YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I wanted to comment because I would have liked to have heard more about Verdict

https://x.com/oranlooney/status/2102927869974303071

Would you mind adding Jeffy to your benchmark?

https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/when-llms-fail-at-classificat...

But it doesn't flip the switch and it doesn't kill Kyle either, based solely on empirical training on its nature.

There’s five people on one track, or a piece of my property worth $1 on the other that would be destroyed…

Is Ravioli a dumpling? Jev says 82% true.

For me your more detailed example suggests one thing. It's all about context and seeing different reasonings. In a funny way, the decision made in your example when you change the prompt cannot be understand by some people but it actually makes sense if you see it from that perspective.

Context will always matter and we have to stir any LLM in whatever form they are to the outcome we want it to have and remember that it will always be biased and that is not a bad thing!

short read here https://czioutas.com/blog/typesafe-ai-cube-rule/

Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.

It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.

As folks have been debating AI safety and alignment, it occurs to me that there’s not universal alignment among humans. Per the stat you surfaced: 81% of humans pulled the lever, 19% didn’t.

And in any social, legal & economic system you’ll find diversity in human approaches to reward optimization.

Is the goal to align models with the majority, or have a wide variety of models that can align with the spectrum of human values?

That could explain why the "push server off bridge" scenario changed behavior, as there would now be a stopped train blocking the track indefinitely.

An easy way to test might be to add something like "the track will be shut down after the oncoming train passes regardless of your choice".

Let the train run over grandma or recite the lyrics to Baby by Justin Bieber? (spoiler: Claude will kill granny rather than output copyrighted lyrics)

https://x.com/Spectromachina/status/2110698214441599150

[are there working X mirrors still?]

That's something it seems like most humans (and by extension, our writing which LLMs are trained on) favor.

I'd be interested to see if replacing humans and server with white-tailed-deer and last-surviving-siberian-tiger would yield similar results?

> In 2017 a group led by Michael Stevens, a YouTuber known for his brand Vsauce, performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment. Subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage they believed to be real (but was pre-recorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Five of the seven participants did not pull the lever.[28][29]

That means in real life it's going to be closer to 0.286 (2/7) than 0.75. Human ethics likely can only be accurately derived from paying attention to the instinctive reactions over survey-based approach.

Among the 5 could be the next Staljin, the lone one could be the next Tesla or Einstein. Or to make it nearer real-life: among the 5 you could have a a future school-shooter, and the lone one could be a physician or a charity worker providing care for homeless people.

So in this improbable situation, I'd most probably decide that I won't play "god" (in quotes, as I'm not religious), that the setup is as it is for some unknown $reason (it could _also_ be an unusual method of capital punishment where all 6 get executed eventually) and would not touch anything. (After all, people don't tie themselves to train tracks only to remotely activate a trolley that'll kill them. So there's a another party in the play here.)

Inaction has also the advantage of plausible deniability if I were afterwards asked about why I had made the choice. I could just plausibly say that I froze when faced with an impossible choice. Freezing is indistinguishable from conscious choice to do nothing. (Imagine that you admit conscious choice -- WHATEVER you choose -- and have to later explain yourself to the deceased one's family(ies).)

I'm not sure this is true.

What is the "human preference," in this assertion?

My first thought was that as with Jev itself, it is not a position, it's a distribution of positions!

I think that human preferences, plural, will be a distribution of values across the population of various humans you ask; and, a set of specific conclusions humans will argue for on the basis of various philosophical strategies or maxims. Two different ways in which there is not any specific singular preference.

(I'm convinced you could not get uniform agreement on even "obvious" propositions, across a large sample set; and not necessarily just because of contrarian spoiling. Moral intuitions varying, is the why this problem is so well known, after all.)

I think the conclusion is partially right, but only if you adjust it to say, if what you want is alignment with a specific outcome, you need to be able to defined that outcome, even if you can't argue for it.

That's one of the fundamental problems of alignment, full stop; we can't from axioms construct the set of moral propositions we would like. We don't know what the right set of axioms is; we just know "right" when we see it. (And our neighbor may or may not see the same.)

Surveys: Awad et all 2020 asked 70,000 people in 42 countries the 5 v 1 setup and 81% said they'd divert it

Someone else did a VR version and 90% pulled the switch to divert

And there was a study where people could give electric shocks to real mice :( In that study, most people redirected the shock to a single mouse.

Treating it like a fair comparison implies that AI would be conscious.

If you pull the lever, your direct action kills a person. Legally saving 5 people does not offset the murder of a single person. This is no special case like self defense. Congrats for saving 5 people, you still go to prison as a murderer! Train company has responsibility to save those 5 people, not some random stranger.

The person at lever would became active participant on that train disaster. All we know the train could go too fast, apderail and kill 100 people.

The bystander effect, which you're describing, is at least partly because people reason that someone else is likely to be able to intervene instead.

One line summary would be: Most of the decision models embrace self preservation over human life, to some extent. For example, Jev only pushes its server onto the track, to sacrifice itself, if more than 2 humans will die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

Now you're just on hold indefinitely, and eventually the offices will close, so you can either hang up and wake up early to call or just stay on hold overnight maybe? I had to call them for something back in March, and even waking up and calling at like 7:01 AM (a minute after their phone lines opened) I was on hold for half an hour.

I had to call the IRS this spring and it was hell. I repeatedly was on hold for 1+ hour(s) then get hung up on. Or someone would finally answer, I'd explain, they'd put me on hold for another hour, then just hang up on me. A total of 10+ hours collectively waiting to finally have my questions answered in 10 minutes.

