ignirtoq

As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs. They just couch it in terms that sound vaguely reasonable or logical in the moment if you don’t know their history and don’t think about it more deeply than very surface-level.

Before, platforms were suppressing their speech, so they were promoters of free speech. Now platforms are not suppressing speech counter to them, so it’s all about content moderation to protect the children, or whatever. But their policies always belie their true motive: they never implement what research shows supports their claimed position of the moment. They always create policies that hurt their out-groups and may sometimes help their in-groups (helping people is optional).

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.

Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.

At least it was better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

Why are they… why are they having autocomplete recommend medical treatment? There are specialized AI algorithms that already exist for that purpose that do it far better (though still not well enough to even assist real doctors, much less replace them).

The human brain is not an ordered, carefully engineered thinking machine; it’s a massive hodge-podge of heuristic systems to solve a lot of different classes of problems, which makes sense when you remember it evolved over millions of years as our very distant ancestors were exposed to radically different environments and challenges.

Likewise, however AGI is built, in order to communicate with humans and solve most of the same problems, it’s probably going to take an amalgamation of different algorithms, just like brains.

All of this to say, I agree memorization will probably be an integral part of that system, but it’s also going to be a small part of the final system. So I also agree with the article that we’re way off from AGI.

“Almost half a dozen times” seems like a weird way to say 5.

The article talks about “Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer,” so it’s possible the UV treatment and the drugs can be combined.

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.

I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.

I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!

The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.

What’s the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.

He never actually says that exact phrase in the books. It’s a cultural misquote, like “beam me up, Scotty,” that somehow caught on in popular culture but wasn’t in the original source.

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People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.

Ah, I think I misread your statement of “followers by nature” as “followers of nature.” I’m not really willing to ascribe personality traits like “follower” or “leader” or “independent” or “critical thinker” to humanity as a whole based on the discussion I’ve laid out here. Again, the possibility space of cognition is bounded, but unimaginatively large. What we can think may be limited to a reflection of nature, but the possible permutations that can be made of that reflection are more than we could explore in the lifetime of the universe. I wouldn’t really use this as justification for or against any particular moral framework.

I think that’s overly reductionist, but ultimately yes. The human brain is amazingly complex, and evolution isn’t directed but keeps going with whatever works well enough, so there’s going to be incredible breadth in human experience and cognition across everyone in the world and throughout history. You’ll never get two people thinking exactly the same way because of the shear size of that possibility space, despite there having been over 100 billion people to have lived in history and today.

That being said, “what works” does set constraints on what is possible with the brain, and evolution went with the brain because it solves a bunch of practical problems that enhanced the survivability of the creatures that possessed it. So there are bounds to cognition, and there are common patterns and structures that shape cognition because of the aforementioned problems they solved.

Thoughts that initially reflect reality but that can be expanded in unrealistic ways to explore the space of possibilities that an individual can effect in the world around them has clear survival benefits. Thoughts that spring from nothing and that relate in no way to anything real strike me as not useful at best and at worst disruptive to what the brain is otherwise doing. Thinking in that perspective more, given the powerful levels of pattern recognition in the brain, I wonder if creation of “100% original thoughts” would result in something like schizophrenia, where the brain’s pattern recognition systems are reinterpreting (and misinterpreting) internal signals as sensory signals of external stimuli.

The problem with that reasoning is it’s assuming a clear boundary to what a “thought” is. Just like there wasn’t a “first” human (because genetics are constantly changing), there wasn’t a “first” thought.

Ancient animals had nervous systems that could not come close to producing anything we would consider a thought, and through gradual, incremental changes we get to humanity, which is capable of thought. Where do you draw the line? Any specific moment in that evolution would be arbitrary, so we have to accept a continuum of neurological phenomena that span from “not thoughts” to “thoughts.” And again we get back to thoughts being reflections of a shared environment, so they build on a shared context, and none are original.

If you do want to draw an arbitrary line at what a thought is, then that first thought was an evolution of non-/proto-thought neurological phenomena, and itself wasn’t 100% “original” under the definition you’re using here.

I am quite nervous about the various posts on social media about “the next four years,” implying once we get to the traditional election season that we’ll have any part of our democracy left intact, let alone enough to actually elect a new president. Trump has seized dictatorial power in all but name within his first month in office. He has taken several powers the Constitution bestows on Congress for himself with no repercussions.

If people bide their time for four years instead of openly resisting now, we’re going to get to “election season,” and what will they do when they find out there’s no election because Trump has suspended it due to his declaration of a national emergency over something? Are they going to go “oh crap, uh, uh, RESIST” all of a sudden after four years of nothing but “voting with their wallet”?