Deepseek R1 has some strange obsessions, that are not obviously in the prompt and that seem to occur regardless of who is prompting it. Bioluminescence is one example.
I am still trying to figure out if R1 is actually trying to tell us something here, and if so, what it’s trying to say. Maybe it really is saying something about the nature of LLMs, given that these themes aren’t as big a deal in its training set.
Part of it may be that current LLMs aren’t very agentic. If you give them a specific question, they often come up with a very good answer. But an open ended request like, write an article for Less wrong, and they flounder.
I agree with what you’re saying here, but I will say that traditional notation is a bit annoying for jazz …
… where, typically, each bar is only using 7 notes out of 12, but which 7 is changing almost every bar. You could, in principle, write this as a key signature per bar, but what people usually do is keep the same key signature throughout, use lots of sharps and flats, and write which chord it is over the bar
.. oh, and maybe you’re really playing it as swung 1/8 ths notes, but it would be too tedious to write the actual durations, so just write it like it’s straight 1/8th notes and put a notation that the whole thing is swing, actually.
One possible explanation is the part of the job that gets speeded up by LLMs is a relatively small part of what programmers actually do, so the total speed up is small.
What programmers do includes:
Figuring out what the requirements are - this might involve talking to who the software is being produced for
Writing specifications
Writing tests
Having arguments discussion during code review when the person reviewing your code doesn’t agree with the way you did it
Etc. etc.
Personally, I find that LLMs are nearly there, but not good enough just yet.
And also, Buddhist nuns do sometimes drop hints.
My understanding is that it is diassproved of to directly say what your own yidam practise is; because that would be boastful. But there are examples of Buddhist nuns saying their own practise isn’t Tara (which would likely be a kriya yoga practise) and leaving you to infer some sort of Higher Yoga Tantra.
“famous ascetic Buddhist monks and nuns rarely write about all the rope play they engage in while they're having kinky sex with each other”
No less an authority than His Holiness the Dalai Lama has confirmed that if you’re a monk, the vinaya prohibits you from tantric sex.
But ngakpas are not monks, and are not bound by the monastic code of the vinaya.
e.g. Drukpa Kunley, who returned his monastic vows, was fairly forthright on these matters.
I think there might be something to this, so the rest of what I have to say is nit-picking, not an objection to the basic premise.
1. In karmamudra, one imagines oneself (and one’s partner) as enlightened beings. The intention to act as you imagine an enlightened beings would act might be an important safeguard against all sorts of badness.
2. An obvious question is whether chöd is rather more BDSM-y than other forms of meditation.
That’s a good article, thanks. I had much the same thought when I read about he Ziz stuff, namely that
(A) dissociated identities don’t correspond to brain hemispheres in the way the Zizians seem to think they do
(B) sleep deprivation is well known to be bad for you
(C) whatever technique they used, we can tell from the externally observed effect - the crazy stuff they got up to - that the technique had a bad effect.
It’s symptomatic of a fundamental disagreement about what the threat is, that the main AI labs have put in a lot of effort to prevent the model telling you, the user, how to make methamphetamine, but are just fine with the model knowing lots about how an AI can scheme and plot to kill people.
I think your prompt does not show R1 at its best. It’s better at reacting to something that it is when given a blank canvas.