Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

  > I was reminded again of my tweets that said "Be good, future LLMs are watching". You can take that in many directions, but here I want to focus on the idea that future LLMs are watching. Everything we do today might be scrutinized in great detail in the future because doing so will be "free". A lot of the ways people behave currently I think make an implicit "security by obscurity" assumption. But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good.

Can we take a second and talk about how dystopian this is? Such an outcome is not inevitable, it relies on us making it. The future is not deterministic, the future is determined by us. Moreso, Karpathy has significantly more influence on that future than your average HN user.

We are doing something very *very* wrong if we are operating under the belief that this future is unavoidable. That future is simply unacceptable.

Given the quality of the judgment I'm not worried, there is no value here.

To properly execute this idea rather than to just toss it off without putting in the work to make it valuable is exactly what irritates me about a lot of AI work. You can be 900 times as productive at producing mental popcorn, but if there was value to be had here we're not getting it, just a whiff of it. Sure, fun project. But I don't feel particularly judged here. The funniest bit is the judgment on things that clearly could not yet have come to pass (for instance because there is an exact date mentioned that we have not yet reached). QA could be better.

I think you're missing the actual problem.

I'm not worried about this project but instead harvesting, analyzing all that data and deanonymizing people.

That's exactly what Karparthy is saying. He's not being shy about it. He said "behave because the future panopticon can look into the past". Which makes the panopticon effectively exist now.

  Be good, future LLMs are watching
  ...
  or humans using them might be

That's the problem. Not the accuracy of this toy project, but the idea of monitoring everyone and their entire history.

The idea that we have to behave as if we're being actively watched by the government is literally the setting of 1984 lol. The idea that we have to behave that way now because a future government will use the Panopticon to look into the past is absolutely unhinged. You don't even know what the rules of that world will be!

Did we forget how unhinged the NSA's "harvest now, decrypt later" strategy is? Did we forget those giant data centers that were all the news talked about for a few weeks?

That's not the future I want to create, is it the one you want?

To act as if that future is unavoidable is a failure of *us*

Yes, you are right, this is a real problem. But it really is just a variation on 'the internet never forgets', for instance in relation to teen behavior online. But AI allows for weaponization of such information. I wish the wannabe politicians of 2050 much good luck with their careers, they are going to be the most boring people available.

The internet never forgets but you could be anonymous. Or at least somewhat. But that's getting harder and harder

If such a thing isn't already possible (it is to a certain extent), we are headed towards a point where your words alone will be enough to fingerprint you.

Stylometry killed that a long time ago. There was a website, stylometry.net that coupled HN accounts based on text comparison and ranked the 10 best candidates. It was incredibly accurate and allowed id'ing a bunch of people that had gotten banned but that came back again. Based on that I would expect that anybody that has written more than a few KB of text to be id'able in the future.

You need a person's text with their actual identity to pull that off. Normally that's pretty hard, especially since you'll get different formats. Like I don't write the same way on Twitter as HN. But yeah, this stuff has been advancing and I don't think it is okay.

The AOL scandal pretty much proved that anonymity is a mirage. You may think you are anonymous but it just takes combining a few unrelated databases to de-anonymize you. HN users think they are anonymous but they're not, they drop factoids all over the place about who they are. 33 bits... it is one of my recurring favorite themes and anybody in the business of managing other people's data should be well aware of the risks.