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bondarchukon Religious scholars met with Anthropic

Conditional logic works just fine!

bondarchukon "Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

Do you think an atom-for-atom software simulation of a human would be able to feel pain?

bondarchukon "Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

Sure. And possibly it is indeed in pain then, if a computational process equivalent to that which makes up pain in animals is being performed. Or possibly not. But the criterium the GP poster laid out is not a valid way to decide that.

bondarchukon "Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

>nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain.

So at least something is different, namely the text output changes (and therefore some internal state too, of course). I think your analogy is too simple, it does not have to be the case that the GPU has to act like the equivalent of the body for an LLM in this respect.

bondarchukon "Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

In order to have a reasonable view of the possibility of AI consciousness, one first has to have a reasonable view of the relation between human consciousness and the physical human brain. Unfortunately most people do not have that. Instead they hold on to received quasi-christian dualistic concepts about souls - even if they would never admit it in those terms, the way most people conceptualize the relation between mind and body it comes to basically the same thing.

And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.

Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...

bondarchukon Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?

When you lose a limb you'd die of blood loss though, right, not the mere lack of a limb.

bondarchukon A warning about 'model welfare'

Copacetically?

bondarchukon A warning about 'model welfare'

It is really quite staggering how many commenters here seem to believe that the fact that there is no state carried from one chat session to the next proves that there can't be consciousness. It is obviously wrong if you think about it for a minute but I guess people just aren't used to thinking about the relation between the physical and the mental with any level of seriousness.

bondarchukon OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents

The whole world is drowning in ads, and people have by and large done nothing about it. Revealed preference is that the vast majority of people support ads.

bondarchukon People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

Interesting, thanks for the reply. So the difference is more in the feeling of ownership and control than the actual intensity of "seeing"..

bondarchukon People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

I would like to know especially what is the perceived difference between normal imagination and hallucination. The way people with mental visualization explain it it sounds basically exactly what I always imagined hallucinations to be like. And e.g. closed-eye visuals on psychedelics. Why is it so special to have closed-eye visuals when most people have closed-eye visuals anyway?

bondarchukon Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening

In theory any device with a microphone and an internet connection can record everything and send it off to some remote server, but in practice there was really no evidence of this happening on any significant scale for a long time. It is easy to see how this would make a difference for most people. But already there was an attitude among some people of "we all carry a microphone in our pocket, there is no privacy anymore".

Then voice-activated devices came out which (without making a secret of it) started recording after detecting some watchword, of course there were false positives but most normal people didn't really seem to care about that. Again this was used by the most paranoid or anti-technology people as an argument that "see, they're really recording everything like we've been saying all along".

Now a device comes out which explicitly and openly records everything within reach and applies AI analysis to it, and the precise people who should be most against it act like it's no big deal because supposedly this was already happening anyway - while, on the contrary, I think this is precisely the moment where the line is being crossed in a way that will have actual negative consequences on society, and this is the time to take a stand against it.

So ironically we see that the hyper-activistic all-or-nothing attitude is actually working against the very interests that its proponents claim to want to protect.

bondarchukon Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening

Uh sorry guys I phrased it weird I meant "complete absence of proof" more like.

bondarchukon Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening

Crazy that this is about to be normalized. Can't help but think the discourse of "they already record everything anyway" of the past couple years (even in the absence of complete proof) has played a part.

bondarchukon Larger Pacific striped octopus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size

"The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale."

bondarchukon My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes

You could say e.g. Spinoza was a punk avant-la-lettre, he was a punk before the word "punk" even existed. I think GP is using it exactly opposite to the normal usage.

bondarchukon AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

We the people in the society who have the power to make laws through democratic means are the ones locking these books up.

bondarchukon Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019)

>another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters?

In fact we started with autogyros.

Also the Fw 61 ("the first successful, practical, and fully controllable helicopter" though I don't know the history in detail) has two equal-size counter-rotating rotors similar to a quadcopter.

bondarchukon Pushes to arch AUR are suspendended right now.

Ah but you switched now from "I don't think people do this" to "people shouldn't do this". You're right about the latter but wrong about the former.

bondarchukon OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened

Do you even need to hack a lab? Can't you just send an arbitrary sequence to some company and they'll do it for you?

bondarchukon I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

It's funny that if the LLMs had all given the same result each time (it sounds like) you would have considered it more valid, even though it might just be giving a single wrong answer more consistently.

bondarchukon Caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee lower stress, depression and impulsivity

>Participants first abstained from coffee for two weeks before being reintroduced to either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee in a blinded trial.

So it could easily just be cessation of withdrawal symptoms.

bondarchukon Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police

>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.

Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence

bondarchukon Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police

It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).

Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:

"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"

so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.

(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)

bondarchukon Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police

He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.

bondarchukon Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police

Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.

bondarchukon Norway greenlights first full-scale ship tunnel

Yeah it looks more like photocollage creatively photoshopped. Perspective is very weird in picture 3 too, very cubist.

bondarchukon McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)

Postmodernism is a bit more "anything goes as long as it's good". Once you move beyond really basic rule-based criticisms like "it's not symmetric" or "there are competing masses" then you can ask "but is it good?" i.e. does it work as a house for the persons it was built for in the context that it was built in? (To be fair from what I recall many entries in the blog actually do that to an extent, only using an air of neoclassical snobbery as a framework (for example that really funny bit about the pre-bathroom space where you can snort coke in the 80s is like this IMO))

bondarchukon McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)

>Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after.

Seems like an obvious way out of this conundrum is reclassifying these so-called mcmansions as postmodern. Description instead of prescription.

bondarchukon Midjourney Medical

I know you are right but it just sounds so dumb. In theory it should be possible to do a scan and then realize most things you find are likely not a problem and don't worry about them.