eternalban

"I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."

This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts.

> Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)

You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.

Does it also snitch on you to your boss? "Here is my assessment of the work habits of cs702 for this week."

[p.s.]:

pipelining is a kind of async comm because unlike the general case of asynchrony, the response order mirrors the request order (which is not a requirement of the general case.)

It's also not opinion. When pipelining, the communicating peers are not sychronizing their interactions; it occurs in an a-synchronous manner. Where does opinion get into the picture?

* since we typically end up packing a multiplicity of requests in a given MTU and further we can saturate the link (on both ends) since we are not blocking for a response before sending the next request. In synchronous protocols, the full bandwidth can't be utilized as there are cycles where the link (on respective sides) is idle.

As for description of pipelining, this question came up years ago in Redis's newsgroup and I posted the following (It starts sync and the final segment is 'pipelining' :)

https://youtu.be/bGv5s3EXH0w

That seems to be the case. I take that assert back.

p.s. just checked out the wiki for Donald Hoffman. Thank you for the reference, TIL. Have to listen to that podcast, but have some idea what are the problematic open Qs that you mention. [I'm not apparently not allowed to vote on hn so take my +1 in spirit ..]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043188

YB starts off with ~'we all agree mind is a product of the brain'. No, we do not all agree. Did we ever find the 'bottom' of matter? Has are search to find 'irreducible particle' succeeded? Is it not the case that as we threw more energy into our apparatus we found more elementary matter? Did we in fact finally arrive at a coherent unified model that fully explains material reality without "mathematical woo"?

So the honest position is that we have patchwork understanding of reality at various scales, and the reductionist program of Democritus et al has not been conclusively shown to be the ultimate truth. It seems that mind is bounded by the body but that 'boundary condition' depends on various reductionist assumptions about materiality.

     ∅
     2: 1 ∅
     6: 1 - 3 - 5 ∅
    30: 1 - - - - - 7 - - - 11 - 13 - - - 17 - 19 - - - 23 - - - - - 29 ∅
   210: 1 ... 209 ∅

"Number rules the universe. Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons. Every man has been made by God in order to acquire knowledge and contemplate." -- attributed to Pythagoras

* simply fold the rrs by ∅/2.

> I don't think the communication protocol between two processes, services, whatever has have the property of being synchronous or asynchronous.

This is news to those of us who have implemented or designed communication protocols between processes.

> It is more about how each side of the communication handles it internally.

You are confusing processing of information obtained via communication with the pattern of communication. A synchronous protocol is a lock-step exchange of data/meta-data between two communicating processes. You can have processes communicating via a synchronous protocol that handle the processing in an asynchronous manner. An asynchronous protocol does not require exchange of messages to be lock-step

   A: HELO w/ MY CREDS <blocks>
   B: HELO - ACCEPT CREDS
   A: GET 'foo' <blocks>
   B: HERE is 'foo' <data> 
   [A: queue foo data for async processing by an internal comp A']
   A: GET 'bar' <blocks>
   [A': processed 'foo'] 
   B: HERE is 'bar' <data> 
   [A: queue bar data for async processing by an internal comp A']
   ...
   [A': processed 'bar'] 

   A: HELO w/ MY CREDS <blocks>
   B: HELO - ACCEPT CREDS  
   A: GET 'foo' <doesn't block>
   A: GET 'bar' <doesn't block>
   B: HERE is 'foo' <data>       # B may even return 'bar' first in some cases 
   [A: queue foo data for processing ...]
   A: GET 'foobar' <doesn't block>
   B: HERE is 'bar' <data> 
   [A: queue bar data for processing]
   ...
   B: HERE is 'foobar' <data> 
   ...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344006359/figure/fi...

The authority to check with is Kenneth Frampton and his Modern Architecture. He categorized Safdie as postmodern. I just checked and apparently my copy (some early 90s edition) is awol from the shelf and no pdfs to be found on the net. However found this article:

Grep for safdie:

https://www.stirworld.com/think-columns-the-fifth-edition-of...

He was a great teacher, too.

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

~

Also not "brutalist" (Safdie meets a straight edge on a hill):

Rokko Housing I, II, III, Kobe, Tadao Ando https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/edificios-rokko-i-ii-iii-...

https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max...

Ando used to make concrete sing. Just superb. He also had a dog he named Corbu (its true!) - iirc he claimed (in a lecture when visiting our school) that he followed Corbusier but to me he generously lifted from Lou Kahn.

https://wrightwood659.org/exhibitions/ando-and-le-corbusier-...

