plonk

Everyone can make disasters at the wheel though. If you didn’t mandate insurance, there would be victims with no recourse.

This isn’t about enjoying the explanation now, it’s about the academic success and open doors one could have had if their teachers had been better communicators. Math doesn’t get studied in a vacuum, it’s the biggest selection criterion for STEM education.

What do you mean by asymmetry?

The elephant's reaction to fear of humans might not be what you expected though? Do they flee humans more often than they charge?

Do they not feel the sting or are they immune to the venom?

I’m curious about why you keep living there despite what you describe. Does it affect your life a lot?

Is there typically a “cold restart” plan to rebuild the whole infra from scratch? I’m thinking of things like circular dependencies when services boot.

I'm looking for actual evidence or reasoning. Of course I have nothing against the US government strong-arming others into using the dollar, but I don't think you have a lot supporting that hypothesis either. The dollar's preeminence could just as well be explained by the fact that the whole world already accepts it, and it's mostly free of exchange controls contrary to e.g. China's currency.

And yeah, the US is known to be a fan of regime change, but again, what indicates that this was done to support the dollar as reserve currency specifically?

Government spending both increases the government's debt and causes inflation. Maybe that's the link they are looking for.

Plus, I don't know much about monetary policy, but wouldn't the Fed feel obliged to start quantitative easing if the government's debt put it in difficulty?

> Your precious ML/DL libraries may not even be upgraded, because writing neural network code is not the same as writing thread-safe code. If it comes from a CS lab, its authors have already left, and there's nothing worthy of a publication in adding thread-safety.

PyTorch and sklearn won't stop being maintained though. I don't rely on unmaintained research code in production, I adapt what I need under MIT license. Any other way sounds crazy.

Plus, most research code is very high-level and uses the same facilities (from e.g. PyTorch again) that everyone else uses, the actual distributed and multithreaded work happens in the main libraries. You'll still be able to use the same neural network code that worked before.

I don't see a huge problem for people who already had their dependency list under control. If you had anything that's both hard to replace and not big enough to be upgraded though, I'd argue that it was always going to bite you at some point.

Because interest rates are increasing? Both the cost of debt and the cost of the dollar increase.

Lebanon and Pakistan aren't exactly politically stable, Greece was incompetently managed for a long time. Don't know about Turkey. Compared to the national deficits of basically everyone in the EU, US, and big Asian economies, it does look like GP is right that big national deficits can be managed?

> It's not a choice if the consequences of making the 'wrong' choice is being invaded, bombed into the stone age and have your country pillaged and its assets handed off to reserve currency alligned corporations.

Is there a reason everybody here seems to believe in that threat? I don't think the US is keen to repeat the 200X invasions. Plus Saudi Arabia, a US ally is threatening to switch to China's currency despite that?

I kind of thought Python would enable the GIL if any no-nogil libraries were installed, but even that is hard to define when you can modify sys.path with environment variables and code.

Will look it up.

In my important dependencies, there are deep learning frameworks from billion-dollar companies, bindings for C++ libraries that are basically standard in the field, projects from CS labs with millions of users. I don't see any of them getting abandoned. But I guess I can't judge how much work removing the GIL could take. The big projects tend to be well-written and well-maintained, for what it's worth.

Which projects do you have in mind that have a significant user base, are still maintained, and would be too costly to port for someone to do the effort?

I think the point was to let libraries declare whether they support nogil mode (opt-in), and your program would only run with no GIL if all the dependencies allow it? So they have all the time in the world to iron out those bugs.

Suppose you’re building a feature that requires $newlib as a dependency. How is that handled? Do you request the addition of $newlib and wait for a new remote image to be deployed for everyone before you can work on your feature branch?

What does a bank write if it's in a good place and the rumors are baseless? Or do you just leave the bank regardless of that to be sure?

Search engines are fucked in that scenario. Maybe we'll just need better-curated ones, or a better ranking (usefulness ratings by verified users?). And anyone can still create a website, so you can escape the AI flood.

But if Google failed to defend against SEO before LLMs, maybe the scale of the current search engines is just too big for effective moderation and we need to scale down to smaller communities.

What your mental plan is doesn't matter though, as long as you actually made a reasonable effort towards what the VCs expect. Or does anyone actually tell them "invest in me because I'll overtake Nvidia or die trying"?

I guess the person taking the VC deal isn't actually against getting filthy rich if they have a chance. If you say "I think this can get big", burn cash and work hard for a while, then recognize the moment where it's not sustainable anymore and scale down, then you did what was expected.

