ta8645

Many people buy a lot of games just to give them away on steamgifts.com. I used to be heavily involved over there, giving away many thousands of game copies, and ended up with over 4,800 games in my own Steam library, and I still haven't played more than 200. I don't think I have enough days left in my life to ever play them all.

I've been watching the new CEO's videos for a few years. He seems like a genuine person who isn't cynical about this at all. I don't think it's a cash grab, but a real hope that a community and something wholesome can be created around this nostalgic company. Either way, it's never going to be a huge cash cow, only a quiet niche.

Earlier in the day the number of preorders / total number of systems available was shown on the order page. That seems to have been removed now. Presales may be going slower than hoped.

The supermassive black hole is also just a small part of an unimaginably large universe. But if you got too close to it, you would indeed find it is a higher power than yourself, lol.

But the higher power in the AA context is a deep recognition that we are subordinate to the laws of nature. Which is indeed a kind of higher power; we are subordinate to the laws of nature, and can not exert our own will to overcome them. It is that recognition and submission to reality that can engender a humility and peace essential to recovery from addiction.

It only represents incoherent nonsense to someone who is very literally minded and can not integrate relatively simple concepts into their own rigid mental framework.

Obviously this administration has no interest in the homeless, but I'm personally a little tired of all the ivory tower elites getting upset that their intellectual play toys are in jeopardy, when millions of people struggle for food and healthcare.

And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.

You are a very small part of an unimaginably large universe; so you are not the ultimate power, ergo there is a higher power than you. Some people choose to call that higher power "God", but there's no reason to get hung up on that for yourself; it's easy to translate into your own terms without raising an objection.

"Prayer" has no universally accepted procedure, and can just be your own calm reflective contemplation. "Spiritual awakening" can be that moment when you as an atheist accept your non-central role in the universe, when you come to peace with the fact that there is a higher power than yourself, and you aren't the central character in its unfolding.

There are only "made up entities" when you demand that everything be understood in literally minded cartoonish definitions, rather than a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, and our place in it.

They don't. That's just a thin veneer of "legitimacy" so they don't have to admit the real reasons, explicitly.

He made a few nice replies 41 days ago; found on that same page.

Humans are the beneficiaries of millions of years of evolution, and are born with innate pattern matching abilities that we don't need "training" for; essentially our pre-training. Of course, it is superior to the current generation of LLMs, but is it fundamentally different? I don't know one way or the other to be honest, but judging from how amazing LLMs are given all their limitations and paucity of evolution, I wouldn't bet against it.

The other problem with LLMs today, is that they don't persist any learning they do from their everyday inference and interaction with users; at least not in real-time. So it makes them harder to instruct in a useful way.

But it seems inevitable that both their pre-training, and ability to seamlessly continue to learn afterward, should improve over the coming years.

Perhaps. But I think you'll find there are a lot of black rectangles on a PCB that aren't actually transistors. You'll end up having to teach the child a lot more if you want accurate results. And that's the same kind of training you'll have to give to an LLM.

In either case, your assertion that one _understands_, and the other doesn't, seems like motivated reasoning, rather than identifying something fundamental about the situation.

It's just behaving like a child. A child could draw a bounding box around a dog and a cat, but would fail if you told them to draw a box around the transistors of a PCB. They have no idea what a transistor is, or what it looks like. They lack the knowledge and maturity. But you would never claim the child doesn't _understand_ what they're doing, at least not to imply that they're forever incapable of the task.

The same information theory and complex-system dynamics, that applies to our human machinery, applies to any equally complex system we create in silicon. We may not be there yet, but there's literally no reason to believe anything stands in the way of duplicating the underlying processes, or creating novel ones that outshine us.

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This difficulty is interesting in and of itself.

When people catalogue the deficiencies in AI systems, they often (at least implicitly) forgive all of our own such limitations. When someone points to something that an AI system clearly doesn't understand, they say that proves it isn't AGI. But if you point at any random human, who fails at the very same task, you wouldn't say they lack "HGI", even if they're too personally limited to ever be taught the skill.

All of which, is to say, I don't think pointing at a limitation of an AI system, really proves it lacks AGI. It's a more slippery definition, than that.

