A miserable little pile of opinions.

Unconfidently: gonna be a similar principle to this I bet:

The basic idea is as follows:

The actual output of a model is a probability distribution over tokens, and then you use randomness to sample a token from that distribution (because always selecting the highest-probability token leads to getting stuck in ruts).

Periodically, the model will switch to using a pseudorandom seed based on recent tokens, rather than a fully random seed. This seed is the watermark.

If Anthropic re-runs the model to get the original distributions, they can detect that the text perfectly matches a watermark seed.

If a text contains several long segments that match a watermark seed, you can be highly confident that it's a lightly edited output of that model.

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Interesting thing about the Day Tripper wikipedia article is John Lennon saying he really wrote the whole thing and even that he played the guitar solo?, with Paul McCartney saying he contributed on composition and most people agreeing that George Harrison played the guitar solo.

I only mention the guitar solo because it seems like another example of Lennon taking too much credit. Not because it's a great guitar solo; George Harrison is not a great guitarist. Of course the Beatles guitar solo we all love is on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and it's played by Eric Clapton.

Within the Beatles, on John's compositions, Paul was saying "C'mon, John, let's add a hook here and a harmony there, now it's catchy". For an illustration, slow down Help and remove the harmony parts, and what remains absolutely sounds like a solo Lennon song—infinitely musically blander than Paul's solo Yesterday from the same album.

And on Paul's compositions... well, John couldn't make Paul write good lyrics, but he presumably objected strongly enough to atrocious ones to prevent lines like the infamous "and if this ever changing world in which we live in" from going into the Beatles oeuvre.

Humans who grow up in [abundant + peaceful + high-civic-trust] circumstances tend to a more [cosmopolitan + liberal] worldview compared to humans who grow up in more violent, resource-scarce environments, and

The Industrial Revolution kicked off a cycle where nations with more [cosmopolitan + liberal] citizens generally produced more [abundant + peaceful + high-civic-trust] circumstances for the next generation.

That cycle is enough of an attractor basin to deserve a phrase; the main subjective element to it is identifying the [cosmopolitan + liberal] cluster with "justice" while many ideologies claim that word for themselves. (I myself have no problem with that, being quite cosmopolitan and liberal.)

Of course:

This trend isn't simple or monotonic, and there's a lot of variance added by the rise and fall of other ideologies.

The trend can be set back or knocked off its course by geopolitical events—obviously if the Axis had won WW2 then things would be quite different.

Technocrats underestimated one particular factor of resistance: in the 21st century just as in the 19th, many people hate to see significant immigration from poorer parts of the world, and they will reject progress in [cosmopolitan + liberal] values in order to fight against immigration.

The true most ordinary object is beautiful, horrible sounding, very smelly, intangible, and delicious.

i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.

therefore, the Default Object is:

beautiful

makes a horrendous sound

smells absolutely awful

is very fragile

tastes delicious

The vampires in Blindsight are a bit of a contrivance tbh. The aliens and the transhuman brain mods are all plausible-feeling - you can imagine aliens with a distributed non-conscious intelligence, and you can imagine how these very drastic modifications would shift people away from human baseline in a big way - but the specific tradeoffs of the vampires - hyperintelligence at the cost of amoral carnivory - come off as arbitrary. These very very advanced humans couldn't salvage the good parts and ditch the bad, really? It's a way to add drama in a thematically relevant way that doesn't hold together as well as the rest of it.

the vampires were actually the original idea for the book. he wanted to make SciFi vampires for his first contact novel and so everything about them is, well, "how do I do SciFi vampires". it's why it feels less natural. the other stuff in the novel, namely everything about the aliens, arose organically as he wrote. basically everything about the aliens came as he wrote, often times looking for extant biological mechanisms for things he wanted in his book, but most significantly the thesis for the book - consciousness is useless cognitive baggage - wasn't what he went into the book with. it was actually supposed to be the opposite - about the evolutionary or cognitive utility of consciousness. as he wrote, he discovered that there wasn't any research which demonstrated a use for consciousness despite looking quite hard - and so that became the conclusion of the novel.