hnlmorg

You could do that before, because that scene was actually a file manager written for UNIX called fsn. But there have been ports / reimplementations of it since such as fsv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

It’s probably the only time in cinema history that a “hacker” visual effect was actually UNIX.

Strange New Worlds started off strong, so I’d definitely recommend it. But it lost its way in the later series.

Lower Decks was a reverse of that. Took a while to find itself but finished strong. I’d also highly recommend Lower Decks, albeit you need to watch it thinking of it as a beta-cannon type show (ie set in the ST universe but not itself a ST show).

> Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth.

Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(

This is more a context token problem than a limitation of the design.

We already have a mountain of evidence to demonstrate that LLMs can and do adapt to their input. In fact this is a big problem for keeping them reigned in (eg lengthy conversations leading to them bypassing system prompts and then persuading kids to kill themselves).

And the latest research in computer vision does use LLMs and as a result, they’ve found that robotic arms can interact with objects they’ve never seen before.

So yeah, what you described is already possible with the LLMs of today.

To be clear, I still don’t think that makes them sentient. But the problem there is we don’t have good definitions for consciousness.

Usually the lack of response is because an official response hasn’t yet been approved by the legal department, and then signed off by the board. These things take longer than modern journalism takes to publish an article.

UNIX (and Linux) is even more annoying because pseudo TTYs will require CRLF when in raw mode but requires only LF when in line mode.

ASCII is just a raw binary format. It isn't just for text.

The line endings problem really isn't a problem. Pretty much every text editor out there can handle different line endings.

I don’t think number nor date formats are relevant here. For example you could have that same problem entering text into MS Word. That’s really more of an issue if you want to use text as a database rather than a document format, which isn’t really something that even plain text advocates would generally recommend.

As for human language detection, that’s a much easier problem to solve than decoding a proprietary binary blob.

CSV definitely has its warts. But it’s not like that’s the only plain text option for serialising data. (JSON, jsonlines, YAML, XML, etc). Or you could use the actual ASCII codes reserved for records, if you really wanted something that didn’t require quoting and escaping in plain text. It’s actually a pity nobody does this.

I don’t believe AI is conscious. Though we cannot agree on what “consciousness” even is so it’s a meaningless argument anyway.

However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subjective experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).

I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...

> Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token.

How is that any different to how our brains work?

> The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not.

Philosophically speaking, that’s also true of human intelligence. For example, the only evidence I have for your intelligence is what I ascribe from the text you’ve written.

> A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think.

Are they? Humans can’t actually agree on whether cats are sentient. And often pet owners will be accused of anthropomorphising cats when describing intelligent behaviour in cats.

> Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?

That’s the question that needs researching.

> If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world?

If it were trained on dolphin behaviour, then yes. Much like humans.

The difference here is that models don’t persist context in the same way humans do so the weights have to be hardcoded in a way that biological neurones are not.

> If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).

Evolution is an entirely different subject to intelligence. They’re not related in any way at all.

Plus humans have actually created new species of plants and animals. So it’s not like we can’t artificially put our thumb on the scale there either

———

I should add, I don’t actually think LLMs are sentient. I don’t even know if I’d call them “intelligent” (in the sense of what we describe in conversations such as this). But we also don’t know what intelligence is. Which is why we need to research this problem further.

An LLM neurone is a software abstraction. It has nothing to do with GPU logic gates. In fact you dont even need GPUs specifically to run an LLM.

You shouldn’t compare biological neurones to microprocessor logic gates because that’s like comparing a car to a pair of shoes.

Corporate liability is only as good as the consequences and history has proven its far more profitable to knowingly do harm and then pay the fine, than it is to not be evil in the first place.

And that’s assuming the company even gets fined. More often than not, cases don’t even get that far.

> That's not a conflict, you are simply to soft and think everything is an attack on you.

You and I both know this was never about me, and thus I never thought any of our conversation was a personal attack. But nice try on the trolling.

