Small typo correction for anyone trying to search or learn more about the term: it's "provenance", not "providence".
638 karma · joined July 28, 2018
That could refer to "knowing the physiology of my brain", which is what you seemed to be referring to. But it could also refer to "explaining my feelings or decision making process". I've lived in my head for many years and had many chances to observe myself, so I can perform post hoc self-analysis with reasonable accuracy, and on a good day, I can even be self-aware in the very moment (which is useful in getting myself to do what I want).
I think maybe that second thing is what people are worried about AI lacking.
> If we're all of a sudden not allowed to leverage systems we don't fully understand then I guess we shouldn't even be at the spot where we are as a species. We've been doing the right things for the wrong reasons for ages, it seems to work OK.
I don't say this merely to be contentious, but I don't think I have quite as optimistic an outlook myself ^_^' which isn't to say I think we shouldn't meddle with the world, just that we sometimes get ourselves in over our heads. But I'm hopeful.
On the other hand, we'd like to know how it works. I mean, why do we do science at all? If you don't need to know physics to throw a ball, why bother studying mechanics or biology?
Unix timestamps, on the other hand, are not unique.
I didn't say that I thought incentives don't matter. (I was trying to say that I thought IP law isn't an especially good way to incentivize creativity, and that there might be better ways.) So I might be misunderstanding what you mean by this.
> The idea that patronage isn't dominant because... it can't compete with copyright? is a not-even-wrong take.
Could you explain why it's not-even-wrong? I can definitely accept that I'm wrong, but I don't see why it's so misguided that it can't even be discussed, affirmed, or denied.
Today, I can (usually) make more money as a software developer writing proprietary software than I can writing libre software. If software couldn't be copyrighted, it doesn't follow as a matter of course that demand for software would plummet. If the demand remains, in this alternate world I ought to still be able to make a living writing (libre) software.
In this alternate world, I would necessarily be paid for the labor I perform (writing code) rather than making money by selling licenses or copies. So, if the only difference between our world today and this alternate world is the existence of software copyright, and in our world today I'm incentivized to sell licenses or copies but in the alternate world I'd be paid for my labor per se, it seems fair to say that the reason I'm incentivized to sell licenses or copies – and the reason why e.g. patronage isn't more dominant – must be "because we recognize and protect copyright the way we do".
That was my line of reasoning.
I'm skeptical that "encouraging creators by offering protections" is much more than a rationalization. (And I'm not sure whether it's historically accurate, although that's beside the point.) It doesn't seem like the concept of intellectual property and its protection under the law have been effective at encouraging people to create things; they seem to be more effective at encouraging rent seeking. If we want to enable and encourage people to create things, we should pay them to create – not pay them to share something after they've already created it.
For example, we can pay someone to perform the labor to create something we want (contracts), we can finance their endeavours or subsidize their living expenses if we like their work (the patron model), and so on. In fact, we already do these things, but their effectiveness is limited because our current laws favor other business models.
And there's a wonderful reciprocity: if I pay someone to create something, not only do I get what I want, but everyone else gets to benefit from it too. And the things that other people pay to have created I also get to enjoy (and there are a lot more "other people" than there are "me").
[This is the visualization of a goal (or at least an alternative way of going about things) and an argument for its possibility. Unfortunately I can't claim to know its feasibility, how to get there from here, or even which tactics would be effective, but I hope to have good answers some day.]
On the other hand, the exact same spatial arrangement can be in two places at once (e.g. the state of bits on a disk, or the idea of a shovel, i.e. the pattern of a shovel as exemplified by two distinct shovels).
All of that's obvious. I think what OP was trying to suggest is:
Despite the obvious difference between physical things and ideas, we often treat them similarly (specifically, we treat ideas like physical objects). And perhaps that would seem a bit strange if we weren't so used to it.
On the other hand, you and I can't both have the same object even if we wanted; it has nothing to do with ability or circumstance.
edit: I should clarify that you and I can share something in the sense that we can freely give it back and forth, but if we have one shovel, we can't both be shovelling at the same time (and can't share it at all if we live far apart). And if we're talking about food, well, we can't both take the same bite of bread.
If I have an idea, or a digital copy of something, you can also use that idea, or also get a digital copy, without depriving me of it. The only reason you can't use my idea or own a digital copy is because society decided that it would punish you for doing so – and that's unnatural in the sense that it doesn't follow from any inherent feature of reality.
[1] https://twitter.com/JonathanHoefler/status/16335344615256064...
Love is something we feel; words are evidence of it. We don't define love as a pattern that shows up in a series of conversations. There are many other ways of generating those same words.
Nobody's trying to reject materialism here. I myself happen to believe that love is nothing more than (or at least, can entirely be explained by) electrochemical processes in my brain. And I agree that that doesn't make love any less magical ^_^
I think by "correlating patterns", the person you're replying to meant "doing just enough processing to produce the salient performances". But it's possible to have additional "inner mental life" beyond the minimum that's necessary to give rise to an outward behavior. (In this case, the outward behavior is speech.) A single interface can have many different implementations, as it were.
I meant functors where the objects being mapped aren't types, but type inhabitants, and the morphisms being mapped are not arrows between types, but arrows between type inhabitants. (I suppose this also has to do with "the only category in Haskell is Hask", rather than types also being themselves categories?)
