drdaeman

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

We didn’t have laws but every TV at the dawn of the era came with full schematics and documentation.

That said, I’m not arguing that we don’t need laws today - we do, or at least I have no other idea how to do a course correction from where we are. Preferably wide-range ones that alter the whole consumer-producer relationships.

But the key thing is not the laws, it’s the attitude (individual and corporate) towards others. Can’t legislate that, I’m afraid.

Which ones?

Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?

Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.

Two completely different stories. One is public data scraping, another is private conversation scraping (where they're a first-party to the conversation). The key difference is that in the former case, no one made any promises, in the latter an explicit promise was made that data is not used for training (assuming opt-out).

Isn't modulo-twelve (if we ignore microtonal) the core underlying structure, and then you pick scale (like 2 2 1 2 2 2 1) and a key as a mapping, and then use degree as an 1-based index into the scale?

I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.

Same exact duration for all authors: as long as they’re around and capable of caring. It’s not the same when duration is expressed numerically, sure. But consider: no life is the same in this way (until immortality is discovered), yet all should be valued equally (or so I hope and believe). Timing life makes them unavoidably unequal - and thus differences in lifetime shouldn’t be a criteria to use for comparing rights. That’d be actual age discrimination.

I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.

> The framing of something as a disease

Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.

> a computer can never be sad or horny or have taste

So far ;-)

What we need are refinement types, where there’s a base type and a predicate. F* has this:

     val (/) : int -> (divisor:int { divisor <> 0 }) -> int

I’m not sure what kind of peripherals the article talks about, but I’ve had a lot of weird crashes with ASUS MB onboard feature that provides RGB lightning to various fans and whatever. I may misremember the details; it was 6 or so years ago when I encountered that, but their AsIO driver was an abomination of engineering. Not only was it a god driver that allowed users to mess with arbitrary memory and MSRs from userspace, it managed to somehow mess up SMBus and cause random lockups.

Guess there’s plenty of other hardware companies that aren’t producing better software.

“How” as in “what tool” is a different “how” as in “with what intent”. LLM was used to produce a bunch of arguments supporting a pre-intended outcome. Doesn’t matter much whether it was a machine or a human (and whether it was “expert” himself or a ghostwriter), but it does matter - a lot - how the outcome was the pre-selected and the task was to cherry-pick the facts to support it.

Yea, my bad, that was a brain fart. I guess I was thinking about it from the thing’s perspective rather than owners’.

Yes. Although, to be pedantic - stealing relocates (it doesn’t leave one less, it moves the only thing into another person’s possession), while copying duplicates.

Copy vs move is IMHO accurate semantics.

Read it in the context. The “made up” wasn’t a general statement. No one argues stealing doesn’t exist at all. My friend’s bike was stolen. What’s made up is application of this word to situations that are incompatible with what stealing is supposed to mean.

Compare this to “the smell of soup and the sound of money” type “theft”.

No, and we collectively had this decades ago already. “Stealing” instead of “infringement” is originally MAFIAA language intentionally (ab)used to encourage emotional reaction despite original owner not losing their copy.

If you broke into a data center, pulled a hard drive and drive off with it - that’s stealing. If you accessed a copy of some information - that’s infringement, unauthorized access, or some other violation. But that’s not “stealing”, which fundamentally requires a loss or otherwise depriving original owner of the property that was stolen.

ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total.

Network isolation, unless it's true airgapping (and then lack of remote access is a feature), relies on router not forwarding traffic where it shouldn't go.

Same goes for NVR or intermediate hub(s) (if NVR is somewhere outside of one's premises). They should only accept what they need and know how to handle, and reject anything else.

Those Eufy homebases are just poorly designed, that's all.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture.

There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.

Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called.

AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art.

I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t explicitly planned are randomly generated rather than chosen (consciously or not). Or unable to be planned - refining the generation results is the most difficult part. Which translates to that “sloppy” image.

Humans can detect sloppiness, not “AI”.

From the first principles, I suspect it’s an attitude thing, management-to-individual-contributors relationships. If management treats ICs as equals and tries to form a healthy human-centric culture, you get unlimited PTO. If the management treats ICs as tools to do the work and tries to squeeze maximum performance per dollar out of that biomass, you get sweatshops with zero time off. Incidentally things correlate with ICs replaceability - the more replaceable an individual is, the less reasons to care (see a work-performer as a human with needs and problems and ) business owners have. Plus, the wellbeing of the business is a likely factor - the more breathing space it gets, the more it could afford (unless greed and lack of long-term planning kills everything) to be less financially optimal short-term for long-term prosperity.

Regulations are means of pushing the bottom line back at scale. They should be unnecessary in ideal humane society, but that’s not a thing. I wonder whether there’s a way to shift the culture somehow… but there seems to be no political will for that, because it’s certainly not any popular agenda point.

