rotexo

I had a similar gut feeling. To use some possibly dubious and dated terminology, would a guardian angel also emulate my shadow self, particularly if that self was an important part of my identity? If I usually manage not to let my shadow self act out, but you could always tell it was there, would the same be true for my guardian angel? If all you do is use your guardian angel to write essays, then sure, a relatively low risk tool. But if military commanders are using it to oversee offensive drones (as proposed in the essay)?! Oof.

I love seeing this. Klondike with a physical deck was my “I need to do something with my hands or I’ll go crazy” release valve during the pandemic after work. I thought about trying to build something like this, but it was far outside of my technical ability. I settled for a simulator that would run toilet solitaire so I could see the distribution of cards remaining after games with a well-shuffled deck.

E4B is pretty good for extracting tables of items from receipt scans and inferring categories, wish this could be called from within a shortcut to just select a photo and add the extracted table to the clipboard

Paul Rudd’s computer (~2009?) was to me probably the most accurate prediction regarding genAI (https://youtu.be/a8K6QUPmv8Q)

Interesting that enforcing an ontology seemed to result in reduced performance. (https://youtu.be/hLDKW3-OKUA) I guess developing an ontology based on the extracted graph will be an important area for future work

I thought most asteroids were basically just gravel piles loosely held together by internal gravity?

Can you describe this more? Is “edge_case” a key in the structured output schema?

The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, “Digital Romulan Management”)

An army of troll bots to shift the Overton Window?

You know that thing in anxiety dreams where you feel very uncoordinated and your attempts to manipulate your surroundings result in unpredictable consequences? Like you try to slam on the brake pedal but your car doesn’t slow down, or you’re trying to get a leash on your dog to lead it out of a dangerous situation and you keep failing to hook it on the collar? Maybe that’s extra latency because your brain is trying to render the environment at the same time as it is acting.

Reminds me of Nadia traveling all over Mars after the first failed revolution and building habitats from scratch using the huge robots in KSR’s Mars trilogy.

Very cool, but probably not solving the factors involved in housing unaffordability.

Forget Eeyore, that sounds like the break room in Severance

I find myself occasionally wondering if 8.11 is in fact greater than 8.9

I feel like this approach might be relevant to achieve the equivalent of “go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.” Pull out two random poorly-rated chatbot conversations and have the model look for commonalities in its shortcomings.

I’ve always felt that the Matrix lacks the sort of social commentary I associate with cyberpunk. Sure, it has virtual reality, but it’s more a messianic power fantasy than an unflinching look at the human condition. Strange Days struck me as a more authentically cyberpunk artifact. Just my two cents.

My knowledge is out of date (I was in a microbiology PhD program starting in the early 2010s), but at that time, it was known that there are a whole lot out of micro-organisms out there, but many of them were probably difficult to grow as isolates in pure culture for a whole host of reasons. What people ended up doing is sequencing a ton of DNA from environmental isolates, and trying to assemble whole genomes from the 100-200 base pair sequenced DNA fragments that you would get out of a sequencer (which is challenging for a whole host of other reasons). Then, if you believed in the genome assemblies you got out of that process, you could compare those inferred genomes to known genomes, see how similar they are, guess at the metabolic pathways those organisms might possess, etc.

Not sure what the state of the field is now, and I don't really know too many specifics, because I never ended up studying too much in the way of microbial ecology. If you wanted to sequence a bunch of DNA out of environmental samples (pond water or something), you would probably search on google scholar for environmental DNA isolation to see what kind of kits people are using, and then you would probably get an Oxford Nanopore minION, make a sequencing library out of the extracted environmental DNA using their ligation sequencing kit, and then run that library on as many flow cells as you can afford (each flow cell costs ~$1000, and you sequence a library on each flow cell for 3 days to get as much sequencing data as you can). Oxford Nanopore presents a relatively low barrier to entry in comparison to the high-throughput sequencers used in academic, clinical, and Pharma settings, and it gives you sequencing reads potentially as long as the physical DNA fragments present in your sample, but it has a lower sequencing throughput in comparison to the big short-read sequencers. For this kind of metagenomic discovery work, you want as high a sequencing depth as possible, because an unknown organism might be at a low abundance in your sample compared to well-studied, common organisms, so you need more sequencing data to detect it.

Then you would run some genome assembly software (https://www.metagenomics.wiki/tools/assembly), and then look into comparing your assembled genomes to known environmental isolates, and annotate those genomes to get a sense of which enzymes are encoded by genes in the genome. That all sounds straightforward, but there are probably tons of different possible computational tools to consider.

> There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer.

Maybe. It is possible, though, that we are now in a situation like in the third Nolan Batman movie where Tom hardy puts his hand on the rich guy’s neck and says “do you feel in charge?”

Some thoughts about making it possible for individual humans to access Wikipedia, robustly to calamities that are within the sphere of human agency.

Seems like you would want it to be stored digitally. Ideally, people would have the ability to access it remotely, in case their local copy is somehow corrupted. For that, you would need a physical network by which the data can be transmitted. Economies of scale would seem to suggest that there would be one or a few entities that would “serve” the content to individuals who request it. Of course, you would want those individuals to be able to access this information without having detailed technical knowledge and ability. I guess they would have pre-packaged software “browsers” they could use to access the network.

