We don’t have the same problems LLMs have.

LLMs have zero fidelity. They have no - none - zero - model of the world to compare their output to.

Humans have biases and problems in our thinking, sure, but we’re capable of at least making corrections and working with meaning in context. We can recognise our model of the world and how it relates to the things we are saying.

LLMs cannot do that job, at all, and they won’t be able to until they have a model of the world. A model of the world would necessarily include themselves, which is self-awareness, which is AGI. That’s a meaning-understander. Developing a world model is the same problem as consciousness.

What I’m saying is that you cannot develop fidelity at all without AGI, so no, LLMs don’t have the same problems we do. That is an entirely different class of problem.

Some moon rockets fail, but they don’t have that in common with moon cannons. One of those can in theory achieve a moon landing and the other cannot, ever, in any iteration.

If all you’re saying is that neural networks could develop consciousness one day, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. Our brains are neural networks, so it stands to reason they could do what our brains can do. But the technical hurdles are huge.

You need at least two things to get there:

1. Enough computing power to support it.
2. Insight into how consciousness is structured.

1 is hard because a single brain alone is about as powerful as a significant chunk of worldwide computing, the gulf between our current power and what we would need is about… 100% of what we would need. We are so woefully under resourced for that. You also need to solve how to power the computers without cooking the planet, which is not something we’re even close to solving currently.

2 means that we can’t just throw more power or training at the problem. Modern NN modules have an underlying theory that makes them work. They’re essentially statistical curve-fitting machines. We don’t currently have a good theoretical model that would allow us to structure the NN to create a consciousness. It’s not even on the horizon yet.

Those are two enormous hurdles. I think saying modern NN design can create consciousness is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we can get to the Moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made in the last few years”.

Moon rockets are essentially artillery science in many ways, yes, but Jules Verne was still a century away in terms of supporting technologies, raw power, and essential insights into how to do it.

GodFUCKINGdamnit please don’t remind me how easily I trust random commenters to report information.

At this point even if I click on it there’s no guarantee one of you fuckers hasn’t vandalised the page.

You’re definitely overselling how AI works and underselling how human brains work here, but there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.

Neural networks are a biomimicry technology. They explicitly work by mimicking how our own neurons work, and surprise surprise, they create eerily humanlike responses.

The thing is, LLMs don’t have anything close to reasoning the way human brains reason. We are actually capable of understanding and creating meaning, LLMs are not.

So how are they human-like? Our brains are made up of many subsystems, each doing extremely focussed, specific tasks.

We have so many, including sound recognition, speech recognition, language recognition. Then on the flipside we have language planning, then speech planning and motor centres dedicated to creating the speech sounds we’ve planned to make. The first three get sound into your brain and turn it into ideas, the last three take ideas and turn them into speech.

We have made neural network versions of each of these systems, and even tied them together. An LLM is analogous to our brain’s language planning centre. That’s the part that decides how to put words in sequence.

That’s why LLMs sound like us, they sequence words in a very similar way.

However, each of these subsystems in our brains can loop-back on themselves to check the output. I can get my language planner to say “mary sat on the hill”, then loop that through my language recognition centre to see how my conscious brain likes it. My consciousness might notice that “the hill” is wrong, and request new words until it gets “a hill” which it believes is more fitting. It might even notice that “mary” is the wrong name, and look for others, it might cycle through martha, marge, maths, maple, may, yes, that one. Okay, “may sat on a hill”, then send that to the speech planning centres to eventually come out of my mouth.

Your brain does this so much you generally don’t notice it happening.

In the 80s there was a craze around so called “automatic writing”, which was essentially zoning out and just writing whatever popped into your head without editing. You’d get fragments of ideas and really strange things, often very emotionally charged, they seemed like they were coming from some mysterious place, maybe ghosts, demons, past lives, who knows? It was just our internal LLM being given free rein, but people got spooked into believing it was a real person, just like people think LLMs are people today.

In reality we have no idea how to even start constructing a consciousness. It’s such a complex task and requires so much more linking and understanding than just a probabilistic connection between words. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more than a century away from AGI.

Some real “steel is heavier than feathers” energy coming off this teacher.

Not only that, the two statements in the premise are simply given. How is the child to know one of them is false? At that point, why not say Marty ate more than Luis and therefore the fractions must be different? Maybe the fractions are wrong and Luis ate more.

Just an absolutely terrible question if that’s supposed to be the answer. I’d guess the teacher didn’t write the question and didn’t understand the answer.

I remember people talking about how the other smokers at work were all the cool people. And like, yeah, you spend several minutes several times a day hanging out outside with them, with no work and nothing to do but shoot the shit. Of course you like them better, you spend way more time with them.

Also you can all bond over your common terrible life choices, what’s not to like?

