Retric

> thats also not about processing and reacting to signals > not an information processing system in the same sense

I can only assume you have some sort of philosophical objection here, but this is information processing.

Neurons are reacting to a range of chemical signals not just a single neurotransmitter because they don’t map to what CS style neural networks. Understanding the brain requires understanding the nuances not simplified models.

> something bogus like system 3

These systems exist, if the author you’re referring to is unaware or unwilling to discuss major issues with their classification then that’s a hit to their credibility.

Danger isn’t some universal thing, people are adapted to notice fact moving objects heading towards them quickly very fast. A very dangerous snake isn’t in that category of danger and can take a significant chunk of time to notice after you’ve stopped looking in that direction. Noticing social danger is extremely critical and glacial by any of the metrics previously discussed.

Emotions cover a huge range of complex interactions that depend on many different parts of the brain but hormones are inherently slow to diffuse through the brain. Pair bonding between a mother and child needs to happen, it doesn’t need to happen in 50ms.

>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope

That it was specifically engineered to give that response. Thus political pressure was applied to the design.

The funny bit was just humorous. There’s likely many ways to get that same information without referencing Biden.

You’re assuming a far more functional system than what was going on.

“And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power.”

Collecting more money in a corrupt organization doesn’t means they will automatically get a more effective distribution system.

The amygdala isn’t particularly fast here. It’s got significant connections to higher order centers in the brain and it’s own memory because classifying dangers let alone more complex emotional states can be quite complicated.

If he’s defining System 3+ then that kind of specificity could still work, but from what I understand he doesn’t thus making subconscious a poor fit for the systems described.

We’re talking about biological processes which have physical limitations on how frequently a neuron can fire as well as a signaling system that based on how rapidly neurons fire. Loops anywhere in the system enforce a minimum 5ms latency and more realistically several times that. A typical neuron is firing closer to 0.1 to 2 times a second. Add to that the physical transmission speed and rapid response doesn’t allow for loops.

There’s a reason reflexes for the feet are handled by the spine that’s got nothing to do with total processing power.

System 1 and 2 is a description of physical process in people.

Using conscious vs subconscious processing is not however a meaningful definition. Subconscious processing isn’t necessarily fast. Visual processing and sensory integration can be quite slow without any conscious input.

Slower paths means loops here for humans where the output of a neuron gets feed back into itself. The fastest path = a feed forward neural network without loops.

LLM’s operate strictly feed forward neural networks.

Consciousness is ill defined hogwash when used in such descriptions.

The process of internal refinement without external action however fits.

The ratio between a single pass and multiple passes is unchanged when you throw more processing power at both.

In a human 30ms vs 3-4 seconds is a 1:100 ratio. Single vs multiple passes with an LLM varies but a 1:100 ratio isn’t unrealistic. So with enough compute and the right workload single vs multiple pass LLM could sit in that exact same 30ms vs 3-4 second timeframe.

It’s big.

That’s a function of the amount of processing power involved not the underlying architecture of decision making.

You can ask a model for output directly and stop, or you can recursively ask it to keep refining the output.

That seems to fit the fast vs slow model of human thought reasonably well.

That’s wildly inaccurate.

Millions of Americans working part time are struggling to find full time employment for insurance, but most such jobs are low pay. For livable hourly wages, substitute teachers positions are available in most school districts in the US for example.

High hourly wage semi retired thus part time positions are offered at nearly 40% of all US companies. Even among extremely overworked professions like doctors you’re find many people working ~20 hour weeks.

What isn’t available is part time work with the same potential for career advancement. But that’s the siren’s call of the hedonistic treadmill not some inherent requirement for employment.

Further, even at full time employment a strict 40 hour week while taking your annual vacation would be a massive step up for a large fraction of Americans.

The issue is there’s zero debate that something very close to QM applies to every single interaction between atoms. We glow in the infrared because of quantum mechanics so does a brick. Similarly chlorophyll works because of QM as does ATP, protein folding, etc etc.

The question is does any of the interesting counterintuitive QM effects apply to very large structures and that’s where humans being hot dense objects kills most of the more interesting bits of QM.

> didn't jump to conclusions

Thus people aren’t jumping to conclusions, QM itself is saying no here. For the effect people want to apply means QM itself must be wrong. That’s obviously possible but means you need a completely new theory of physics and evidence to support that.

Serfs had fewer incentives to work more hours.

Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.

You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.

> That is not small.

There are 70 countries larger than Italy, Russia is more than 50x the size.

America the 4th largest country is still 20x the size of Italy.

Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.

It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.

A large fraction of all nuclear power stations only have one reactor.

> maintain extremely good uptime

Not from a capacity planning standpoint.

Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.

That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.

In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.

You’re underestimating what motivated thieves can accomplish.

Crackhead and electrician are not mutually exclusive categories.

You can’t assume behavior is unchanged when you change the situation.

In remote areas if you only guard at night they will go in the day.

24/7 coverage 365 days a year at 20$/h = 175,200$/year.

I’m familiar, the issue is IaC only works on a subset of system administration jobs.

Maintaining systems in a tunnel boring machine is a very different than an internet startup.

CI is really only significant on the programming side of things. Networking, systems administration, hardware, etc often don’t have that workflow.

The energy density of specific compost heaps varies by several orders of magnitude it’s not a single number. Volume, moisture content, internal temperature, external temperature, materials being composted, etc all play a significant role.

There’s often more ambiguity than that. “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.” You can’t spend endless resources deciding if something is or isn’t responsible.

Systems use arbitrary buckets like if someone commits suicide in less than six months from coming home after a war might count it, while excluding every case after six months. That’s going to misclassify cases in both directions but means you don’t need to track millions of people for decades or look through mental health details.

Obviously people with more data to work with can make a convincing case you’re wrong, but higher levels accuracy get expensive. In the end we know more than 1 million Americans died of COVID for example, how many more isn’t precisely known but ~1 million is plenty useful for decision making around the next pandemic.

People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations.

Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.

You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.

In theory sure, in practice programmers are often making a large number of such decisions because nobody else in the org is as invested in the specifics.