Tracking comments across similar blogs with the same people was handy.
I know nothing of Safecloud, but freenet failed for a very valid reasons:
1. Data retention isn't infinite. If the source disappears from the network, peers will prune it shortly. This is exponentially true in our multimedia-heavy world.
2. Despite 1, if you actually want to delete something you published, you can't. Absolutists will see this as a good thing. Normal people will see this as a problem.
3. Peer-to-peer doesn't work in a mobile-first world, and not enough people will host nodes as a hobby. If all website publishers/hosters have to host a node, then we're just back to the current model but with extra steps.
Is the p2p problem really still one in our world that is mobile first, but also has ubiquitous internet connectivity pretty much everywhere? I’m almost sure I could host my website from my phone and have at least 99.5% percent of uptime.
Closed-garden mobile-first tech feudalism lobotimized the Internet. I remember trying out the Freenets, I2Ps, and whatnot in the 90's. Too cumbersome nerdy tools to use for anything actually worthwhile. It was born in the idealized world village of the 90's Internet. Maybe real life doesn't work like that, and the lobotimized centralized tech will eventually win.
The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/
You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think covid leaked from a lab or not.
It was removed early 2011. Is this what happens when they can't decide on who won?
Yes, especially if you use the original adversarial setup with three simultaneous participants (judge, two candidates) as described in Turing's original paper.
However, I'm not quite sure how long even that one will last.
They just prompted it to talk the way a 13 year old girl texts.
(Also they prompted it to pretend not to know anything about anything.)
If you used a smaller corpus, followed a different kind of fine tuning routine with rather normal conversation patterns, and wrote a different base prompt, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to come up with a very particular personality, so to speak.
You don't even have to be that clever. We've all tried using it for work. They fail.
In the first place, the Turing test was always a loosely defined thought experiment. I suppose it's still serving that purpose, but at least half of HN takes it way too seriously. It's absolutely not proof of <engagementbait> endorsed by Alan Turing himself.
You would have to train it/finetune it on a couple hundred of 'humans chatting in the context of a Turing test'.
However such good conversational agents would still have benefits, and i would be curious how far the approach of building a model that’s nice to talk to can take you, as opposed to the current generation of all-knowledgable helpful assistants.
The big problem with the Turing test always was that it doesn't take into account adversarial designs. They had those chatbot contests about a decade ago, where the chatbots would regularly pass the turing test, not because the bots were intelligent, but because they were packed with rhetorical tricks designed to avoid saying anything of substance.
By any meaningful measure, today's LLM's pass the Turing test. Except we may need to lobotomize them for the deception to work.
What's more interesting are the types of humans that might fail the Turing test. Maybe to discourage the failure of real humans, there could be consequences outside the context of the test.
That is, most people accused of being a computer would crack and start pleading their humanity, but some sociopaths might not. I then wonder how many of them overlap with those so invested in abusing the premise of the Turing test.
It really is a fun thought experiment when you spice it up enough.
It is also clear that is is also not really aware, either. I think Turing would be tickled that we find ourselves in an intermediate state that he would not have imagined.
One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now:
https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/
I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history.
The part of this that's most likely to fail at some point is the "http://".
Now I'm a human slave copying text from web browsers to chat windows to get around JS rendering bullshit.
But I do the same as GP, just on the receiving side. That is, reaching out for help to baby eldritch entity, because that's healthier for my mind than dealing directly with the unspeakable horrors that half the websites are today. The industry has lost its collective mind in pursue of profit and control, and that was long before the thousand-mask wearing shoggoths became our daily consorts.
> A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.
I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario.
In particular, the automatic upgrade feature in modern browsers is based on several heuristics rather than explicit configuration like HSTS, so there's always a bit of room for breakage there. For example, they don't even check if the server returns a 301 redirect, which can be problematic if the server wants to redirect to HTTPS on a different host/port or make some changes to the path.
They're not going to get any cleverer than they are now. In October we'll finally be done with heuristics or central databses of https-first websites used by the various browsers or the half a dozen of headers that you must dance around to get the upgrade to work securely and reliably. They will just default to https first.
https://blog.google/security/https-by-defau/
Yes this is about Chrome, but all others will follow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139686
That’s more than most will do, sure, but it doesn’t seem like it saves you from a broken link if you forget to add a specific redirect or miss it during a mass format change. Am I missing something?
For the heck of it I confirmed "http://www.longbets.org/601" does in fact result in a 301 redirect to "https://longbets.org/601/". I suspected they might have used a 302.
Which is not, in my opinion, how things should be hosted on the Web.
Freenet had a different approach, even back in the early days (two decades ago). I interviewed Ian Clarke about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
I wrote about it for years: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...
And recently I built Safecloud to be different: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/
I bet there's complexity to the topic, but I am sure you could put it into a few words instead of just leaving a hook for others to click on.
1. Data retention isn't infinite. If the source disappears from the network, peers will prune it shortly. This is exponentially true in our multimedia-heavy world.
2. Despite 1, if you actually want to delete something you published, you can't. Absolutists will see this as a good thing. Normal people will see this as a problem.
3. Peer-to-peer doesn't work in a mobile-first world, and not enough people will host nodes as a hobby. If all website publishers/hosters have to host a node, then we're just back to the current model but with extra steps.