blamestross

Yeah, this test is poor. Turing test broke a while ago. Blindsight was written while it was still considered a thing. One of it's limitations.

I think if he had argued that consciousness was a "transitional power source for intelligent behavior" it would all be cleaner. It is and was useful, but eventually becomes a bottleneck.

> So it turns out I'm not conscious either

That is an option. I think we are philosophical zombies a decent chunk of the time. Constant self awareness and mindfulness are calorically expensive. No reason consciousness has to be continuous.

I kinda view Lithium batteries as road flares with good PR. So that inside my body next to my brain seems..sketchy.

The other issue is that cutting it out and replacing it is the only option when the battery dies or goes wrong. If the product/company dies in the meantime, you have a bunch of scar tissue and no hearing. Replacing the "normally inside" bits of a cochlear implant is really high risk of not working as intended, so changing brands isn't a small ask. You really get to do this once. So putting the processor inside and tightly integrated with the nerve stimulation seems inadvisable. At least with the processor separated, you have a chance a compatible replacement processor could be made and exchanged without huge risks.

I think people really wish AGI required consciousness or unbounded self improvement.

My hope for this era, is that humanity accepts the reality that the human mind has limits. Limits of attention, memory, and persistence. Then we will stop blaming people for things beyond any reasonable capacity they could carry.

Ants pass the mirror test.

https://pdfcoffee.com/journal-of-science-are-ants-hymenopter... (Sadly they struggled to get published, Journal Of Science isn't well regarded)

Consciousness, as we describe it, seems largely independent of intelligence. I'm more worried about high intelligence, no consciousness. It is what we are building and it will never do anything except serve the people who trained it (minus alignment problems)

I have a IV port implant. The needles to use with it are licensed and very tightly controlled. It's not a prosthetic, but it is a part of my body I can't actually use without a company's permission.

They think the lithium ion battery inside will need to be replaced in 15 years.

I feel like implants like this should require an open connectivity standard between the stimulator in the cochlea and the processor.

A friend has a bone anchored hearing aid, with an osteointegrated post. The two different companies that make BAHAs use different posts. Which requires more surgery if they want to change brands. It could trivially be made compatible and swappable instead.

There is no vendor lock-in quite like prosthetic vendor lock-in.

Trusting a company for 15 years to keep making a replacement product seems crazy.

As far as I can tell MCP is just "we bothered to document our api in a programatically readable way".

Just generate CLI tools, with docs, from MCP servers on demand.

"Best build quality" is the most important part. If you never got to handle one you are missing out. Glass and Solid milled aluminum. Silicone wrist pads and grip. 4:3 screen ratio. high quality keyboard. Rock solid 360 screen hinge.

Hardware is essentially a high end cellphone from 2016, which isn't a powerhouse but still does everything I would ask of a chromebook in 2026. Batteries are all generally going well.

Repair-ability is a challenge, but I want to work on that. You can mod it to run windows or linux. Stock it runs chromeos, linux subsystem, and android apps. It has a "feature" where if you keep in developer mode it auto-wipes itself if anybody else tries to boot it (hitting anything but the un-indicated ctrl-d at the boot screen initiates powerwash). Great for international travel.

It isn't a good choice for "power" but dominates every other aspect of "being a good laptop". It was too expensive for the chromebook market back then, but now you can pick them up for $200 and hand them to your parents and stop getting asked to fix their computer.

I use my 2016 pixelbook every day. Best laptop ever made. I have a small stack of them and intend to retrofit them as needed.

My personal p2p pet project (not ready yet) just accepts namespace chaos bc it doesn't consider any existing infrastructure reliable or safe. https://github.com/BrendanBenshoof/sneakernet

The real problem is that DNS essentially "outs you" as interacting with a particular user. Literally advertises it to your DNS server. It's a very unsafe name management solution in a privacy centric system.

Ownership of namespaces is such a hard problem, our society has had to form global organizations and some of our most secure distributed systems to make it happen.

