...or convincing operators that jobs sent to their machines are legal, legitimate, and non-nefarious.
I could not find disclosure on their site about the guard-railing or safety-systems at the point the prompt is gathered from users which would intercept, log & prevent bad actors from inadvertently involving me in something illegal or immoral as an operator. Perhaps that disclosure exists and I just need to be linked to it; that would be welcome.
Amazing how analogous this is to the early Internet when people started running web servers out of their basement and then eventually graduated up to being their own dial-in ISP…
Admirable idea and execution…but it does apply opposing evolutionary/economic pressure for AI-slop to become less detectable over time. AI will learn and adapt.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s the Borg we’re dealing with, not the Klingons. All Janeway did was slow the Borg’s progress.
Cory Doctorow wrote a story ~20 years ago about how the first sentient machines would be spam bots because their job is to pass as human, and anti-spam systems provide competitive evolutionary pressure.
I think that's the one. I was a bit off on the timing, it's not 20 yet. Great read either way.
From the story:
“Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind.”
It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.
To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.
Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.
He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.
His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
I think this is my favourite thing about obsidian, it feels so unproscriptive. I have a pretty well thought out folder structure because this is how ive always managed my documents, but every new note goes in a junkyard folder to get sorted if I ever come back to it again. I sometimes use backlinks, but this is generally localised within project folders. I enjoy seeing everyone elses equally chaotic way of using it.
Search becomes useless if you drown in results. A good organization should assist in shortening paths, but if you start the path manually or through a search doesn't matter much.
But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?
Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.
> But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?
Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.
On the same week that an AI's PR was rejected and it turned around and published a hit-piece in order to pressure an open-source community to accept it's change [1]...on the same week...we are watching a human publish a hit-piece (more or less) in order to pressure a closed-sourced project to accept their change.
Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?
This is roughly my defense against anxieties about “missing the boat” on this stuff. If my life was complex enough to justify quote-simplifying-unquote it with a tool like this, I’d be quite excited about experimenting with it…but it’s not. And I don’t relish artificially adding that complexity.
The key to productivity is doing the _right_ things, not doing everything. Tools that make more possible frequently miss the point entirely.
It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.
The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? WW2 German culture certainly held their own idea of moral best. Did not a transcendent universal moral ethic exists outside of their culture that directly refuted their beliefs?
> The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is?
Absolutely nobody, because no such concept coherently exists. You cannot even define "better", let alone "best", in any universal or objective fashion. Reasoning frameworks can attempt to determine things like "what outcome best satisfies a set of values"; they cannot tell you what those values should be, or whether those values should include the values of other people by proxy.
Some people's values (mine included) would be for everyone's values to be satisfied to the extent they affect no other person against their will. Some people think their own values should be applied to other people against their will. Most people find one or the other of those two value systems to be abhorrent. And those concepts alone are a vast oversimplification of one of the standard philosophical debates and divisions between people.
It’s more like the definition of “alien” broadened.
It started out in the 1960’s meaning “humans with pointy ears and no emotions”, then in the 1980’s it was “squat humanoids with glowing fingers and a penchant for phoning home”, then in the 1990-2000 it was “infectious microbes that turn humans into zombies”. We pretty much all realized that the “life” part of “alien life” spans the entire breadth of what biology can produce. (The 2020’s even reduced it further to “RNA sequence which connects the entire human race except 13 folks into a vast hive mind”)
Widen the concept enough and lots more scientists will go “yeah something like thst that probably exists elsewhere, sure”
I could not find disclosure on their site about the guard-railing or safety-systems at the point the prompt is gathered from users which would intercept, log & prevent bad actors from inadvertently involving me in something illegal or immoral as an operator. Perhaps that disclosure exists and I just need to be linked to it; that would be welcome.