In order to maintain this arrangement, you would want enough political stability to allow for the physical upkeep of this infrastructure, including human infrastructure (feeding the engineers who make it all possible). In order to make it worthwhile, you would need people who want to access the information too. I suspect political stability, a sufficient abundance of the necessities for human life, and the political will to make sure that everyone’s needs are met so that they can safely be curious about the world would help here too.

All of this requires sources of power. I suspect that a combination of nuclear power, solar/batteries, and geothermal energy would be sufficient and would avoid the problem of running out of fossil fuels at some point in the future. The nice side-effect here of reducing the impact of calamities exacerbated by the greenhouse effect.

For the information to continue being relevant, you would have to update it with new knowledge, and correct inaccuracies. How best to accomplish this? Well, I guess you would need a systematic way to interrogate the causes behind the various effects we observe in the world. I would propose a system where people create hypotheses, and perform experiments that exclude the influence of as many factors as possible external to the phenomenon being studied. People would then share their findings, and I guess would critique each other’s arguments in a sort of “peer review” to try to come to a consensus. You would have to feed and provide for these people at a certain basic level to make sure they are comfortable and safe enough to continue doing this work. I guess you would want to encourage the value systems compatible with this method of interrogating the world.

Just my 2 cents.

I think his private armies are going to be his private armies. Think Wagner group, to be deployed domestically and in central/South America.

That soundtrack never fails to improve my mood. Maybe it is just the nostalgia of playing that game with my buddies in my teenage years.

Yes, I recognize that these are articles of deeply-held faith. I am open to the idea of God, I am open to the idea that God is fundamentally mysterious and beyond our mortal understanding. I simply feel that I always have to exercise skepticism regarding the words of religious institutions, though, because it seems to me that power-hungry individuals could use legitimate teachings as a camouflage for their immoral selfish impulses. Though maybe some institutions can effectively guard themselves against this, selecting people truly committed to God for leadership (I find myself likely to believe, for instance, that Pope Francis in particular is truly committed to God via the humans around him).

I guess all of the doubts are a reminder for me to focus on other humans with love. That is the part of the Bible's teachings (or the teachings of other religions) that are accessible to my experience.

I liked the simple observation in point 35: 'as Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”[69] and risks overlooking what is most precious in the human person.' I was texting my buddy that the proper acronym could be ABNECUI (Almost, But Not Entirely, Completely Unlike Intelligence, to rip something from Douglas Adams).

At a more profound level, I really appreciated point 18 under "Relationality": 'human intelligence is not an isolated faculty but is exercised in relationships, finding its fullest expression in dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity. We learn with others, and we learn through others.'

I was raised Protestant, but taught to be fundamentally skeptical of the political and historical baggage of any religious institution. Though I recognize that writings like this are a result of deeply held faith, it always feels paradoxical when leaders wax poetic about the mystery of God and then say 'so here is what God thinks you should do.' How could they know? That probably sounds basic, but it is my reaction. What draws me back in is the emphasis on our relationships with other human beings. Those relationships are the things that are actually in front of us, and can make a meaningful difference in our day-to-day lives. Something very useful to keep in mind when developing AI (or ABNECUI).

I interpreted that causality as AI leading to deployment of carbon-neutral energy, then when the AI bubble bursts, we’ve pushed carbon-neutral electricity sources off the learning curve cliff and it is available for cheap without the original consumers needing it. From that perspective, it could be any carbon neutral electricity (fusion, fission, enhanced geothermal, super-deep geothermal etc.). I could be misinterpreting the parent comment.

Can the E-cache and KV-cache be supplied to the model to produce the natural language output that would have been fed into the next model of the chain, if it were not for DroidSpeak? If so, doesn’t seem to materially change the explainability of the system.

This talk touches on similar points, I haven’t finished listening to it though https://youtu.be/s7_NlkBwdj8

Correction: it is generally accepted that DNA was confirmed as genetic material in the Hershey-Chase experiment (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experi...), which predates the determination of the structure of dna by about a year

Probably not at all. My understanding is that forensics uses either fragment analysis of pcr products, which depends on synthetic oligos, not plasmids. Those tests might be moving to NGS or long read sequencing, which also would not depend on plasmids. The reliability of forensic tests, good or bad, is another topic entirely.

I guess a further refinement here would be that depression and anxiety are clinical terms for what are likely a range of conditions, some of which can be addressed using omega 3 supplements and some of which can’t (like mine).

I see that my comment came across as snarky. I guess the point I was trying to make was that the results of clinical trials treating humans with antidepressants make me more confident of their impact on depression and anxiety than studies on mouse models using behavioral readouts that may or may not map perfectly on the subjective human experience of anxiety and depression. Again, I don’t doubt anyone who takes omega 3s and experiences an improvement in anxiety and depression! That seems great!

I am honestly very glad for people who took omega-3s and who experienced a benefit. For me, though, next time I’m a mouse and I want to drink more sugar water and stay in the middle of an open box vs. the edges (all that was demonstrated in the article, as far as I can tell), I’ll be sure to take some omega 3s. Until then, I’ll keep taking the prescription antidepressants that actually allowed me to get through a PhD program and hold down a job afterwards.