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Federation works for Twitter, it doesn't work for Reddit. If my Mastodon instance federates with yours, I can see your posts, you can see mine, we're fully merged. If my lemmy instance federates with yours, we can browse each other's communities, but those communities themselves don't merge. The userbase merges but the communities do not, and the community is the base unit that gives Reddit value. Federated Reddits will never take off for this reason. You either have a bunch of fractured communities that are all worse because there is no network effect, or you have one instance (or one community) absorb all the traffic and become its own centralized fiefdom.

If there are no successful, extant examples, then I don't think it's a good basis for anything. As I said, it's a Utopian ideal. That's fine, but it's not practical (and it's not trying to be).

I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there. However, all of that will be capitalized by a nimble, forward-thinking, idealistic-yet-centralized model that gets rid of all the ideological cruft and polishes a real, useful, and engaging product.

They never will and popular tools will never expect them to. Some people will, but never most.

If the federated system can't handle the trolls and bad actors that Reddit is currently equipped to deal with then the whole idea is dead in the water.

If the philosophy is the point, it's a dead platform. Utopian ideals are fine, if that's your thing. Shaming people who don't share them is just rude. I don't see how you can compare the platform to the democratic process and not expect the same warts you see in democracies. A few people care a lot, some people care a bit, most people barely care at all. Grandstanding will never change that.

Maybe if reddit developed some expertise in using all of the user data they have to tag, categorize, annotate every comment, they would have something of value to provide. Their recent actions only angered users and won't stop future LLMs from using their data for the reasons many others here have noted.

Here's a thought experiment: what are the qualities of a parrot that would make its consciousness different than that of a stochastic parrot? For that matter, what are the qualities that separate a parrot's consciousness from a human's? Or a human's from a pig's? Given the way we treat pigs, we clearly don't think consciousness in and of itself is worthy of any formal consideration, as long as the benefit we derive from exploiting it is high enough.

So, with AI, is it fair to say that anyone really cares whether it will develop qualities that make it seem as though it is an emergent consciousness? Why would we treat digital consciousness any better than we treat organic consciousness? What is the point of pontificating whether or not the type of thinking an AI does crosses an arbitrary threshold when that threshold only exists as a tool for creating useful outgroups?

However sophisticated the thing that our thinking is, it exists on a scale and we sit at an arbitrary spot. We treat thinking that occurs further down the scale as functionally irrelevant not because of any real distinction but because doing so has a high utility for our species.

So, the question of how we will treat a "truly conscious and sentient" AI has already been answered. Look at how we treat pigs. Good luck out there, HAL.

>Yet those of us who never got that genetic golden ticket should take heart: The halo effect appears to go both ways. A number of studies show that goodness often enhances our looks. A paper in PLOS One in February, for example, reports that people found faces in photos more attractive when they learned the subjects were honest, kind and not aggressive. The results suggest that “facial attractiveness is malleable,” the authors write. Or as Sappho observed: “What is beautiful is good and what is good will soon be beautiful.”

Well there goes the correlation/causation angle. I'm sure everyone has experience with seeing someone for the first time and thinking that they're incredible attractive until they open their mouth. The mind builds perception out of many signals and ocular vision is just one kind. Typically 'ugliness' is the presence of unwanted phenotypes, and in the absence of that 'ugliness' it's very easy to impute beauty.

I also think the idea that beautiful people become more likely to believe in a 'just world' is a strange way to think of it. If we're assuming a baseline level of selfishness, evolutionarily it would make much more sense for ugly people to try to shift consensus away from a 'just world' as doing so is likely to increase the amount of resources they receive. That is, instead of beautiful people recognizing their own privilege and thus lobbying for more, to me it makes more sense that people who don't see themselves as beautiful will tend to lobby for more beauty-blind practices. No one complains the deck is stacked when they're winning.

F-35s aren't particularly useful for collecting taxes, for maintaining a state. You can't use them to intimidate an individual, it's a huge waste of resources for the owner of the F-35. What's more dangerous than an F-35 is a group of guys with guns driving around in a pickup truck. Guns and trucks are just so much cheaper than fighter jets, so much more deployable... not to mention the entire logistical and manpower apparatus that goes into getting an F-35 in the air. If you want to win a war of attrition you use cheap, effective tools, not the flashy stuff. Flashy weapons are great for blowing up some other country's infrastructure, it's not very useful if the enemy is your own people. If you blow up all your own people and infrastructure, what do you have power over?

