madaxe_again

Reminds me of when we thought proteins were the be all and end all and this goopy stuff bundled up in chromosones was just some useless goop.

There's a pattern which we see again and again in nature, where incredibly complex structures and behaviours emerge from interference and feedback patterns between waves - from deciding whether your toenails grow on your face or your feet to the formation of planets, from ant colony foraging and spacing to whether it will rain on Tuesday.

I suspect elements of cognition are similar.

They’re possibly taking advantage of the international postage remuneration system.

You ship something from, say, Pakistan. You pay them the postage, they put a label on your parcel, send it to the U.S.

The USPS receive it, label it, deliver it, and note that the original collecting agency was overseas.

Periodically, usually based on the inbound volume, they settle the net value with the other international postal union member.

So - you ship from somewhere porous, with poor systems, it gets delivered, originating agency says “not ours, not paying”, and the USPS is left holding the bill.

Oh totally - but if you listen closely to Tatum you find Rachmaninov hiding in there, occasionally a little Chopin riff - it’s turtles all the way down.

Is it just me that has a constant dribble of other people's private data coming to me from government agencies?

This year, I've had the UK variously send me someone else's court summons, someone else's tax documentation (not address error - just inadvertently included as attatchments on emails to me).

I've had portugal disclose property taxation information on any subject to me, through a simple enumeration hole.

And last week I had brazil's ministry of agriculture send me details on other peoples' livestock shipments.

Our information environment is unbelievably porous. There would be no secrets from an unshackled AI.

I had like 10btc in mtgox when they cut and ran, and never bothered pursuing it as it was “oh well” money.

You never know, in another universe it could have still ended up as nothing.

I still listen to 14 year old me when it comes to investments, like when in 2016 they whispered “GPUs are going to be hot shit because of this CUDA stuff. And games.” in my middle aged brain.

Gonna listen to my kid when she’s 14, too, as it’s been a strategy that has paid off to date.

I empathise. I won’t go into detail here, but 20 years ago I built something that went on to be a major commercial success - after I had been coerced into signing over ownership at the pointy end of a lawyer. For not dissimilar reasons, it’s a lost cause at this point.

For what it’s worth, I just view it as part of the lottery of life. You win some, you lose some, you learn plenty.

The TLDR is that the sun is very, very far away compared to the moon.

It’s actually quite fun to look at the moon, adjust your mental model based on where the sun is relative to you and what you see illuminated, and experience the scale of the solar system.

Not a career musician - just a musician, pianist.

I love Coltrane - I find the complexity lyrical, like Art Tatum or Django Reinhardt in their respective disciplines - or if you throw back, Liszt, Chopin, the other bloody show-offs who could sing with an instrument. I dunno. It talks to me, but I guess at the end of the day it’s all just taste.

Yeah, very similar. For each and every image, the code loaded every image into memory, several times each, then did a pixel-by-pixel walk through the entire image, identified all objects, and then compared all of the objects to all of the objects from all of the previous images (which it would not use the calculated result for, but rather recompute that too) to establish which one was moving - or which one was staying still.

The main fix was not making it hideously IO bound, as not only was it loading every image multiple times, it was then grinding away in swap as we’re talking tens of gigabytes of raw image data, in an era when 1gb of ram was a lot - and then making it spiral out from the last known location of the object of interest rather than brute-forcing it. My solution wasn’t even optimal, as it was literally just an afternoon of tooling around as a favour.

> It may have gotten a boost from using Python, and not Maple (Lance’s favorite program for math) or Mathematica (mine), and it may have used much better software engineering practices than we would have, but not super-intelligently so.

This is the crux of the matter here. Physicists are physicists. They are not software engineers. I read physics between 2001 and 2005, and the programming language they had us use for all of our assignments was FORTRAN 77. They were still trying to decide if it was ok to move students on to FORTRAN 95.

FORTRAN is pretty performant - if you know what you’re doing. Very, very few people did - and they, me, went on to have careers in software, not physics. I remember some FITS (astronomical image format) processing software someone was using to calculate ephemera - and it took DAYS to run over a few thousand images and produce an output. I sat down with it, screwed around for an afternoon, and it produced a result in under a minute - so much faster that I honestly thought I had broken it - but I hadn’t. It was just terribly written by someone who was excellent in their domain and terrible at writing code.

I see there being an enormous opportunity here, in AI providing scientists with software that isn’t diabolical.

Why would women not stand a chance in Rubik’s cube or chess? Please explain.

I mean, chess makes the same supposition, that women need a separate league.

There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.

And for those hypotheses - we use language.

Most human reasoning happens within language - even mathematics is an abstraction that allows us to map concepts we don’t natively hold into a linguistic processing layer.

Yes! All science and research that relies on prior research is FAKE.