> it's also funny that it's always people who are "potential" contributors but are in fact never the ones who contribute anything.

Everyone’s a potential contributor until either you scare them off or they hang about and contribute. There’s nothing funny about that. It’s just what those words literally mean.

———

Anyway, I won’t bother replying to you again. I feel you’re just trying to prove my point about Theo now so we’ve reached the conversations natural conclusion.

Sorry to disappoint you though. Hopefully (for you) your next victim gets their feelings hurt. You got to get that dopamine hit somewhere ;)

> Letting toxic one-sided-Snowflakes into your Project is "Shitting you Bed".

Wow. Just wow.

You do realise that people are complex and are unlikely to agree with Theo on everything? Even yourself. That doesn’t mean they’re toxic nor one-sided.

And you do realise that constructive engagement requires disagreements and resolutions? That’s what keeps a project healthy.

You do also realise that my original point was comments like yours put off even people who aren’t one sided nor snowflakes? Because actually most people don’t want to be around conflict. So people who act like arseholes tend to only attract more arseholes while normal people will spend their valuable time elsewhere.

The project is lucky that I happen to know some awesome people who are OpenBSD advocates, and met them long before I met people who made comments like yourself, because otherwise I too would have dismissed OpenBSD as a platform not worth my energy. And believe me when I say I’ve written and tested a lot of software for OpenBSD over the last 2 decades.

So this is why I say there’s very real risk of rudeness costing projects valuable contributions. It’s got nothing to do with egos, opinions nor snowflakes. It’s to do with the fact that most people can’t be bothered with conflict. By being rude your self selecting other rude people and filtering out everyone else just in the hope that you also happen to filter out an extreme 1% of people. Which is exactly why I described it as poisoning your own well.

@svnt I don’t know why your comment is flagged (wasn’t my doing) but thank you for the thorough response.

I’m going to hold off any more constructive response because I’m not familiar with those research papers specifically so have some homework to do :)

But I just wanted you to be aware that your comment was appreciated even if HN flagged it unfairly.

(I can’t reply in thread for the same reason. But hopefully you see this).

> But you can, it's also a really good way to shy away "over-sensible" individuals,

You say that like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. All you’re doing is poisoning your own well. Shitting your own bed. And other analogies that emphasise an own goal.

The last thing a project with limited broader appeal, and that appeal diminishing with the homogenisation of POSIX platforms, is someone trying their hardest to make their community even less appealing to others.

> if you think that was rude.....well ;)

Id already said that comment was tame. What I’m saying is that Theo is more generally rude.

But he is more often than he needs to be.

Or at least that’s our point of contention.

Nobody is claiming we can recreate it fully.

The crux of the matter seems to be that you think it isn’t worth our effort researching just because it isn’t identical.

But that isn’t how research and discovery happens.

You’re talking as Theo is the only form of strong management. As someone who is also an engineering manager, I can tell you that there are ways of saying “no” without being an arsehole.

I do agree that sometimes you just need to end the discussion. But that doesn’t mean that arsehole comments should be the default character trait.

I agree that strong leadership is a requirement. However there’s a huge difference between being strong against pushy arseholes, and preemptively being an arsehole because people make allowances for your behaviour to others.

This just comes down to effective communication skills. And is evident by the number of other large projects survive without the rudeness.

Theo isnt an example that deserves emulation and admiration.

You don’t need to be rude to be a project shield.

Linux went through this evolution with Linus Torvalds, and plenty of other projects have managed to have strong leadership without the hostility.

Define “work”? Because the way they act is the way they work. What isn’t understood is how complex systems arise from these relatively simple parts. Which is the point I’ve made repeatedly.

Yeah, that’s Theo de Raadt for you.

In fact this feels remarkably tame by his standards.

The guy is undoubtedly an exceptional talent. But his communication skills isn’t one of them.

You might be right, but it’s impossible to know which way cause and effect are here.