If you and everyone in a 10-mile radius of where you're sitting right now decided to ignore some federal law, like maybe the one against cannabis, what the heck is an F-35 going to do about it? Blow up a building, is that supposed to help? No, you get some guys with guns and trucks and then you can start going door to door, threatening people, looking around, collecting stuff, whatever. You can set up checkpoints and block off bridges, the whole shebang, because you're trying to establish control, not just blow things up.

Blowing things up has its uses but if you want to intimidate someone to the point where you have power over them, you need to be a little more intimate. You can't just be a fleck in the sky and you can't just show up do to the big stuff. You need to be in their face as a persistent, immediate threat. That's what influences human behavior and that's how power is established. That's exactly why small guns are such a sticking point in the USA, they're a very effective counter to this intimate threat.

No, it doesn't, because you don't know what the world would have looked like if there were no sanctions. If the impact of the sanctions delayed the war or forced Russia to go in with fewer supplies then the sanctions absolutely had a measurable impact. Just because Putin has strong authority now doesn't mean he wouldn't have been stronger without sanctions. Your arguments have no basis in reality.

OK, so your ministers are targeted, but everyday citizens are not. It's now trivial to work around sanctions and they don't matter at all. When your sanctions are symbolic, that's fine. When they're meant to actually have an economic impact, that doesn't work. There's an argument for fomenting dissent against the government causing the sanctions, too. If there were good, easy solutions, it wouldn't be the conflict that it is.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The counterparts to the government of Israel would be the PA and Hamas, not "Palestine".

There is no objective measure of terrorism since that designation is a political one. You can look at the objectivity of the criteria but the choosing of the criteria is unavoidably political. The question is not whether or not the definition is objective, but whether or not it is fairly applied. How would you describe a government that pays the families of "martyrs" who blow themselves up in coffee shops and restaurants, not despite but for their actions?

Unlike the Russians facing issues due to the actions of their government? Do you think they are all guilty, all deserving of sanction and economic hardship? Of course not, but what's the alternative?

I don't understand the confusion on this topic. One side will pay the family of a suicide bomber that murders innocent civilians, the other won't. It's not complicated.

War is ugly, but as a global society we do have some idea about the difference between combat and terrorism. Firing rockets indiscriminately into a civilian area is not combat. Hiding your guns, bombs, and bases inside of civilian buildings is not some idle decision.

The biggest losers of the Palestinian propaganda machine are the Palestinians themselves, and they are not the ones funding it. They are victims of this proxy war. It's a terrible situation, and it will continue to be terrible so long as it being a terrible situation is a precondition of the funding the terrorist governments receive. Hence, PayPal's ban.

You are not the worst picture of yourself ever taken. The picture does reflect a subset of you: at a particular place, at a particular time, taken from a particular angle. You are in the photo but the photo is not you. You can just take a better photo. People do this all the time, it's not a big deal. While it's normal to be embarrassed by a bad picture, it's also normal to chalk it off as bad lighting, bad timing, whatever.

That's what your code is. It's a picture of your thoughts at a particular time, constrained by the process of translation onto the medium on which it is being viewed. Some part of you is in there, but the thing itself is not you and it doesn't make sense to view it as a completely accurate representation of yourself. You got caught thinking with your mouth open, oops. Just try again.

This is only true when it is meaningless.

Let's say my friend was born on January 2, 1900, and I was born on January 1, 1900. Who has the closer birthday to someone born on January 1, 2000?

If you say it's me, well guess what, you're wrong! My birthday is 1 day farther away, just count the days.

If you say it's my friend, well guess what, you're wrong! January 1 == January 1. It's the same birthday, obviously.

Incidentally this is why I think LLMs are a lot more impressive than many here give them credit for. Language is ambiguous and being able to create something novel & coherent using an algorithm is an amazing achievement. Embedded in our use of words is a lot of information that is often incongruent with the understood meaning of the word, as this example shows. Apparently humanity itself has two divergent "hallucinations" of what the word "closest" means in this context. We really can't blame the AI for imitating us when that's what we ask it to do.

You're right that from an observer outside of the event horizon, a black hole hasn't happened yet (and never will).

There's a fun thought experiment to be had here. We're all familiar with the concept of "going back in time". Even though the math doesn't check out and our imaginations of what that looks like are totally impossible, it's something we can (and often like to) imagine.