Define "actually matters".

Is there any reason to believe that humans are imbued with some mysterious magic, that silicone creatures lack? And even if you believe that we possess some such magic, is there any proof that it can't eventually be instantiated within a creature we create?

It may be that our ultimate achievement as a species is to give birth to a more intelligent and capable future species. And if we do, it will be the result of, and the next step in, natural evolution. We are part of nature, not something separate; ergo, everything we create, is natural. Everything we might achieve, was already provisioned in the fabric of reality.

Nothing that we do, or happens to us -- including the inevitable demise of our species, diminishes or jeopardizes anything fundamental.

For whatever it's worth, I tried setting up a quick Swiss chess tournament, and got a little confused about the stages. I think I may have set up two by mistake, at least, the "previous" button was visible when I was editing the stage I created.

And it appears that Teams are required, even though for a chess tournament like mine, each player is just an individual, and there are no teams involved. So it didn't really feel like a good fit.

None of this is meant as a criticism, just a data point.

The argument is that humans manage the task without lidar, and automation doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be better than humans, to be a net positive. It seems to me, you might as well use lidar if it's cheap enough, but the argument that computer systems can outcompete human drivers, without using lidar, is at least reasonable, although not yet proven.

But if there was a Kardashev type III civilization in the Milky Way, they would have had full control of our entire galaxy in a mere 200 million years or so. And we can be pretty sure that such a civilization doesn't actually exist. Which suggests that either advanced life is rare, or dies off long before it ever reaches such technological breadth.

Scientists use the term "technosignatures", which you can google for more info. But broadly: radio signals, infrared from megastructures, optical signals like laser pulses. We haven't put a huge amount of effort in searching for such signatures, but there has been some.

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long.

If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.

It sounds like you're advocating for a centrally planned market that allocates resources according to a grand, rational vision. A free market will by definition be messy, sometimes inefficient, adhoc, and defy any notion of a grand vision. You have to trust the free market to produce the best results in the long run, and to be the most responsive to change (opportunity).

Fair enough, and I agree to an extent. But a lot of the complaints leveled at Trump amount to the same thing. For example, visa holders are free to say whatever they want, but may have to return to their country of origin, etc.

Trump is obviously attacking free-speech, but the attacks have been going on by both sides. The examples I gave are _very_ prevalent and common, and not coming from the Trump camp. Very few people seem to actually believe in free speech, when it comes to protecting their political rivals... which is the only place the principle actually much matters.

It's been under attack a lot longer than the current administration.

"free-speech does not mean freedom from consequences",

"free speech does not apply to hate-speech",

"we must suppress and limit the spread of misinformation",

It really seems that people do not believe in free speech anymore, and only appeal to it as a principle to defend themselves, never to defend those they disagree with.

But that is not always a bad thing, and it might not change how people behave _enough_.

This one minute Youtube short, gives an example of a guy dancing, without regard to being watched. And how a large internet crowd reacted to him being shamed by others at the dance.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n2rtYzzSgL0

I think we tend to focus on the negative effects of constant surveillance, without giving a nod to the positive once in a while.

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

I've lost track of what we're disagreeing about.

It takes knowledge to even know they're flawed, noisy, and disconnected. There's no reason to "correct" anything, unless you have knowledge that applying previously "understood" data has in fact produced deficient results in some application.

That's reinforcement learning -- an algorithm, which requires accurate knowledge acquisition, to be effective.

> Would that make in-context learning a superset or a subset of pretraining?

I guess a superset. But it doesn't really matter either way. Ultimately, there's no useful distinction between pretraining and in-context learning. They're just an artifact of the current technology.

Well Dr. Michael Levin would agree with you in the sense that he ascribes intelligence to any system that can accomplish a goal through multiple pathways. So for instance the single-celled Lacrymaria, lacking a brain or nervous system, can still navigate its environment to find food and fulfill its metabolic needs.

However, I assumed what we're talking about when we discuss AGI is what we'd expect a human to be able to accomplish in the world at our scale. The examples of learning without knowledge you've given, to my mind at least, are a lower level of intelligence that doesn't really approach human level AGI.