"I initially planned to scale but eventually realized the company wouldn't make enough to survive, as happens to most startups. I chose to scale down and make the company profitable instead of killing it." Could the VCs really argue against that in court? It's well-known that most startups fail without any scamming.

> Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.

> I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

I have no idea what you mean. What does it mean to "abuse" the laws of physics? Why would you need to do that to improve an organism's environmental fitness, compared to simply developing a complex nervous system by natural selection? Do you consider these to be the same thing? Where does the "conscious universe" come up in that process?

> The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness.

That sentence doesn't make sense to me either. How does the second proposition contradict the first?

"Consciousness" isn't a clearly defined line, it's a pattern of thoughts that happen in a system complex enough to be aware of itself and its surroundings. I'm conscious because my thoughts include the fact that I exist and that I am thinking, and that fact influences my thoughts. A regular computer isn't there because it follows a program without knowing that it's doing it, or having any kinds of thoughts about itself. When we program a computer to do that (and current computers are probably physically capable of some form of that, as you say), then they will fit the definition of consciousness.

> After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals.

Why would I want to discount the consciousness of a crow? What does the fact that some people discount the consciousness of farm animals have to do with this discussion? I really don't understand what point you're making. It seems that you're trying to put words in my mouth, creating a contradiction with things I didn't say.

Crows are probably conscious, farm animals are probably conscious, and a wet piece of cloth or a plant aren't. That's because the cloth and the plant don't have a nervous system capable of holding the thought that it itself exists. I'm open to changing my mind about plants if we discover one that does.

> So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

Defining a concept necessarily makes some things special in the context of that definition. That's what a definition does. Consciousness has a somewhat vague definition that clearly applies to humans and some mammals, while it doesn't apply to rocks and plants. Your objection is like saying that a rock is "alive" because otherwise the definition of "life" would make humans special. Of course it does! It makes every living thing "special" in that it fits the definition, while other things don't. Again, that's the whole point of defining a concept: discriminating the objects that display it from the objects that don't.

That's a weak argument. The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make.

If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are known regions inside it that activate when the subject feels certain emotions and thinks a certain kind of thoughts. There are regions that have predictable effects on the person's consciousness when damaged (see lobotomy). _And_ this hypothesis doesn't contradict any observations made until now (which is not the only argument as you're implying, just one of them, and a good one).

If you try to explain consciousness as something else, you have to change the laws of physics. You have to consider that _something_ exists that isn't in the current theories, just to explain a phenomenon that shows no evidence of needing that. There's no data to guess what it is, how it behaves, why it exists, whether it interacts with anything. Actually, you could say that all the evidence until now proves that it doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way, besides brainwaves (which are just regular electrical activity in the nervous system) and whatever the body does (which is explained by nerve signals coming from the brain).

To believe that something exists, you make observations that your current theory can't explain and try to explain them. Here the root observation is that we "feel" conscious, we feel that we are something more than the physical objects that are our bodies. This is an observation about the state of our brains, it's not an observation about the rest of the world. It doesn't need any new laws of physics to be understood and it doesn't give us any data that we could use to build such a law. The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.

It's much like believing that a god exists, built the universe, looks and thinks and feels like a human, and wants us to be good. It's so obviously something that humans naturally want to think because it matches with their inner biases that it's not worth considering as a scientific hypothesis. It's completely explained by the brain being wired to see humans (and living things in general) as something "special" because that helped with natural selection.

I said patterns, not literal parts of images.

Generative models are still trained with real data. That output isn't really synthetic, it contains patterns from existing images of victims. Making that legal to share doesn't sound right.

Why would inflation push people into banks? In my (EU) country, banks don’t offer anything that matches current inflation besides speculative investments.

No, the only versioning is “old models still exist in the bucket and their IDs stay in the docs”.

We might need to add a database with more structured attributes for each model, but until now it hasn’t been a real problem.

Models that actually get deployed get a random GUID. Our docs tell us which is which (release date, intended use, etc.)

Models are then stored in an S3 bucket. But since the IDs are unique, they can be exchanged and cached and copied with next to no risk of confusion.

Have a few functions taking UTF-8 paths for the filesystem operations you need, have separate versions for Windows and for other systems, and enable one or the other version with the preprocessor?

The best approach is to develop completely local build scripts and add a few options to plug GitHub Actions' exclusive features into them. Make a build script that can take a cache folder's path as argument. Make it take a test report output path as another argument. etc.

So your GHA workflow is: set up secrets (AWS and co.), set up Python, download cache to path X if possible, run the build in X and send reports to Y, publish reports in Y. And put as much work as possible inside the build script. We have a whole Python project for that.

This is truly painless after the first development effort.