As a matter of prescription, maybe, but as a matter of description? I think it's interesting. It is meaningful and it's something that English speakers produce. Here are other examples in the wild:
"To complete the request, the owner of the permit must have had been present at the time the citation was written, present a valid permit to the Tax Collector in person, have a copy of their citation, and pay a $7.50 processing fee to the Tax Collector if approved."
"Lankeshwar must have had been easy to defeat compared to new-age Ravanas."
It can even have a distinct meaning (rather than just being a variation), which is how I would interpret it. Which I think is cool.
It's perfectly fine to say "don't use this construction if you want to be taken seriously by so-and-so", but if its usage happens to be dialectal, for example, I don't think you can say those speakers are using their dialect of English incorrectly.
I am watched. (present passive)
I was watched. (past passive)
I have been watched. (present perfect passive)
I had been watched. (past perfect passive)
I am being watched. (present progressive passive)
I was being watched. (past progressive passive)
I've been being watched. (present perfect progressive passive)
I'd been being watched. (past perfect progressive passive)
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have had been watched.
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've had been being watched.
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
—
—
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
—
—
I can't find many examples of it, but there are a few I've found online:
"To qualify for a special enrollment due to a permanent move, you must have had been enrolled in other minimum essential coverage, such as under a job-based health plan, another Marketplace plan, or Medicaid."
"Sales must have had been in the same year as the tax return."
So perhaps it's best to say it's nonstandard but attested.
She must've been being watched.
She must have had been being watched.
Two detectives are watching security film.
DETECTIVE 1
She's acting ordinarily, but I see fatigue written on her face. I wonder why.
Detective 1 leans back in their chair and muses.
DETECTIVE 2
She must've had been being watched. The state security service monitors high-profile civilians occasionally, and a few days before this she was acting very cautiously, almost as if she was suspicious of something.
Two detectives are watching security film.
DETECTIVE 1
And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but –
Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen.
DETECTIVE 1
– from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why?
DETECTIVE 2
She must've been being watched.
I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.
The programs that people work with in their mind are not the programs (the code) that the machine runs. What the machine does is definitely more important in the moment, but the models that live in the heads of people are more important in the long term. The code that the machine runs is just one implementation, a shadow cast by the real thing from one of many angles.
Code can deceive even if, definitionally, the code states what the computer will do. So code most certainly can lie.
[By analogy, you'd still feel lied to if someone told you something that is technically correct but very misleading: "(Me) It's going to rain tomorrow." → tomorrow comes → "(You) It isn't raining today!" → "(Me) It is raining, in Japan. I didn't say it would rain here."]
I suppose it depends on whether you're considering what the code communicates to the machine or what it communicates to a person.
She must have had been being watched.
= It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).
I grew up using archaic, Jamesian English regularly (in a religious community), so it always sounds wrong when people use them incorrectly while attempting to be old-timey, which is a bit distracting and ruins the effect.
Apparently ChatGPT suffers from hypercorrection as much as any modern speaker.
(The meter is also dreadful, which is another thing that I think many modern English speakers don't often do precisely.)
Modern engines would crush Deep Blue with fewer resources and even without NNUE, and this is because of specific search techniques and search improvements that we've discovered. For example: formulas that work well for late-move reduction; continuation history tables and the update formulas that work well for them; internal iterative reductions; refinements to futility pruning, reverse futility pruning, delta pruning, multi-probcut, and so on. None of these were found by meta methods and none of these emerge from scaling computation. But it's also the case that none of them resemble anything that a human does when they play chess.
So I don't think I agree with the first point of the bitter lesson, that general methods beat specific methods, and that scaling beats efficiency. But I do agree with the second point, that performant systems often behave in ways that don't resemble human thinking, and we're often hopeless to personally understand performant systems' complexity.
It reminds me a bit of that project to "create Beethoven's tenth" using an AI that I heard about a year ago. It was amazing in many ways, but the music didn't go anywhere and wasn't saying anything. I know that description is nebulous, the sort of feeling you might imagine or trick yourself into having, or a perception you invent perhaps out of defensiveness or say you have just to seem cultured.
And perhaps in a "blind" comparison, cantable diffuguesion wouldn't stand out as much. But with all that said, it definitively sounds not quite human after a moment.
I wonder how we can teach machines the larger-scale structures of (common practice) music. At the scale of an entire movement, structures can be merely formulaic and the music still turns out alright. At the level of phrases and themes, though, it's harder to articulate, and requires good taste. But it's the sort of "intuitive" thing that I'd expect AI to be good at, so I'm always surprised that it seems to be the thing AIs are worst at.
(My background: although I've not studied Bach's chorales in any depth, I've studied a few years of composition and used to be a church organist.)
And I think you're right! It seems very likely to me that that happens.
Playing devil's advocate for myself, however: the comment was not uncharitable because it did not attribute intent. Someone saying "let's keep politics out of it" may be trying to avoid conflict or simply be respectful, but unknowingly in effect quashing challenges to the status quo.
The comment was meant to be an observation of unwitting outcomes rather than secret intentions, but maybe that's in fact what you're objecting to ("it's easy to be pessimistic about the aggregate effects of small, inoccuous actions, and that attitude deserves some pushback").