sethev

I think the onus is on you to explain why Turing would publish something he didn’t intend people to take seriously. It seems like an odd claim. Perhaps you mean he didn’t intend it to be interpreted the way it was in popular culture?

I don’t accept the point of the article and it does in fact claim to be making a point about intelligence

Fair - yes, it is ironic that his point was closer to "we can't possibly know/define whether a machine is intelligent" but somehow it got turned into "Turing's test will tell us when machines are intelligent".

Yes, the Turing test has been misunderstood for a long time. Turing published it, though - it wasn't some offhand comment he made and it wasn't intellectually lazy.

The challenge here is in trying to decide whether LLMs are intelligent or have a mind. Famously, the criteria for intelligence seem to slip with each advancement in technology. But going back to Turing, his test was actually more carefully phrased than we remember: he said that when machines could pass the test, the question of whether they are intelligent would become moot. That seems to be what we're actually seeing: if people can't tell the difference, it kind of won't matter whether they're "truly intelligent" or not.

Crows are fascinating creatures. My wife read that they will chase hawks and eagles away, so she started putting food out for the crows near the tree where they gather (we have chickens and ducks that we don't want the hawks near).

Now they bring trinkets as gifts and leave them near the tree. We also had a crow in the past that would make barking noises when it saw our dogs and freak them out. I'm convinced it was messing with them.

This immediately reminded me of the Hutter Prize (http://prize.hutter1.net/) - a contest that has run since 2005(?) based on the premise that compression is closely related to intelligence.

I'm just guessing but observability is often looking at small slices of hot data and then there's a vast set of cold data that is occasionally needed. Sounds like NVMe is for the hot data cache and object storage is for cold data.

Yes, agree. These are very sane defaults and match what I use..

Interesting idea - I like seeing a list of pet-peeves followed by a proposal for a straightforward way to have a set of 'alternative defaults' that remains backwards compatible. If you don't want to opt in, don't run the new PRAGMA edition = 2026.

Too often it's just a list of issues and a wish that everyone else will change.

In (mild) defense of SQLITE_BUSY - busy_timeout just tells sqlite to sleep and retry up to the timeout when it receives SQLITE_BUSY. It seems like a sensible default for a library to leave that up the calling code - which may have something else it could do while it waits. However, that logic often gets missed!

I don't think it's a knock on the original prediction to say it didn't turn out to be true. In fact, at the time it probably felt like a pretty conservative prediction. That being said, if you think back to the year 2000, we were pretty far from building such a machine at that time.

To me it's an interesting lesson in how hard it is to predict technology advances which still applies to our own predictions of the future.

So true. Where do people think agents learned to write slop?!

it said recognizable, and I recognize this :)

Right - but the big difference is that the received wisdom for healthcare is that the higher cost in the US is an unfathomable mystery and/or due to "waste". If you said "writing software is more expensive in the US because software engineers there have higher salaries" everyone one would nod their head in agreement.

I'm actually making a very simple point. You said most of Jeff Bezos wealth is imaginary / not real. But he's proven that he can turn it into cash at a rate of at least $1B per year.

And again, he only owns 9% of Amazon. Of course if he dumped all of that stock at once the price would go down, but Bill Gates sold almost all of his Microsoft stock for cash and Microsoft stock has continued to go up. Jeff Bezos could certainly do the same and come out the other end with around $260B in cash - but he has zero reason to go do that..

Here's another way to look at this: do you have a retirement account? Is the money in there imaginary? If not, why not?

Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works.

I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

You're not even staying consistent in your own replies in this one comment. Let me boil it down: are the 11,000 people who earn their salary at Blue Origin getting real money or not?

My point is has nothing to do with despising blue origin - it's just a direct contradiction to your absurd belief that this wealth is imaginary. You can't fund that big a company on imagination!

By legislation and policymaking - just like any other numbers we as a society end up picking (like the age to get a drivers license or buy alcohol or the income tax brackets).

Just like those cases, what other countries are doing would mostly be irrelevant - except, just like now, people may try to find arbitrage opportunities by getting creative about where they live.

Dollars are the way we denominate wealth - no one who understands this thinks that these numbers represent cash that they hold. But that's a far cry from it being imaginary.

This seems to come up on every thread like this. Owning 9% of a company that generates ~$80B in profits and employees 1.5m+ people is literally a massive amount of wealth and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.

Anyone who owns a house can understand that liquidity and net worth are two different things. But shares of Amazon are far more liquid than a typical home.

In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin by selling around $1B worth of Amazon stock each year. That's 11000 people earning their salaries + a huge amount of capital investment that are all funded from this so-call "imaginary" money. I can assure you that each time those people get a paycheck, it's just as real as yours.

Thread was a poor choice of word. Outside the control of the program is a better way to put it. Like memory mapped io.

I wonder if it’s just the colorful metaphors and an opportunity to bring out examples of surprising behavior. Plus it’s a topic that can always stir up debates.

Yes, there is a data race there. The value of a volatile can be changed by something outside the current thread. That’s what volatile means and why it exists.

Edit: thread=thread of execution. I’m not making a point about thread safety within a program.

The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"

If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.

Right - I mean, what you're describing makes sense, but it doesn't sound like what they're describing. Their benchmarks are running on an EC2 instance and the post's author is here saying that they run on virtualized hardware. Plus they run on top of a file system. None of that screams "direct DMA from our buffers" to me.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but typically people who want to lean on hardware guarantees for extra performance control more of the stack.

This seems sketchy. O_DIRECT skips the operating system's page cache, it does not guarantee that the SSD driver sent the data to the SSD or issued a flush to the drive itself. The data could still be in the driver's memory or the in non-durable memory in the drive itself when this engine says "ok, we're good".

EDIT: sketchy from an answering "what exactly are the guarantees?" perspective

It's fascinating to read the perspective of someone seeing X-files as a show from before their time. The clunky phones in the show, for example, were actually advanced technology that most of us had never seen in real life. The closest thing I'd seen was the IBM technician Brick that an uncle had.

> I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio

That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.

Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.

More power to them for re-visiting this, but agree with you:

> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow.

That sounds exactly like the pre-git model that git solved..

It's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.

I don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median household income is $87k, which means that the majority of households are well below the income level it takes to live there.

That stresses me out just to think about it.