The model of the psyche that I subscribe to is ~Jungian, with some minor modifications. I distinguish between the un-conscious, the sub-conscious, and consciousness. The content of the unconscious is atemporal, where as the content of the (sub-)conscious is temporal. In this model, background processing occurs in the sub-conscious, -not- the un-conscious. The unconscious is a space of ~types which become reified in the temporal regime of (sub-)consciousness [via the process of projection]. The absolute center of the psyche is the Self and this resides in the unconscious; the self and the unconscious content are not directly accessible to us (but can be approached via contemplation, meditation, prayer, dreams, and visions: these processes introduce unconscious content into the conscious realm, which when successfully integrated engenders 'psychological wholeness'). The ego -- the ("suffering") observer -- is the central point of consciousness. Self realization occurs when ego assumes a subordinate position to the Self, abandons "attachment" to perceived phenomena & disavows "lordship" i.e. the false assumption of its central position, at which point the suffering ends. This process, in various guises, is the core of most spiritual schools. And we can not discount these aspects of Human mental experience, even if we choose to assume a critical distance from the theologies that are built around these widely reported phenomena. I am not claiming that this is a quality of all minds, but it seems it is characteristic of human minds.

The absolute minimum point that you should take away from this (even if the above model is unappealing or unacceptable or woo to you /g) is that we can always meaningfully speak of a psychology when considering minds. If we can not discern a psychology in the subject of our inquiry then it should not be considered a mind.

I do -not- think that we can attribute a pyschology to large language models.

~

Your comment on the mapping of the latent spaces is interesting, but as you note we should probably wait until this has been established before jumping into conclusions.

And also please excuse the handwavy matter in my comment as well. We're all groping in the semidarkness here.

"In May 2003, at age 72, Gardner dosed himself with painkillers and stabbed himself to death."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Gardner#Controversy

(The original MoMA was a minor gem and an oasis in midtown. I almost forgave Philip Johnson because of that garden. Now it has lost all its charm.)

https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/pompidou-cann...

Does that all sound familiar to folks building backend systems? That is 'microservices' for architecture, a counter to 'monolithic' structures, using almost precisely the same motivations, and, running into the same exact problems: operational complexity.

It's a pity Jean Nouvel wasn't around then - his work* is great imo.

This is a modern French building:

http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projects/institut-du-monde-arab...

* http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projets/

A must see if you go to Switzerland - an amazing structure that defies photographic capture - has to be experienced: http://www.jeannouvel.com/projets/centre-de-culture-et-des-c...

‘Pompidou cannot be perceived as anything but a monument’

Reyner Banham discusses the roles of Megastructure, Archigram and modern technology in Pompidou’s design, 1977

"The Centre reflects the supreme moment of technological euphoria in Western society: the moment when we genuinely believed that ‘freedom’ was to be got by providing ourselves with endless power-supplied facility: with servicing which would be so elaborate and so heavily duplicated that you could do anything you want, any where, at any time. We are wiser now; for we know that even if our resources allowed this sort of indulgence, the political machinery we would have to forget to operate it would be so offensive that it would remove true freedom from the face of the earth."

https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/pompidou-cann...

~

(The Walking City - Archigram)

https://archigramwalkingcity.weebly.com/

My sense of the general idea (non-authorative): Since the sequence emitted by an LLM is probabilistic completion i.e. predict the next word, the examiner can also do the same by progressively processing the text. Given the assumption that the semantic relations extracted from training corpus should be fairly universal for a given domain at the output level (even though distinct LLMs will likely have distinct embedding spaces), then the examiner LLM should be able to assign probabilities to the predicted words. The idea is that a genuine human produced text will have idiosyncrasies that are -not- probabilistically optimal and the examiner can establish a sort of 'distant from probable mean' measure, with the expectation that LLM produced text should be 'closer' to the examiner's predictions of 'the next word'.

The problem (if above is correct) then is the missing 'prompt' and meta-instruction embedded therein. Those should ("engineering") affect the output, possibly skewing the distance measure, thus defeating the examiner. But of course, say in context of academia, the examiner can 'guess' as to some aspects of the prompt as well. For example, if you are examining papers for a specific assignment, the examiner can self-prompt as well. "An essay on Hume's position on the knowledge of the self".

"We're in a terrible mess because there has been 10,000 years of stupidity".

p.s. found it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAmzziUZMYuRIEeCImzmX...

This FMI? (https://fmi-standard.org/) And what do you mean by "moral equivalent"?

Very topical in context of LLMs. GPT would exemplify a fully "fragmented" mind for him, I would think. He's quite alarmed in that '90s book; he would positively have a fit if he had encountered our chattering machines.