I seriously doubt he ever worked anywhere like that, not to mention that he’s too spineless to actually get in trouble IRL.

He’s such a complete moron. He doesn’t want to recite “DEI shibboleths”? What does he even think that would refer to? Why shibboleths?

To spell it out, that would refer to an antisemitic theory that the reason (for example) some black guy would get a medal of honor (the “deimedal”) is because of the jews.

I swear this guy is dumber than Trump. Trump for all his rambling, uses actual language - Trump understands what the shit he is saying means to his followers. Scott… he really does not.

I just describe it as “computer scientology, nowhere near as successful as the original”.

The other thing is that he’s a Thiel project, different but not any more sane than Curtis Yarvin aka Moldbug. So if they heard of moldbug’s political theories (which increasingly many people heard about because of, well, them being enacted) it’s easy to give a general picture of total fucking insanity funded by thiel money. It doesn’t really matter what the particular insanity is, and it matters even less now as the AGI shit hit mainstream entirely bypassing anything Yudkowsky had to say on the subject.

Other thing to add to this is that there’s just one or two people in the train providing service for hundreds of other people or millions of dollars worth of goods. Automating those people away is simply not economical, not even in terms of the headcount replaced vs headcount that has to be hired to maintain the automation software and hardware.

Unless you’re a techbro, who deeply resents labor, someone who would rather hire 10 software engineers than 1 train driver.

Also, my thought on this is that since an LLM has no internal state with which to represent the state of the problem, it can’t ever actually solve any variation of the river crossing. Not even those that it “solves” correctly.

If it outputs the correct sequence, inside your head the model of the problem will be in the solved state, but on the LLM’s side there’s just a sequence of steps that it wrote down, with those steps directly inhibiting production of another “Trip” token, until that crosses a threshold. There isn’t an inventory or even a count of items, there’s an unrelated number that weights for or against “Trip”.

If we are to anthropomorphize it (which we shouldn’t, but anyway), it’s bullshitting up an answer and it gradually gets a feeling that it has bullshitted enough, which can happen at the right moment, or not.