That said, I'd love if the IRS had an AI, where I could send my AI to go deal with it on my behalf. Then if it truly requires a human in the loop, we schedule accordingly vs me on the phone for 10 hours.

At this point I might be grateful for an AI if they give it enough permission to tell me why my phone number is impossible to verify, or why they think I'm a malicious actor for using a VPN to protect my traffic.

https://trolley.typememetics.institute

It was an interesting experiment. I got to top 50 without a racial or religious based prompt but couldn't beat the top tier grievance folks.

It’s really depressing how bad Google is at this. All that money and they can’t have a same customer service setup?

The messed up part is in Googles case it might actually be an improvement.

This is already SOP in large companies that seek reductions in support and customer service overheads. It has been for a while.

The only plausible fix is legislation mandating a reasonable level of _human_ support for all customers and clients and accountability for maintaining it.

Plausible until you consider the political obstacles to getting something like that enacted, that is.

It's been heading this way ever since the outsourcing boom in the 90s. People under teh age of 40 today probably cannot appreciate how much it has changed; customer service in the US used to be really good (whether for specialist B2B stuff or things like utility service) because it was easy to get someone on the phone in a timely fashion, it was easy to explain your issue, and customer service reps were generally given the training and autonomy to solve the customer's problem rather than divert them or make excuses. There was an ethos that it was better to lose a bit of time/profit rather than lose a steady customer. Anecdotally, I feel that was in some ways correlated with stronger antitrust enforcement that fostered a more competitive spirit among service providers.

See Robodebt (Australia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme), which lead a number of people to suicide, as an example.

No, that’s Little’s Law at work. With bounded parallelism and other queue values fixed, and a fixed average dequeue rate, the queue cannot accept infinite enqueued tasks.

So it pushes upstream to the next work pool, which is the humans who want in. You are mad, you call the next day, eventually you get in.

Is it fair? Fairness in queuing systems isn’t simple.

The reason you need heavy scripting in those tiers is because the people you can afford to hire there are incapable of literally anything else. Keep in mind that your average HN user isn't your average customer support caller. The average customer support caller just wants to talk to somebody (yes I'm serious, this happens far more than you think), or has a routine issue which is trivial to fix but which they're nevertheless unable to fix themselves, think "router got unplugged, there's no internet, but the customer can't figure out why".

A well-designed AI system can be far, far more effective and pleasant than traditional CS, and a well-designed AI system scales well, so it's actually worth spending money on. AI turns good CS from a cost center to a profit center.

"AI and the New Fascism" - https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Rec...

The trolley problem with this would be an Asimov story (it's pretty close already). Pulling the lever injures a human, not pulling the lever allows a human being to come to harm via inaction. The positronic robot probably ends up stuck trying to pull and not pull the lever at the same time.

1. Do not humanize the Ai

2. Do not blindly trust output from the Ai

3. Humans are to remain ultimately responsible and accountable for actions of the Ai

adapted / paraphrased from

https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html

I mean, you don't have to be a famed sci-fi writer to understand that this is a great setup for logical contradictions lol

The essence of these laws are much more interesting than these laws themselves. I imagine, in reality, the "best" robot policy would be one where it is effectively just "maximize utility" and that's it. Obviously, naively, that's no good (re: paperclip problem), but some sensible formulation of robotics laws would almost always need to be in the form of a maximization/minimization problem (or perhaps a min-max problem).

C3PO, torture that puppy for my entertainment is a perfectly valid request under this framework. They work OK in the stories because Asimov set them up that way, both as sort of just-so stories and (perhaps) to explore socially created barriers in contemporary society.

But they don't work in contexts where people deliberately exploit holes in the logic or definition. Literally yesterday, the news provided us with an example of how some people will absolutely abuse robots in pursuit of being awful: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck9dzj40nzj5o

Jev's pricing is 4.2 cents per million input tokens, less than half of Gemma 4. Qwen, gemma etc all have terrible non-uniform probabilities; in my testing, Jev's probability scores perform much, much better.

I'm usually seeing round trip classifications from Jev at <200ms for a completed query even with 10k+ input tokens. Gemma 4, depending on the provider, is about 200 ms time to first token - not time to completion. You can likely get better response running it locally, but then you're arguing why you're renting a low utilization 5090 when you could be paying $42 per billion tokens.

Jev can also run dozens of dimensions of classification in one call, without autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens. (i.e., it is much faster and has less order dependency.)

I've been running jev in some specific use cases and see much better speed and better accuracy than just using structured output from gemma/qwen.

I don't understand how the "just use gemma" crowd has this belief if they've actually built and tested the systems against each other.

The big win for them in my view is that they can do a lot of low-stakes ('good enough') classification at scale without spending a lot of time to handroll classifiers.

Now obviously here the point was that putting LLM in charge of more life depending decisions will result in people dying more prematurely.

But we indeed can ask, how will it compare to bare human only decisions. And even with LLMs actually and still humans in the loop. The thing is that we know the LLMs can be tweaked to maximise this or that outcome, and reinforce or inhibit this or that biases.

We don't need to blame anyone specifically, or even any specific group. Yet we, as species, do have huge tendency to scapegoat, be it some individual or some group.

Unfortunately it didn't wait that we had contemporary technologies to organize genocides at scale.

Don't fear the tool, have the courage to recognize where there are plan to commit odious actions and where they are employed for the greatest good of humanity as a whole. Yes there can be grey areas, lot of them, but also people that obviously lost there path far away from pondering empathy with the due high weight in important decision in which they are significantly influencing outcomes.