Seems very "packable into a standalone binary" but doesn't seem like that is a planned use case.

The problem would be cross-platform support. In the end the capsule file is the standalone binary similar to a PDF or a Word document, you only need the viewer app to open any capsule file.

you can trivially bake X binaries if you have the viewer app for each platform. This is the normal way to distribute software for cross-platform support.

I might just be hyper-defensive to any sort of vendor lock-in like a "viewer app".

The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.

Strangely, I think it does "care" or at least would perform caring.

Capitalism doesn't care what you feel. LLMs are just a distillation of the entire human written corpus, there is a lot of "caring" in there. Companies are simply spinning out threads of behavior from the corpus that serve them instead of serving all of us.

To be fair communism doesn't care what you feel either only what the party feels

is there a case for a long lived animal being a cannibal? I would imagine that prion risk will select for aversion.

Salmons decay after spawning, then die. Their offspring eat the nutrients presents in the water, including their parents leftovers.

Fyi octopus is a Greek not Latin word (meaning 8 feet) and its correct plural would be rather octopodes.

Octopi is equally correct because we're speaking English and frequency of use trumps etymological cromulence.

Octopuses works too. I quite like "Octopods" because -podes is unusual in English, though not entirely absent (see Antipodes).

(I'm not sure "an Octopi" is correct in any of these cases!)

Ding ding! We've found our best candidate for ambassador to a newly discovered alien species!

I'd go, fully expecting to be eaten for the good of mankind.

The most powerful change I have run into is: "Positive phrasing" as a default, prefer to tell the model what they should do, and why. Not a prohibition on a behavior.

When you say "don't do x" you are just pre-seeding the model with "x" and the prohibition mitigates that some, but not as much as never having put "x" in the context in the first place.

"Do Y, for these reasons" can be shaped to achieve what you mean by "Don't do X"

"Don't do X" leads to "Wait, I need to make sure I didn't X" and "Let's look up X to make sure I don't do that." And each time the odds of X happening keeps going up, not down.

My experience is that the LLM will be less creative than the human in this situation. Necessity is the mother of invention. Prison is a special sort of neolithic age.

What does that look like? Dropped in a foreign country without money or documents. Likely in the custody of a government who doesn't care.

How do you re-enter the country?

Whatever country will accept the lowest bribe. So likely somewhere in Africa. SA would be too close, almost walk back

My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.

We have long passed at least my owner personal "threshold of evidence" to assume that Mars had life.

That bar is pretty low. I am not hard to convince.

We don't have a baseline by which to contextualize the situation statistically. There is no p-value we can meaningfully satisfy. Worse than that, evidence required for a belief derives from the risk of being wrong.

Is there a discussion of what evidence WOULD be enough for the scientific community to say loudly "There was life on mars". Because right now it seems all risk and no utility, so the evidence bar would be really high.

The bar for scientific discoveries is generally incredibly high and rightly so. In particle physics for example for a discovery to be confirmed it must be independently verified by a second experiment and both the discovering experiment and confirming experiment must be within five standard deviations (or a roughly 1 in 3.5 million) chance of not being a discovery. Its not a perfect comparison because astrobiology is messier but it is useful to see how high the bar is.

For a discovery of the magnitude of life outside our planet the scientific community would probably need something like: a real and well-characterised signal, multiple independent lines of evidence, strong geological context, replication by independent teams, and a serious failure of plausible alternate explanations. Until then, “potential biosignature” is probably the right phrase.

To be clear, I think like you that there probably was life at some point on Mars. I am pretty convinced. But, you and I being pretty convinced does not come close to the threshold of a scientific discovery.

We can say we discovered signs there might've once been life on Mars