Now, what happens when you move backwards not in time, but in space? And I don't mean changing your direction 180 degrees, but moving backwards within the confines of space. So, if your present coordinates are (X, Y, Z), you move "backwards in space" 5 meters such that no matter what your direction of motion, if you move "forwards in space" by 5 meters you end up right where you started, at (X, Y, Z). You're basically creating an inverted bubble around (X, Y, Z) and making it so that all possible paths lead "outward" toward (X, Y, Z). Any point that is A meters away from (X, Y, Z) is actually A+5 meters away from you.

In a 2-D world this can be modeled with a third dimension. We all live on a flat plain but someone on a 5-meter hill is actually farther away than their 2-dimensional coordinates would imply. You're able to move away from a point in 2-D space without changing your 2-D coordinates (because you're actually moving in another dimension).

For 3D space, this extra dimension is time itself. The only way to move "backwards" in a comprehensible sense within 3 dimensions is by moving backwards within time. So, I'm not actually moving 5 meters "backwards" within space but moving backwards in time such that I will appear at (X, Y, Z) in 3-D space at precisely the same time it would take me to move forward 5 meters. I'm blipped out of space until such time has passed to allow me to reach (X, Y, Z) again, so I've successfully "moved backwards in space" by 5 meters. So, if I move "backwards in space", then I'm really putting (X, Y, Z) in front of me time-wise.

So, what's the center of a black hole? We can imagine it has coordinates (X, Y, Z). And let's pretend it's actually moving backwards into space, which we now conceptualize as putting its "present" coordinates forward in time. But, it's actually moving backwards in space (i.e. moving universally farther from every other point in space) at a speed faster than we can travel. The center of the black hole is always in the future and even as we move closer to the center, it's still infinitely far away. As we cross the event horizon, we ride the current and start moving faster than the universal speed limit, cutting ourselves off from ever interacting with the outside universe again. However, we're still never going to be able to reach the center, and indeed the center of the black hole has still not happened from our point of reference (and still never will).

"Cannot be inferred from its training set" is a pretty difficult hurdle. Human beings can infer patterns that aren't there, and we typically call those hallucinations or even psychoses. On the other hand, some unconfirmed, novel patterns that humans infer actually represent groundbreaking discoveries, like for example much of the work of Ramanujan.

In a real sense, all of the future discoveries of mathematics already exist in the "training set" of our present understanding, we just haven't thought it all the way through yet. If we discover something new, can we say that the concept didn't exist, or that it "couldn't be inferred" from previous work?

I think the same would apply to LLMs and their understanding of the way we encode information using language. Given their radically different approach to understanding the same medium, they are well poised to both confirm many things we understand intuitively as well as expose the shortcomings of our human-centric model of understanding.

So is the word "word" but that seems to have worked out OK so far. I can explain the meaning of "meaning" and that seems to work OK too. Being self-referential sounds a lot more like a feature than a bug. Given that the neurons in our own heads are connected to each other and not any ground truth, I think LLMs should do just fine.

LLMs are quickly going to be able to start explaining their own thought processes better than any human can explain their own. I wonder how many new words we will come up with to describe concepts (or "node-activating clusters of meaning") that the AI finds salient that we don't yet have a singular word for. Or, for that matter, how many of those concepts we will find meaningful at all. What will this teach us about ourselves?

>As an AI, I cannot make judgments or take sides in a debate.

Not what I was expecting to hear from an AI judge!

It's a big deal as far as impact, sure, but I think it's also OK for us to abandon the need for complete control. Because, really, that's what this is about: we're worried that if we can't understand what's happening, we can't control it. Personally I think that's just fine. It's a different class of thing but that's also OK.

Do we even really know all that we should about how to manufacture chips? My understanding is that we rely heavily on experiments and heuristics. I think with complexity that's just how things are, sometimes.

And again, going to the human-throwing-a-ball metaphor, maybe generalized intelligence actually requires introspective opaqueness. Maybe it's some cosmic law we don't understand: the better a system is at handling open-ended issues the less it can be systematically understood. I just think the utility of application is so, so much more important than our inability to know down to the last bit how a given LLM works. If it works, and delivers value, then we just don't need the why. We can and should try to understand, but we can also accept that we won't always get all of the answers we want.

I mean, why does anyone do anything? Ask someone to explain why they did everything they did today and I'm sure a lot of what they'll tell you is made up or just plain wrong. Humanity seems to be just fine despite all that. Why do we expect our apprentices to be different?

