thethimble

Another angle on this is that there’s many formal axiomatic ways to define computing.

Everything is just a Turing machine. Everything is just a function. Everything is the Conway’s game of life.

The fact that all of these forms are equally expressive is quite a surprise when you first discover this. Importantly, it doesn’t mean that any one set of axioms is “more correct” than the other. They’re equally expressive.

How does bazel manage virtual envs and python versions if at all? Could bazel and uv be used together or are their feature sets mostly overlapping?

How is not endorsing a candidate “antithetical to independent journalism”? I understand that Bezos stepped in to perhaps overrule an endorsement but in what sense is maintaining neutrality antithetical to independent journalism?

My understanding was that Mozilla scrapped Servo. What’s the plan/scope for this project now that it’s being developed outside of Mozilla?

The fact that many such businesses have become cashless suggests that the ROI of accepting cash is not worth the cost/burden. Therefore it’s not a fundamental “cost of doing business” and instead just a mechanism to reach a subset of customers that prefer cash.

I agree that mandating businesses to support cash is unnecessary regulatory burden. After all, shouldn’t it be the shopkeeper’s right to do business how they please?

On the other hand, enabling the judicial and executive branch to overcompensate for this disfunction also seems problematic - particularly as the former groups aren’t elected (except for the President, of course).

It’s not clear that the material world of the simulation is of the same kind of the material world we seem to observe. Further it seems definitely not clear that we can interact/modify the simulation’s material at all.

The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.

If observations imply that there’s a material universe that you are inspecting then I agree with your conclusion that the brain creates consciousness and it seems possible to replicate that consciousness artificially.

However, I am rejecting the idea that observations necessarily imply the existence of a material universe.

Actually rather than “rejecting”, I’m suggesting that it’s logically possible to take the “reverse” position: that consciousness is primary and we are experiencing what appears to be a material universe within that conscious experience. In this model it doesn’t make logical sense to be able to replicate consciousness with materials because materials seem to exist within consciousness as opposed to the other way around.

My overarching point is that most people here seem to believe that we’ll obviously replicate consciousness with more understanding of biology and I think that’s a bold claim because it’s not obvious that materialism is the “correct” framework to describe existence.

In any case, these frameworks are in the realm of non-falsifiability (axiomatic) so you can’t really claim either is fundamentally correct.

> The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material

This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true.

How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness.

It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.

The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.

The framework of materialism posits that there’s a physical universe and consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. This view is so prevalent in the western world it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else.

As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea).

In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary.

To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.

The Two Generals Problem is a great thought experiment that describes how distributed consensus is impossible when communication between nodes has the possibility of failing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem

I really hope that Shortcuts gets a UX overhaul. It feels so painful to write and test new shortcuts.

It’s also interesting now that they’ve taken over rye as well. Really hopeful they develop a unified solution between these projects.

Why wouldn’t you use a standard container based approach like Docker?

If you’re interested in spaced repetition for chess openings I’d strongly recommend chessbook. Not open source but extremely helpful in discovering interesting variations and remembering them in the long term.

https://chessbook.com/

Feels similar to the Microsoft vs. Sun lawsuit over Java which Sun won and eventually led to Microsoft building .NET

This kind of response is level 0 or level 1 on PG’s hierarchy of disagreement

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

The last All in Podcast had an interesting take on this:

Most of the R&D and Capex going into LLMs/GenAI is speculative. The investments haven’t translated into real revenue yet. The expectation is that there will be a large pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven’t seen the killer apps to substantiate this. This makes for a perfect bubble if the promise doesn’t pan out.

Relatedly Nvidia’s revenue - as impressive as the recent growth has been - is fully exposed to this risk.

Of course it’s possible (likely?) that there will be major wins from this tech, but the fact that there isn’t definitive proof (in the form of revenue) yet represents real risk.

Random sampling issues due to problems with the inference kernels on certain GPU configurations. This seems like a clear root cause and has nothing to do with the magic of NNs. I don’t understand what the fuss is about.

Are you sure that the API injects prompts?

GPT4’s ability to answer questions without special system prompts can be entirely a product of training - not necessarily evidence of an injected prompt.

Eh I actually prefer Apple mediating all my app payments (despite the X% surcharge that ultimately the consumer pays for).

I don’t have to ever enter in my cc info. I can easily cancel subscriptions from a centralized place. Payments UX is user hostile in the wild.

I wonder how your original claim balances with something like freedom of speech/expression? Ultimately it’s art and perhaps the Nightshade-modified version is a component of what makes the piece art?

OOP madness? XML? Web scale databases?

Perhaps not superstition but certainly fundamentalist/hype-based thinking.

Really? Doesn’t iMessage fall back to sms if the receiver doesn’t ack? At least that’s what the UX feels like.

GLSL - OpenGL Shader Language

Definitely check out ShaderToy to see many other examples: https://www.shadertoy.com/

What a sad take…

These languages put forth ideas that are extremely powerful. They might be unconventional from an imperative programming lens, but to call them all “complex” as a justification for discarding them entirely is pretty shallow.

This paper suggests that learning does happen within a prompt.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

By extension it seems totally reasonable that the model is developing self awareness by introspecting its tendencies (prior generated output), summarizing those tendencies, and then iteratively building a more nuanced description of those tendencies over time.

Does it actually know how it should be promoted (through introspection and reflection)? Or is it pattern matching the countless articles/tweets on prompt engineering?

I think this distinction is important as the latter feels less worthy of the praise you’re suggesting.

Or, alternatively, copyright risk is a major concern for real customers, and this is a major step forward in addressing that.

Not everything needs to be so cynical. What’s good for investors can be good for users as well.

Of course passively reading ChatGPT transcripts isn’t going to help you master math.

But equally problematic is the said roadblocks that - prior to ChatGPT - simply led many learners to stop learning. We finally have a mechanism to adjust difficulty level to the mastery level of the learner. This is fantastic.