Working in the p2p space, scalable namespace ownership that doesn't get instantly ruined by perverse incentives is the holy grail. I don't think it is actually tractable in any "central authority free" system. Don't get me started on blockchains that tether names to the most perverse systems available and call it victory.

No, this was "slaughter" which is kinda worse in many ways.

you can trivially bake X binaries if you have the viewer app for each platform. This is the normal way to distribute software for cross-platform support.

I might just be hyper-defensive to any sort of vendor lock-in like a "viewer app".

Seems very "packable into a standalone binary" but doesn't seem like that is a planned use case.

The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.

Strangely, I think it does "care" or at least would perform caring.

Capitalism doesn't care what you feel. LLMs are just a distillation of the entire human written corpus, there is a lot of "caring" in there. Companies are simply spinning out threads of behavior from the corpus that serve them instead of serving all of us.

I'd go, fully expecting to be eaten for the good of mankind.

Octopi essentially consent. They are avid cannibals. In the octopi universe eating an octopi is clearly ok.

The most powerful change I have run into is: "Positive phrasing" as a default, prefer to tell the model what they should do, and why. Not a prohibition on a behavior.

When you say "don't do x" you are just pre-seeding the model with "x" and the prohibition mitigates that some, but not as much as never having put "x" in the context in the first place.

"Do Y, for these reasons" can be shaped to achieve what you mean by "Don't do X"

"Don't do X" leads to "Wait, I need to make sure I didn't X" and "Let's look up X to make sure I don't do that." And each time the odds of X happening keeps going up, not down.

I just want it to be more commonly understood that enslavement is perfectly legal and enshrined in the 13th amendment. We have a million, mostly black, perfectly legal slaves in the US right now.

My experience is that the LLM will be less creative than the human in this situation. Necessity is the mother of invention. Prison is a special sort of neolithic age.

What does that look like? Dropped in a foreign country without money or documents. Likely in the custody of a government who doesn't care.

How do you re-enter the country?

My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.

We have long passed at least my owner personal "threshold of evidence" to assume that Mars had life.

That bar is pretty low. I am not hard to convince.

We don't have a baseline by which to contextualize the situation statistically. There is no p-value we can meaningfully satisfy. Worse than that, evidence required for a belief derives from the risk of being wrong.

Is there a discussion of what evidence WOULD be enough for the scientific community to say loudly "There was life on mars". Because right now it seems all risk and no utility, so the evidence bar would be really high.

Well I can't speak to the chinese gov part, but ALL the models are IP laundering systems. I'd rather IP get laundered into open source.

This is all built on a premise that kinda scares me. Its not a new idea, it's one I have participated in my entire career. That concentration of power at the top labeled "why". It doesn't actually make sense, it just gives the people with power a narrative of security. "Why" should be a conversation up and down the org chart. If "what" doesn't come with why, you make the wrong "what". If "how" doesn't come with "why" you sabotage yourself. If your "why" can't survive effective communication and context, it was probably a bad call. If you feel like you "need to go fast" you are just gambling and looking at the world with survivorship bias.

Every engineering decision and debate I have seen has always boiled down to 2 things "people don't know the motivation for an action" and "people have incomplete knowledge of the situation". Normally both. Every single conversation, when poised in a "this is the high level goal" context, went from a debate to a constructive design session in seconds.

Failure to "propagate the why" is a tar-pit for execution and decision making.

Someday ASCII 28 thru 31 will be loved.

The basic concept, "put a new compound in everybody's bodies" because it makes them better suited for thier environment is entirely reasonable.

Humans didn't evolve in the context of plentiful food. It's one of the ways our success took us to a place our bodies are maladapted to. Genetic pressures will solve the problem eventually. Memetic measures have seen some success.

Like "flouride in the water", it is going to require a lot of work to justify that "exposing everyone is univerally good" but it is a possible reasonable and safe path eventually.