emptysongglass

Haha, well, I would appreciate if comments included more substantive evidence when they make claims like they did.

I see a lot of "AGI boosters/doomers" comfortable making big claims without providing research to back what, when challenged, prove to be just their model or feeling of how things function.

> Awareness is just continuous propagation of the neural network, be that artificial or biological. The reason thoughts just "appear" is because the brain is continuously propagating signal through the neural network.

This is just a claim you are making, without evidence.

The way you understand awareness is not through "this is like that" comparisons. These comparisons fall over almost immediately as soon as you turn your attention to the mind itself, by observing it for any length of time. Try it. Go observe your mind in silence for months. You will observe for yourself it is not what you've declared it to be.

> An LLM does all of these things, and more, and you can prove this by how complex their output is.

Complex output does not prove anything. You are again just making claims.

It is astoundingly easy to push an LLM over to collapse into ungrounded nonsense. Humans don't function this way because the two modes of reasoning are not alike. It's up to those making extraordinary claims to prove otherwise. As it is, the evidence does not exist that they behave comparably.

How does that back up your point?

You are not making an argument, you are just making assertions without evidence and then telling us the burden of proof is on us to tell you why not.

If you went walking down the streets yelling the world is run by a secret cabal of reptile-people without evidence, you would rightfully be declared insane.

Our feelings and desires largely determine the content of our thoughts and actions. LLMs do not function as such.

Whether I am arguing with a parrot or not has nothing to do with cognition. A parrot being able to usefully fool a human has nothing to do with cognition.

No, the burden of proof is on you to deliver. You are the claimant, you provide the proof. You made a drive-by assertion with no evidence or even arguments.

I also do not accept your assertion, at all. Humans largely function on the basis of desire-fulfilment, be that eating, fucking, seeking safety, gaining power, or any of the other myriad human activities. Our brains, and the brains of all the animals before us, have evolved for that purpose. For evidence, start with Skinner or the millions of behavioral analysis studies done in that field.

Our thoughts lend themselves to those activities. They arise from desire. Transformers have nothing to do with human cognition because they do not contain the basic chemical building blocks that precede and give rise to human cognition. They are, in fact, stochastic parrots, that can fool others, like yourself, into believing they are somehow thinking.

[1] Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). Brain, 106(3), 623-642.

[2] Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H. J., & Haynes, J. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11(5), 543-545.

[3] Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2003). Parsing reward. Trends in Neurosciences, 26(9), 507-513. (This paper reviews the "wanting" vs. "liking" distinction, where unconscious "wanting" or desire is driven by dopamine).

[4] Kavanagh, D. J., Andrade, J., & May, J. (2005). Elaborated Intrusion theory of desire: a multi-component cognitive model of craving. British Journal of Health Psychology, 10(4), 515-532. (This model proposes that desires begin as unconscious "intrusions" that precede conscious thought and elaboration).

Yeah this one isn't relevant at all to the current protocol version.

Conversations is fantastic, not sure what you're on about.

They're really lagging on their mobile client updates.

A reminder that Tim sold out his own creation to DRM. I trust Tim to "save the web" about as far as I could throw him with one hand.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/06/berners_lee_web_drm_w...

I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.

Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.

Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.

I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.

Sorry, as a Dane, this weird conspiracy narrative that the US has us by the throats and is forcing us to push this legislation through is garbage.

Our government did this because they love control. A hard hand is what got us through COVID and it's been effective at curtailing a lot of the issues our neighbor to our north has faced with uncontrolled immigration of refugees. Our government has also been pushing through expansion of surveillance capabilities for our police, including predictive policing and expanded facial recognition.

Now kindly stop passing the buck and blame for us. This is on us, on Denmark. We are to blame.

What country are you in?

I said a good overview. Many experts have given their analysis on why Lynetteholmen sucks including environmental scientists [1]. The very fact that the environmental assessments were done piecemeal [2] plainly demonstrates the politicians responsible for this mega-project disaster knew exactly how bad it was.

[1] https://www.dn.dk/nyheder/forskere-i-skarp-kritik-af-miljovu...

