808 karma · joined October 23, 2014
When writing an essay, I often start with pen and paper. Mostly, an outline, and sometimes also the introductory couple of paragraphs. But I switch to a word processor when the bulk of the words start flowing.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?
Maybe the chat interface does away with the first half of the GUI/CLI schemes, skipping over learning the affordance part of the interface.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-27/purdue...
He quotes and explains parts of both the majority and dissenting opinions.
He argues that true happiness comes from being-at-work in accordance with virtue. And that virtue can be cultivated through habit. So in his scheme, you can work towards sustained happiness.
Three of the important virtues he devotes separate chapters to are: courage, temperance and practical judgment ('phronesis', sometimes translated as 'prudence').
Of course, everyone develops their own map on how to understand and go about their lives. Just thought I'd share a pointer to the one in this work.
I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import.
'jail time' for AI could be removing access to the Internet, and restricting interactions with human users. That would put the AI behind other AIs that can stay current (through ongoing training with new data etc.), offer services to humans and gain market share. No pain for the convicted AI, but economic disadvantage that might be difficult to make up for upon release.
My lawyer friend says families of victims e.g. of murder, feel bad waking up in the morning knowing that the person who did the act is still out and about, and that it affects their productivity as they keep thinking about it. It helps when the perp is caught and sentenced.
I first heard him on his 1999 CD of Debussy's Preludes Bk 1, which first made me notice and eventually fall in love with the sonority of the piano.
A pity I didn't try hard enough to catch him perform live some time. RIP.
What do you make of the following exchange, which feels like a summary of his contrarian takes?
Lex Fridman (01:29:00) Well, so to summarize, you recommend in a spicy way that only Yann LeCun can, you recommend that we abandon generative models in favor of joint embedding architectures?
Yann LeCun (01:29:15) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:29:15) Abandon autoregressive generation.
Yann LeCun (01:29:17) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:29:19) This feels like court testimony, abandon probabilistic models in favor of energy based models as we talked about, abandon contrastive methods in favor of regularized methods. And let me ask you about this, you’ve been for a while, a critic of reinforcement learning.
Yann LeCun (01:29:36) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:29:38) The last recommendation is that we abandon RL in favor of model predictive control, as you were talking about, and only use RL when planning doesn’t yield the predicted outcome, and we use RL in that case to adjust the world model or the critic.
Yann LeCun (01:29:55) Yes.
Not sure if TFA uses it in this way.
See: https://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/SKerstein/categoricalandh...
--I think people who play/practice musical instruments regularly, esp. in an ensemble, esp. in classical music (where the written notes are referred to a lot); to make arrangements, transcriptions, instrument parts, etc. out of the originals to perform for fun. I'dn't be surprised if programmer folks are overrepresented in this group. (I am one of them).
* How similar is sheet music to source code? Does any software interpret it to output audio?
--I'd like to say quite similar, but upon further thought, maybe not. e.g. In sheet music, there's no ready equivalent to functions taking arguments and returning values. Maybe the similarity is with compiled/machine code (which I am not familiar with).
* How expressive is sheet music? How constrained do you feel trying to convey your idea onto this format? Does it support abstraction, or making your own abstractions?
--It is quite expressive. Most musical material that people come up with in their minds will likely be adequately represented in sheet music. I haven't seen "user-defined" sheet music notation, which I think is what you may mean by abstractions. I suppose it could be done (and supported by LilyPond).
Reading about their falling out at Tanglewood in the 90s, Ozawa appears to have been a decisive chief executive too[2].
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/14527513-Ravel-Prokofiev-Bri...
[2] https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/lifestyle/1998/01/12/e...
Says wouldn't have been an issue if the companies were doing it in-house. But because of SV culture it's the startups doing the innovation that the big boys then need to support + get access to.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-29/financ...
d. can generalize (as you do say) into offering my expertise at something they're interested in (like, getting a Linux laptop); an expertise exchange as it were.
I am most sympathetic to the argument that self-consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is not easily modeled, but is nevertheless derived from physics. In the context of my previous comment, it is this emergent phenomenon that is deemed "intelligent".
> If I made a careful atom by atom (or quark/lepton/boson) copy of every atom in your brain and body in a different location, would that new copy be intelligent?
Yes.
> If our intelligence is purely a result of physical processes, then why do you suppose it would be impossible for us (or more advanced future beings), to construct a machine which can also follow those processes?
I think it is possible, and not too far off to boot. We might get (maybe we already have gotten) the intelligence without the particular emergent phenomenon of self-consciousness that is of the kind humans possess, at least not at first. Some of us will call that AGI, some of us won't. Because we are still working out the terminology and taxonomy. Discussions like these in HN help.
Maybe we'll get the emergent phenomenon soon thereafter. If it is in fact intractable to model (and therefore to train for directly), it may happen unpredictably. Exciting times.
Problem is, even granted the above, that's not enough of an argument that AGI is only a matter of mechanism.
Take the analogy with pain. We've discovered the mechanism for pain. That it's e.g. some stimulus applied to skin which sets of nerve signals that register in the brain. To then say that the experience of pain is the same as the physical mechanism we've discovered still misses a key step:
what does the experience of pain inhere to, and is that the same subject as that for the mechanism of pain?
Comparing AGI and human intelligence has the same problem. We don't know exactly what is intelligent in either case, let alone whether the two are comparable. So it's not a question of intelligence per se, but of that which is intelligent. Maybe AGI, the way we are thinking and talking about it, is unavoidably tangled with having to grapple with [self-]consciousness.
https://free.copula.ai/?file=80c04873-4cef-40c6-8c5c-6a9519f...
I just asked it if the police indeed handcuffed people trying to get in to help, to fact check what I read on Reddit.
Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
Some high-end headphones are marketed as "studio" headphones. Meaning for professionals such as you when doing the monitoring at the recording studio, and not for the consumer at home.
I never managed to understand why what's good for the pro is not good for the consumer. Might you be able to help explain?
I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.
Apparently the old set of charges were already severe enough to e.g. get a Harvard student suspended for a year[1] or so.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-...
Granted not exactly undocumented, as it is linked on the /submit page. But I think worth including, as it is not in the Guidelines or FAQ.
[1] see my user profile
--praise them for the fight they have been managing so far --tell them that their talents are being looked forward to by others/the world when they manage to recover
[1]Paraphrasing from memory of a podcast interview he did with Andrew Sullivan ~a month back.
> So sacks also concludes that we need other humans to acquire language (really, to become human in general)
I do agree with Sacks' conclusion, having first come across a version of it in Hegel's dialectic--the dialectic of self vs. other. Or in my interpretation, of personhood and relationship. i.e. Personhood is forged through relationships with other persons.
Do you think this applies to AGI? That it needs to bootstrap itself by communicating and relating with other intelligences? This, and related concepts like free will, tend to be ignored in the scientific literature on the subject[1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708 Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness
Sounded controversial to me when I first encountered it, but apparently accepted by modern philosophers as a legit argument. (That language is necessarily a public/communal thing.)
Though I feel very bad writing ^^^. The rest of those pieces are very worth listening to. I listen more often to the first movement of the Ninth.
Until you think a bit and realize the photographer's probably seen a lot of "street paintings" and could have learnt good composition that way. Still, very impressive achievement artistically (on top of technically).