Actually, factually, in truth, for real, fr, no joke, seriously, absolutely, in fact, truly, truthfully, really, in reality, literally, I couldn’t tell you, because only you can figure out how to say what you want to say, and if you didn’t already know that there are countless ways to say that, that makes me wonder if you actually care very much about the topic, for realsies, in actuality. All you need to do is spend a few seconds thinking of another way to say it and you can answer your own question.

It’s language. Of course we have ways of saying things, that’s what it’s for. Also you can say “literally” to mean “actually” as long as you understand how to say it in context, and the fact that you can correct people who you believe are using it wrong is a sign that you can tell the difference and you don’t need to correct them.

And if we don’t have a way of saying something, you can invent one, because that’s how language works. People who tell you that there’s some authoritative measure by which we know what words mean don’t actually care about language. They’re trying to kill our language, because a living language can’t be controlled like they want. The good news is that it’s impossible to achieve that goal.

Like if you’re not going around lamenting the fact that “terrific” doesn’t mean “terrifying” anymore then maybe it’s okay if words change. It sounds like you survived that particular tragedy.

You can, but I find that if I have the tabs there, I use them or close them. I don’t use bookmarks after I make them, so they just acrue. You’re right I don’t need 7000 open tabs, just like I don’t need 7000 bookmarks. Part of the point of tab groups is you can more easily determine what tabs aren’t relevant and get rid of them, so you don’t wind up with thousands to start with.

If they’re open as tabs, even in groups, I’m incentivised to close them when they’re no longer relevant. For longer term notes I use a note-taking app that doesn’t rely on my browser or computer staying the same. I don’t like using a browser for that because it’s just not a good tool for it.

“Literally” literally means “as written”, or “in the literature”.

To use the word “literally” to mean “in reality” or “in fact” is not that original meaning, but is literally - in fact, as well as a written thing - a figurative meaning.

Language changes. There are plenty of words that are their own antonyms. It’s not sad, it’s inevitable, and the sooner you can accept that the sooner you can avert the fate of becoming an old man yelling at clouds.

Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people’s lives.

It’s legislated that only “secure” hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.

Just a glimpse of where all this “trusted”, “secure” computing might lead.

As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: “trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?”

Edit: holy shit, it’s 15 years old, and “anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over” (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:

https://www.lafkon.net/work/trustedcomputing/

Assume, he says, that the distribution of holdings in a given society is just according to some theory based on patterns or historical circumstances—e.g., the egalitarian theory, according to which only a strictly equal distribution of holdings is just.

Okay well this is immediately a false premise because nobody seriously makes this argument. This is a strawman of the notion of egalitarianism.

Also, we don’t need Wilt Chamberlain to create an unequal society, we just need money. It’s easy enough to show that simply keeping an account of wealth and then randomly shuffling money around creates the unequal distribution that we see in the real world:

https://charlie-xiao.github.io/assets/pdf/projects/inequality-process-simulation.pdf

And every actor there began with the impossible strictly eqalitarian beginning. No actor was privileged in any way nor had any merit whatsoever, but some wound up on top of an extremely unequal system.

So Noszick just needs to look a little deeper at his own economic system to see the problem. There is no reason why we need to have a strict numerical accounting of wealth.

People should look into tab groups. Firefox has a tab grouping feature built-in now but this is a plugin that is a bit more feature-full.

So I have tab groups for different dev projects, games, podcasts, shows, music, etc. It reduces the size of each tab group which makes it easier to actually return to the important stuff and close the stuff that doesn’t matter.

Also though these are RC size, 5mm screws, so much easier to kill. Apparently the issue is most hex drivers are slightly undersized, and ARRMA like to loctite their axle grub screws to hell.

I’ve done it. It was a grub screw - so the hex was entirely within the shaft - that was surrounded by loctite, and frankly I never had a chance to get it out. It went circular immediately, just with hand pressure. I ended up having to use a screw extractor.

I was told this was a common problem on ARRMA vehicles and that I should get a more precise type of hex driver. They were expensive but I haven’t had the problem since.

Faster to apply and much harder to remove.

Your funeral, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Your gnomes shouldn’t be dead, they’re technically immortal and a stint in the dishwasher is their ticket out of the salt mines. If you’ve got dead gnomes the last thing you want is to keep their bodies on the premises. If you leave them in the cartridge they can be revived when you exchange it for the new cartridge. If you put them in the ground they will find… other ways back to their realm, and they will remember what you did.

And please remember to buy gnomane dishwashing tablets, I cannot stress enough how much they should not be dead.

Also don’t ask me why the gnome salt mine slavery exists, I didn’t create it, I just benefit from it.

You can get anti fungal liquid that you add to one of the secondary dispensers which should keep that at bay while also keeping mould off your clothes, and also you can leave the door open between cycles to dry it out. I’ve been told it’s important to leave the door open when it’s not in use.

You don’t replace your dish gnome cartridge every 3 years? I was told it was a feature. They get tired.