[2] https://dm.dk/bio/alle-artikler/groenne-byer-skov-og-landska...

Can you elaborate on both points?

But it's not. I do not enjoy the benefits of a de minimis as a resident of Denmark. Every policy set in place is to discourage my enjoyment of a de jure de minimis.

If you import goods into this country at below the threshold, you are very likely to pay more than the original price of the good itself. That's the truth. There is de minimis in name only.

Look at my other comment. Most countries in the EU levy their own import fees that essentially make any de minimis in practice null.

US consumers have long enjoyed the privilege of actual de minimis, that is straight to their door, no fuss, no additional fees goods below the threshold.

You are correct that technically this is true. The EU has proposed to eliminate the threshold [1] but in practice EU consumers have not seen the benefit of the de minimis practiced by the US: try and import goods below the threshold from outside the EU and you will be hit by a variety of fees [2], making it uneconomical for a consumer to buy anything from outside.

[1] https://copenhageneconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/S...

[2] https://www.postnord.dk/siteassets/pdf/forretningsbetingelse...

And note that basically no other developed country had this carve-out except the US. People are foaming at the mouths about this issue, but no one pointed a finger at the EU or anywhere else.

That's the one! Here's a good overview by a Dane on its folly: https://youtu.be/K4icpF0S5BM?si=zjB2qkB-wy-VQu58

For what its worth, unions don't do collective bargaining for tech workers in Denmark.

Doesn't mean it isn't done. The Lego family was caught flying their private jet all over the world so they sold it and now have exclusive renting rights to a plane in a hangar operated by another company.

Exactly and I'm glad to see this the top comment.

I live in Denmark. I am Danish. Too many people nurse fantasies of the Nordics as some kind of socialist utopia.

The fact is Denmark grows more corrupt by the day. They keep pushing the retirement age so I will be working until I'm 72. Healthcare quality has been dropping for more than 40 years now. The wealthy own the majority of land. We are currently home to a government that is leading the EU in its push for a surveillance mandate that is frankly terrifying in its scope. That same government pushed through the most garbage mega-project I have personally ever witnessed—that we the taxpayers are supposed to fund—despite voter outcry. Digital tenders get sold in backroom deals to a single company that is so ethically bankrupt they've been called out numerous times for workplace violations by our unions.

We're all fucked in the global slide toward authoritarianism and the wealthy's capture of the world economy. And while they get fat supping on our labor we're at each other's throats for who can be crowned the greatest victim.

May I ask if you make comparable money to when you were in tech? This sounds like a good career-shift for me but I wouldn't want to sacrifice current quality of life.

Yes, please, though I really wish you had posted something more substantive than two lines.

You're not saying anything, though you may think you are. Fiduciary duties owed to the company arising from the legal relationship between the directors and company is just legalese disguising the actual practice of public companies. In practice, every publicly held company that is not a benefit corporation serves to maximize stakeholder earnings.

Various: rejection due to irrelevance and not provoking substantive debate.

Identity politics, a key component of woke ideology, is not a rebranding of social democracy and egalitarian humanism.

The latter two used to be a common platforming of class equality. Woke ideology has turned common ground into a pitched battle against each other where the only winners are wealthy elites.

It most certainly is not the best game in town (of democracies). All the scariest mass surveillance laws are deliberated and passed in Europe, such as the Online Safety Act in the UK and currently seeing a record number of countries supporting is Chat Control which was proposed by a shadow group whose identities are unknown.

Much of what the EU (now speaking EU not Europe) does is deliberated behind closed doors, without any transparency to those outside.

I live here, and it is extremely scary where we are all going.

It's still around in its spiritual successor! https://crunchbangplusplus.org/

Danes are very proud of Denmark. It's a tiny country. There's a sense that we need to protect this tiny state from criticism because it's taken care of us. We've given the world Lego, Hans Christian Andersen, and we rank in the top two happiest countries in the world according to terrible measurements.

So now we're the baddies, what do we do? We don't mention it. Ignorance is bliss.

Danish journalists refuse to inform the public about this.

The moderators of r/denmark are also currently blocking any submissions of this story to the subreddit.