"It doesn't know how it knows what it knows" is a very common criticism. "It's just predicting the next token but doesn't really 'understand' anything" is another.

To me it's like saying, "How can humans actually play baseball if we don't even explain how we throw balls and swing bats at moving objects?" Wording it that way, it just sounds ridiculous. As ridiculous as I think this AI conversation is.

I don't know why we care so much about model transparency. Yes, it's worth scientific pursuit to understand what we're building and how it works, we should absolutely try to know as much as we can. But if the bar for "true intelligence" is a machine capable of doing things that we can't do ourselves, is that saying we aren't "truly" intelligent, either? If we're all of a sudden not allowed to leverage systems we don't fully understand then I guess we shouldn't even be at the spot where we are as a species. We've been doing the right things for the wrong reasons for ages, it seems to work OK.

>We don't really know how they work inside.

I keep reading this, and my response is so what?

Do you have a ball sitting handy somewhere? Pick it up, throw it in the air, and then catch it.

How did you do that? Can you regurgitate all of the equations used to define how objects move, how you determined the approximate mass of the ball, how you calibrated your muscles to apply a specific amount of force and then how you orchestrated the whole thing? Of course not, that's ridiculous. You don't need to know physics or even be literate in order to throw and catch a ball. Your brain "knows" how to do it but that knowledge is opaque and the part of your brain that talks to people can't actually communicate any of the nitty-gritty.

So why does it matter that an AI can't tell us how it does what it does? We're the smartest things we know and we can't even do it. We can give rationalized mockups of a lot, sure, but the AI can, too. Why do we think introspective clairvoyance is a requirement of AGI?

What was the outcome of that incident? Fault was found with the Air Canada procedures, training, and manuals, while the Captain and First Officer went on to receive FAI Diplomas for Outstanding Airmanship. What did not happen was mass calls for the individual pilots to write their own calculation software. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, as reading about the incident you mentioned only paints a clearer picture that systematic redundancy is the responsibility of the creating and maintaining the system, not of those using it.

We all rely on abstractions over layers we don't deal with directly, that's just a fact. You're not running a home-grown OS on custom-built hardware made from materials you mined out of the ground yourself. AI is just another layer. Not everyone operates on the highest, newest layer, and that's absolutely fine. You can carve your niche anywhere you like. Telling yourself that the layer above you isn't feasible isn't going to do you any favors but it does generate buzz on social media which seems like it's the goal here.

You're not betting anything because the cost for you to change your mind and start working with AI tools is exactly 0. This rhetoric is just marketing. I'm sure you'll find the customers that are right for you, but you can at least admit that this kind of talk is putting the aesthetic preference of what you want work to look like above what's actually the most effective. Again, I'm sure you'll find customers who share those aesthetic preferences, but to pretend like it's actually an engineering concern is marketing gone too far.

I'm sure people said the same thing about compilers. And then interpreters. Even today people complain about interpreted languages being too slow and not requiring people to understand "enough" of what's actually happening.

Turns out that really doesn't matter. I think your argument is incredibly weak; the fact that some people don't use these tools effectively doesn't mean that nobody can. Whoever figures this stuff out is going to win, that's just how it works.

That is to say, there will always be a niche for people who refuse to move up the chain of abstraction: they're actually incredibly necessary. However, as low-level foundations improve, the possibilities enabled higher up the chain grow at an exponentially-higher rate, and so that's where most of the work is needed. Career-wise it might be better to avoid AI if that's what you want to do, but as a business I can't see a dogmatic stance against these tools being anything but an own goal.

Redundancy is not a good use of focus for most people (except SREs and the like). The whole point of redundancy is to remove something from focus. I'm guessing you checked everything by hand for the sole purpose of not having to focus on these calculations mid-flight. I'm sure most commercial pilots rely on a larger organization to make these checks for them and their organization probably employs its own system of checks and redundancies at scale. Putting that all on the pilot is not going to give you a sustainable transportation business.

If you're just trying to get off Gilligan's island, that's another thing entirely.

Someone worried about the exploitation of bees is still going to be a vegan, since it takes more acres of crops to grow a pound of beef than a nutritionally-equivalent basket of produce. The idyllic picture of cows grazing in an open field might be accurate as far as the number of farms on the planet, but pound-for-pound our meat comes from factory farms where they grow massive amounts of corn and soy to feed the animals.