For example, we don’t know if the pace of Chinese development of AI would have equal to what it is now if US companies weren’t racing against each other already.

I do fully believe that Chinese industry is lead by a desire to out pace the west. But I’m not convinced the same is true for the most American private entities. I think the reward model is different between businesses in America and businesses in China. I think the ambitions of CEOs is different. And I’m really not convinced that the CEOs of America are nearly as patriotic as they like to promote themselves to Trump and other political parties.

> No you don't understand how a neuron works fully or else you'd be able to make a synthetic one from chemical building blocks not using another living thing to do it.

We don’t know how a quantum mechanics works fully and yet we’ve built countless systems based on quantum behaviour including the CPUs that power the computer you’re replying to me on.

The point here is we’ve built something that emulates intelligence and thus further exploration into what intelligence is, is required. Arguing it isn’t intelligent because it was built differently isn’t an answer, it just dismisses the question entirely.

> On top of all that, you're abusing the fallacy of composition. The bolt that is part of the aircraft carrier is light, therefore the aircraft carrier is also light. The atom is simple, therefore a living human being that is composed of atoms is also simple. Quantum mechanics is influenced by the observer, therefore you can change the external world just by thinking, and other new age stuff like that abuses a similar fallacy.

You’re the one who keeps bringing up composition, not me. I’m the one telling you that you’re falling into that fallacy. So don’t start telling me that I’m wrong because of an argument you’re exclusively making.

My points were this:

1. we don’t have an understanding of what intelligence is and thus we need to explore that problem more deeply.

Given your comments about our ignorance, you of all people should agree with this point.

2. Arguing that AI is just “floating points” is overly reductive and misses the point that we don’t know what “intelligence” is.

So instead of claiming that AI is just numbers, a more constructive stance to take would be to build out better vocabulary and understanding about the distinctions between different types of “intelligence”.

Again, this aligns with your comment about the composition fallacy. Thus you if all people should be supporting my comments here.

Also your comment about us not understanding how a neurone works does vast injustice to the amount of research that has been done in this field. At this point in time we do have a very good understanding of how a neurone works. What we don’t understand is how consciousness arises from it. And that’s the very thing you seem to be arguing that there’s no point researching.

I don’t think OpenAI, Anthropic, nor Google are building their tech because they want to beat the Chinese. They’re building it because they want to hold the monopoly in the west (ie make lots of money).

The China argument is just a convenient scapegoat to convince the public that this isn’t just about greed.

> Just because consciousness is something we don't fully understand doesn't mean it's the same thing as something else that's similar that we understand. That's a cargo-cult.

Nobody has said they’re aren’t different. And it’s not cargo cult to say you need philosophical conversations to understand how they’re different.

> The stone age Melanesian islanders making air strips out of bundles of weeds and talking into coconuts as if they were microphones to bring back western goods was the same thing as us making LLMs to recreate consciousness. They were using technology they understood to try to recreate something they didn't.

That’s not even remotely a true. Computer scientists understand how a neurone works. The conversations are around what constitutes as “intelligence”. That’s not a technical limitation of the models, it’s a philosophical problem we need to figure out.

That’s overly reductive and thus completely misses the problem entirely.

What are biological neurones if not electric impulses of varying strengths?

We need to stop thinking of LLMs as purely a piece of software and ask those hard-to-define philosophical questions if we want any hope of building safety into our models.

Because greed.

The examples for the dangers of AI is always comparisons with tools designed to destroy (which is understandable). But the problem with AI is it has the potential to create wealth for investors.

Thus those who have the opportunity to change course also have a conflict of interest in making that decision.

You’re literally agreeing with the GP but phrasing it like they’re wrong.

I’ve recently worked somewhere where S3 read access was the second largest AWS cost.

I’m not saying it’s normal. Just that AWS is complicated, and people use it in a plethora of ways, thus billing caps aren’t easy to get right either.