poikroequ

I had a similar line of thinking. Just because you can measure something doesn't mean it fundamentally exists. We can measure things like pressure and temperature, but that doesn't mean they are fundamental in any way.

That doesn't make sense to me because electromagnetism is both an attractive and repulsive force (can pull objects together or push them apart). Gravity is purely an attractive force which makes sense when explained as warped spacetime. But I'm also not a physicist...

These algorithms are largely reactive. When humans panic and start selling all their stock, the algorithms react in kind and exacerbate the problem. So while these algorithms have no feelings, I think it's wrong to say they "have very little to do with human emotion."

Buffering...

More and more botnets are being sold as a service. By that, I mean things like DDoS as a Service. So it's not quite correct to say there's no cost to the hacker.

How do they define "security" exactly? Does security include privacy? Will they pull back on all the advertising and tracking they've been forcing upon their users? Will they pull back from injecting AI into everything? How will this affect the backwards compatibility of Windows applications?

It's pointless PR talk without explicitly stating specifics of how this is going to affect their products and services.

I'm pretty sure they want to keep flight numbers short because that's how passengers identify their flight. As a passenger, you wouldn't want to be reading signs with 40 digit flight numbers.

Attention passengers, flight 3467548742468759027225995322800483168368 to Dallas is now boarding.

It's interesting to think, using AI to solve captcha requires some compute time, effectively turning captchas into proof of work.

Consciousness is magic. Got it.

To you, perhaps. I've used laptop keyboards with similar full height left/right arrows and adapted to it pretty quick. I certainly didn't find it miserable.

I think it depends on the domain. You don't need Rusts memory safety guarantees everywhere for everything. But if you're writing some sensitive piece of code where security is crucial, it seems crazy to not use a language like Rust.

It's estimated that methane may contribute to about 30% of global warming. I agree it's poorly phrased, but it's still a very important point.

proprietary annotations*

Sorry, autocorrect, I typed this on my phone.

Yeah but it's wishful thinking to expect all software vendors to do this. What would be better is if operating systems had standard ways to install and update software that was actually well established, so vendors didn't need to roll their own. While Windows has the Microsoft store, not many vendors use it, for various reasons. Most Linux distros have package managers that handle things well enough, and, more importantly, support third party repos.

> Those involved with the oversight of C and C++ have pushed back, arguing that proper adherence to ISO standards and diligent application of testing tools can achieve comparable results without reinventing everything in Rust.

If you stick to extremely stringent coding practices and incorporate third party static verification tools that require riddling your code with proprietary situations, then sure, you can achieve comparable results with C/C++.

Or you can just use Rust.

> there is so much stuff to improve. There’s nothing better than the feeling of improving things with code (or by removing it)

And there is nothing worse than a crappy codebase the company won't let you improve.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I'm saying that a computer (RAM sticks, registers, etc) is extremely unlikely to have actual conscious experience. At best, a computer can be a philosophical zombie. The point is, consciousness doesn't emerge purely from computation alone. You need the right physical process/activity/properties/whatever, which the brain has and computers do not.

You can construct a computer using purely mechanical parts - gears, cams, springs, etc. The first calculators were purely mechanical.

So imagine you built an absolutely massive computer, made purely out of mechanical parts, that was capable of performing matrix multiplication and therefore running LLMs. It's technically computation, but should we seriously expect real consciousness to emerge from a purely mechanical computer just because it performed the right computations? Of course not, that would literally be a miracle.

As I said before, you can simulate a nuclear explosion, but that simulation will never manifest itself into a real nuclear explosion.

There's a physical basis for most things. A magnetic field forms because you have a bunch of particles with the same quantum spin. A stove burner glows red when you run electricity through it.

I'm not saying the process in the brain is unique. I'm not saying there's only one way to "activate" consciousness. Heck, for all I know, maybe a bolt of lightning experiences consciousness, even if just for a fraction of a second.

Allow me to give you a "physical" example. The brain operates near a critical threshold, that is the edge of chaos. The brain is teetering on the edge of chaos without ever going chaotic. Well, not usually, because when the brain does enter chaos, you get a seizure. But there is growing evidence that this may be a prerequisite for consciousness; when the brain enters a less chaotic state, a person may lose consciousness.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8851554/

Now let's talk about information processing. Most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only a small subset of what our brains do is actually conscious. What makes some information processing more special than others that some of it is conscious and the rest is not? Isn't it more likely that the way the information is processed is what makes the difference? I.e. different at a physical level.

> There is no inherent reason we couldn't just add that effect to our metal and silicon computers.

Yes, I agree with that much. Hopefully I understand you, but I do believe we could create a "consciousness chip", so to speak, that performs the proper physical process to create real conscious experience, not just simulated. But it's unlikely to happen with existing computer hardware. (by "create", I'm not saying that consciousness emerges from nothing. Rather, there's this idea of "activating" consciousness, "turning the lights on".)