That’s why I’m trying to make a better shoelace but first I have to develop arithmetic and shoes.

Just buy new socks every day. Use paper crockery. Job done.

And they’re not allowed to use Lorenz, Riemann, Grossman, Mach, or any other prior art. Only then is it real.

Oh god this again. Riemann. Lorenz. Grossmann.

Einstein was not some brain floating around in a vacuum deriving GR from the pure Platonic solids.

I mean, did it design the silicon? Mine the rare earths? Make an apple pie from scratch? No? Fraud.

Also you appear to be using a computer to submit this comment rather than doing it manually, so can it really be said that you wrote it?

Indeed. The same goes for widows at funerals. I mean, has anyone ever dissected the brain of a grieving human and said “aha hah! Here it is!! The grief!”

I agree with you that it’s a core question.

People don’t like it, however, for a whole host of reasons.

I don’t like it either, to be honest - for there the abyss may also stare into you - but I also often find that the things which we don’t like thinking about are critically important things to think about.

I also reach the same conclusion as you: it does not matter. If I cannot discern whether I am responding to a human- or LLM-written response, then we are back to zombie cats in boxes - and therefore the answer as to whether this precious magical spark we call consciousness (which may or may not exist anyway) exists in our interlocutor becomes moot.

And as I say - I may or may not be conscious. I seem to myself to be conscious, based on my understanding of the term - but I cannot prove that what goes on behind my eyes is the same as what goes on behind yours, or even that anything much is going on at all. Perhaps there’s just a narrative layer that likes to use “I” that parasitically explains the universe and the actions of the host to itself, and spreads between hosts through neurolinguistic programming and coadaptation. Maybe that’s what “we” are. I don’t know.

That said, perhaps I am wrong, and that is no small part for me of why this question should be earnestly considered and discussed. How can we possibly seek to understand or define machine intelligence before we examine our own.

Oh but you’ll go to expert sex change dot com?

Synonym is the word you’re after.

The market has more confidence in Nike than Nvidia, however - the former trades at a higher forward PE.

I guess it’s easier to believe in a shoe brand turnaround than it is in an AI future.

Thanks - that was an excellent read!

I gate it exactly as the parent says - automation only runs between 0530 and 0800, and when we’re home.

I literally couldn’t do without HA - I live off-grid, and it manages everything from monitoring water tank levels & running pumps to a power grid distributed over three independent and geographically distributed battery banks. Monitors for anomalies and tells me what is acting up - for instance today I got sent on a mission to find out why an array of PV was underproducing by 33%. Wouldn’t have noticed until it started having energy budget impacts otherwise. Makes decisions on whether today is a passive cooling/heating day or whether we have the energy budget to run climate control, when windows should be opened/closed to maximise efficiency, which blinds to close when depending on where the sun is to prevent or encourage passive solar gain, when to run the partially pumped storage hydro and in which direction, when to pull the pin on the deluge system and where if it’s set to wildfire mode. It has literally saved the house - not our lives, as we’d already evac’d and left it in charge of firefighting.

Stuff like the coffee machine and opening the blinds in the morning are just easy quality of life improvements, something less to have to manage manually, as my days are full enough that removing any point of friction is useful.

And yeah, I’ll take slightly stale coffee now over fresh coffee in ten minutes.

Yeah! If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear!

looks at you suspiciously

Are those… curtains?

They aren’t 20-30 years old - they are 160 years old.

Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon in 1872 - which was based on an essay he wrote about RSI and superintelligence - in 1863.

I did similar with our coffee machine a year ago - I was bored of getting home from the school run to a cold pot of coffee because the machine automatically turns off the hot plate after 30 minutes, and it seems there is no such thing as a WiFi connected drip coffee machine. Kettles, yes, coffee machines, no.

Dead simple. Cracked it open, chucked an ESP32 in there connected to the soft power button, and to the “machine is on” indicator on the display, which was conveniently on its own pin. No need for any thermal protection cleverness as the machine does that itself.

Now I just turn it back on when I’m heading home, and no longer have to wait for the pot to warm up again.

I then decided to stop using the “make coffee at time” functionality baked into the machine, as the kid gets up when the kid gets up, and the machine would either start early and wake her, or she’d get up before it and I’d have to go start it. Now, she opens her bedroom door, I get “kid is awake” alert on my phone, and the machine brews the coffee.

Yeah, transparency on gifs is binary, so you always had a crunchy edge. Plenty of use cases, but nice looking text wasn't one of them.

And position: absolute did not behave the same way across IE, NN, FF, or safari.

For some reason I feel the sudden urge to have a drink.

Just don't tell the kids about how eCommerce used to work. Credit card number in an email, courtesy of Mal's eCommerce? Pretty much industry standard. shudders, swigs