I don’t think it’s about powerful people or personality cults. The same dynamic surely can be observed in any communities (interest groups, even families), where people take sides based on personalities rather than facts about events alone. It’s just less prominent, but same overall phenomena - the bias exists, and there are cases where it becomes severe and nearly unconditional.

It’s easy to dismiss PG with “SV techbros are nuts”, but that could be (or could be not, but there’s a risk) the same identity over substance bias manifestation. To de-bias, we should look where the class/status/social-circle identity becomes unimportant.

There’s a theory that our reasoning had evolved not for truth-seeking purposes but for a social cohesion, but I haven’t yet read well about it (“The enigma of reason” is on my reading list) to form an informed opinion.

I’m not sure how you interpreted it all, but neither I was talking about any foreseeable future (I explicitly said that I dunno if LLMs are somewhat relatable to all this), nor I’m a religious type (I merely used a term “spirit” because this language was suggested in the thread).

Every example was picked and vetted from popsci books I’ve read, with real basis in neuroscience (in my layman understanding, obviously, so I could’ve gotten something wrong, but I trust that a bit more than an online diagnosis). That blending was a pretty naive mix of a bunch of sci-fi tropes, but point taken - proper writers indeed blur those lines a lot better than my mess of a post.

And so we’re essentially back to <font color=red size=10>?

> You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise.

Does the gap scare you somehow? Why?

Any artificial biology (and whatever hosts a live human spirit automatically becomes a life form - thus, a biology) is entirely our, human product. If it's not ours, whose else it is?

> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off.

I agree that our biology is 100% innate part of us, as we are today - we are layers upon layers upon layers. But some parts of some of those layers are inadequate for who we're trying to be as a society. And many of those had appeared way before a human pronounced first words ever.

We'll never be at peace with what some parts of us are doing. We'll continue to cheer for punishments, and demand those relative to our feelings about the act rather than consequences. Our moral judgements will keep piggybacking on our pathogen-avoidance machinery, ever prone to abuse by those who seek wars. We won't collectively overcome our unconscious contempt for low-status. We'll be bound to self-deceivingly conform to beliefs for loyalty signaling. We'll keep tending to pursue short-term gains even if they clearly contradict our future goals. And so on. YMMV, but I hold no allegiance to any of those machinery. It's very interesting how it all came to be, but there's nothing beautiful about the results.

If we can "fix" it in our current biology - that'd be wonderful too, although I suspect that it could be impossible without creating a whole new family, separate from apes. Possibly a lot deeper. At which point it's probably "traitorous" all the same, unless you hold some allegiance to DNA-based life in general.

I guess, we can try slapping on new circuitry that overrides old one. But why pile up hacks? We have plenty piled up already, and most don't benefit us. Not to mention difficulties of mixed-biology reproduction.

So, a new organism doesn't strike me as treason, as long as it replicates all the good parts of what makes us human. The darker rest can carry on in (trans)our cultural layers, as historical tales of how we were in the days of old, no longer an active factor in daily lives.

> Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits?

You're asking who's directing a hypothetical? Hypothetically, no one. Or, better said - evolution, as always. It developed a few interesting mechanisms: tool use, language, reasoning, now through those it starts to dabble at different biologies.

And the Life itself benefits. As it always did, from diversity.

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not.

I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended.

If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and limitations of our preexisting biology, exercising more control of their own lives - that’d be wonderful.

I obviously have no idea wherever language models can lead to such dream, of would be a dead end.

The article allows for breathing and blinking, but has an odd constraint of “don’t move”, which AFAIK will make one fight their own neural system trying to autoregulate arousal. I’m not an expert but in my limited understanding, remaining completely still is not “not doing anything”, it’s very active inhibitory action.

As an experiment, just get in a nice running shower, so your sensory system will get external stimulation. YMMV, but for me three minutes pass quick. I just did that and when I decided to check the time it was almost 5 minutes already.

Real “doing nothing” is just leaving things be, just chilling out and observing whatever is happening without actively participating - and three minutes is a pretty low mark for that, unless we’re talking about fellas with ADHD.

There’s no person in case of a fetus.

It is mainly so because of lack of education and emotional manipulation into mixing up human biology and human personhood. Heartbeat doesn’t make a person. It’s not even a requirement to be a person (people with continuous-flow artificial hearts lack it). The first specks of personhood appear a lot later in the process.

A normal sane reaction is “yeah, there’s already a working cardiovascular system, better stop it before the organism develops even further.”

This said, it’s an obviously pointless and harmful delay. There is no reason to check a heartbeat of a fetus if a mother decides she doesn’t want to carry it.

It did not, for example my /home is a btfrs mounted with compress=zstd:3

And some machines I’ve used, had swap on zram…