> Those atoms and molecules may just be bits of information themselves in some higher order computer. But there is nothing inherently "magical" about consciousness other than its uniqueness.

I don't buy the idea that the universe is a computer nor that we're living in a simulation. I do believe there is an objective reality.

> Heck there are fairly convincing arguments for pan-consciousness where it is a fundamental part of any set of information and is simply as complex as that information system. If you have a highly complex, self referential information system like our brains, then the complexity of consciousness is equivalent to our experience. The chinese box would have its LLM-like consciousness, which we would not recognize as our own, but could still a qualitative experience born from objective information states.

It's an idea that comes out of sci-fi. It's been used as a plot device in some episodes of Star Trek. But it's just that, science fiction.

> Think more about your last paragraph, it undermines your argument from the previous two. If everything is the result of a physical process, then how is that an argument for consciousness being somehow fundamentally different or exceptional in our ability to recreate or simulate it?

That's not what I said. What I'm saying is computers are not magically conscious. Could we recreate consciousness with the right hardware? Sure, I don't see why not, like what I said with a "consciousness chip" . But is consciousness magically going to emerge purely from a simulation without any special hardware? No, of course not.

I use the word "magic" a lot. If you really stop to consider how a computer works, multiple sticks of ram, registers, L1/L2/L3 cache, LRU cache, memory swapped to disk, GPU memory, virtual memory, encrypted/compressed memory, x86/arm instructions, Unicode, and computation can span multiple computers.

It seems insane to me to believe that consciousness can emerge from this mess, simply because "you performed the right computations", regardless of cpu architecture or operating system or programming language or whatever. If consciousness really could emerge from all this, interpret the CPU instruction set, parse virtual memory tables, dereference pointers, decrypt and uncompress memory, parse Unicode text, assemble all of the necessary information scattered all about in the system, then consciousness is magic, a miracle.

Or, we could simply assume there's some unknown physical mechanism/process/activity in the brain that leads to conscious experience. Almost everything else in the universe is the result of a physical process, magnetic fields, a nuclear bomb exploding, even quantum entanglement. Why should consciousness be an exception?

Being forced to watch one or two ads every 3-4 months is unacceptable?

It depends who you ask, but I personally lean strongly towards the "unknown physical mechanism". It seems insane to me to believe that simulating neutral activity in software will magically result in real consciousness.

What? No. Consciousness isn't magic. Consciousness doesn't emerge purely from computation, that's just nonsense. Do you realize computers can have encrypted memory? How the heck can you possibly hope to perfectly recreate conscious experience with encrypted memory? How about virtual memory? Is consciousness seriously parsing the virtual memory table to reassemble the memory of a process, dereferencing pointers, parsing UTF8 bytes, interpreting computer code? Be real.

The author is clearly talking about PHYSICAL connectivity in the brain. Thus why he says AI is unlikely to become conscious without the "advent of new technology". The brain is a physical neural network. AI is a software simulated neural network. Nowhere in the article does the author confuse the two.

AI is just software. He's talking about the physical transistors in a computer.

Lesson one is to never go public. As soon as you have shareholders, they're going to demand growth, and there's only so much you can do to sustain that growth before you have to raise prices.

AI is not being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors.

Actually, I think nixos could be a wonderful base for a beginner friendly OS, by limiting the user to very specific configurations which have been well tested. Don't allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot. But if you allow the user to start writing or modifying nix configurations, then all bets are off.

I gave you an example, qualia. I gave you another example, the philosophical zombie problem. The latter has real implications, how can we know whether or not a coma patient is conscious?

There's new evidence to support the idea of quantum effects in the brain. Far from conclusive, but it does give a little credibility to the idea.

https://youtu.be/xa2Kpkksf3k

There's also a hypothesis that the electromagnetic field produced by the brain could be the "carrier of conscious experience", which would at least solve the binding problem.

But you're very hand wavy and simply disregard my examples. Instead, you throw around the word "mystical" without giving a clear definition, which makes it too easy for you to move the goal post. And then you simply refer to the brain as a "bag of stuff", which is a gross oversimplification.

Ultimately science is limited by what is observable and measurable. The question is, what can we observe and measure about consciousness? How can we even be sure we're observing consciousness?

I believe we can study consciousness scientifically, even if our observations are limited to asking people what they experience, and making the grand assumption that the person is conscious (not a philosophical zombie). But the science may be limited by what is technologically possible.

As for something that may not be accessible to scientific endeavour: qualia. How can you know that what I perceive as the color red is the same as what you perceive as the color red? Maybe my red is your blue. Maybe my red is unlike anything you've ever experienced. How can we possibly know?