Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I like the comment on the site about blockchains replacing HTML links (from 4 years ago).by predictsoft
- This is basically a bet on if you think longbets is going to be around.by cortesoft
- It's all a matter of whether someone is willing to pay for the hosting.
Which is not, in my opinion, how things should be hosted on the Web.
Freenet had a different approach, even back in the early days (two decades ago). I interviewed Ian Clarke about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
I wrote about it for years: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...
And recently I built Safecloud to be different: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/
by EGreg - On HN, a TLDR would be helpful, because just clicking your links would potentially mean falling for shilling of ones own side-hustle.
I bet there's complexity to the topic, but I am sure you could put it into a few words instead of just leaving a hook for others to click on.
by hypfer - Anyway to find all bets expiring this year? it will be interesting to see. Could not find a way to search for it there.by sucuri2
- Some nice posts about his prediction on Jeremy Keith's blog:
- Wow, that could be a post of it’s ownby doubletwoyou
- Amazing that Disqus comments are still live for this page. More impressive even than the website itself being live.by vvoyer
- I'm grateful the comments are still there, since they reminded me to get back in touch with my old friend Craig Hubley!by DonHopkins
- I really liked disqus back in the day. When I was in my kinda cringey singularity phase, Kurzweil and all that. Tracking comments across similar blogs with the same people was handy.by jamiek88
- One thing I've done is include my redirect rules with the web application. So my links continue to work even when I change them and forget them.by firefoxd
- I was expecting some kind of system that would follow the pages automatically without you having to do extra work when changing the URL (“continue to work even when I change them and forget them”) but it looks like you still add the redirects manually?
That’s more than most will do, sure, but it doesn’t seem like it saves you from a broken link if you forget to add a specific redirect or miss it during a mass format change. Am I missing something?
by latexr - At a certain bet size it would almost be self-fulfilling, heh, as one side would be very incentivized to keep at least that url working (buying the domain + hosting it if the page were to die)by matsemann
- Someone should do a long bet on the continuous existence of longbets.comby 9dev
- I'm not sure how it played out in 2011, but as of now it looks like the win condition hinges on the redirect.
For the heck of it I confirmed "http://www.longbets.org/601" does in fact result in a 301 redirect to "https://longbets.org/601/". I suspected they might have used a 302.
by mike_d - > entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 into the address bar of a web browser or command line tool (like curl)
The part of this that's most likely to fail at some point is the "http://".
by JoshTriplett - The detailed terms of the bet include this:
> A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.
I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario.
by ywain - In my mind, the part that is most likely to fail is "return an HTML document that still contains the following text." Nowadays, more and more "HTML documents" do not contain any content at all, just some JavaScript that is responsible for then fetching and displaying the content.by ludwik
- It's worth noting that some prediction URLs, for instance: https://longbets.org/6/ are offline.
The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/
You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think covid leaked from a lab or not.
by CSMastermind - By 2029 things will be different. Humans will have learned to talk like LLMs.by hahahaa
- >You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
While LLMs are very capable of appearing human in general conversation, the test is that they are trying to convince a human that they are human, which is not something that is in their training data and I suspect they would go about things in very odd ways from an actual person, especially when challenged by an actual person. It is still very easy to back LLMs into a corner where they fall into very unnatural patterns and in my experience challenging them on their "humanness" (or anything) backs them into that corner.
LLMs also still can't use context or subtext in natural ways and even people who are terrible with purposefully exploiting context and subtext, generally have a natural ability that they developed to use and parse them. In a short conversation that is not adversarial, this is not an issue but falls apart as the length of the conversation grows or they start getting challenged.
LLMs just don't play with ideas and conversation like we do, they don't riff on it and go with the flow without care, picking up on subtexts and contexts and manipulating them the way people constantly do without effort until they find themselves on the edge of a cliff looking into the void and debating if they should jump. If we are put into the situation of proving we are human (in an academic test sort of way) we will play with it and have fun with it, and we will find ourselves on that cliff looking into the void, debating if we should expose ourselves and admit things we normally wouldn't. We pick up on this when people do it, even over the internet, their way of stating things changes and their subtext falls away or drastically changes; I have never seen anything approaching this in LLMs.
by ofalkaed - > You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
I think the clear winning strategy is to find some of the common sense reasoning fails that are still quite common, like the "should I walk or drive to the car wash" one from a few months ago.
by tsimionescu - >https://longbets.org/6/
Anyone know why this (and many other bets) have been removed?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080803213625/https://longbets....
>By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.
Not exactly a hot-button issue.
by pinum - > You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
Yes, especially if you use the original adversarial setup with three simultaneous participants (judge, two candidates) as described in Turing's original paper.
However, I'm not quite sure how long even that one will last.
by eru - Wayback shows #6 as "By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks."
It was removed early 2011. Is this what happens when they can't decide on who won?
by mmahemoff - I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia.
Arguably, ELIZA passed the Turing test ca. 1967: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... and not that long ago, ELIZA was still more convincing: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-...
The Turing Test can be gamed. This was done in some Loebner Prize entries: see https://www.behavior.org/resources/325.pdf and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman
To determine whether a machine is intelligent, I think it's necessary to understand how it works internally and not just take a black-box approach. This was already understood when Alan Turing wrote his 1950 paper. Elmer and Elsie, William Grey Walter's tortoise robots built during the preceding two years, appeared to behave as if they had some degree of self-awareness. But their "brains" consisted of only two thermionic valves, so self-awareness can be ruled out.
by DonaldFisk - There was a paper a while ago, where they found a strategy for GPT beating humans on the Turing test 2/3rds of the time.
They just prompted it to talk the way a 13 year old girl texts.
(Also they prompted it to pretend not to know anything about anything.)
by andai - It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html.
One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now:
https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/
I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history.
by mg - > I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history.
Oh! So its your website. Cool.
Did the money change hands, for this bet, in 2022? How do you ensure it. Or is it honor based?
by aws_ls - *a will and the ability for that will to access what it needsby joshspankit