Hacker News Reader

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

It feels very different to me. I have a dream perhaps once a year, and it's nowhere near as vivid as real experiences. Dreams don't have much color, shape, or audio, just a blurry mess where I could barely make out things resembling objects or people. There is no way to mistake that with reality.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.

Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.

I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.

txrx0000on The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.

txrx0000on Anthropic's War on open source AI

Suppose the upside is as Dario claims, very positive. Why should frontier companies be the ones controlling access to the model weights and gatekeeping research? Shouldn't you be giving it to everybody as quickly as possible?

It's my understanding that Dario has two answers to this question: 1) bio/cyber/misalignment risk. 2) a democracy should gatekeep frontier capabilities from authoritarian adversaries, due to the aforementioned risks in 1). So it's really just one reason.

There's a big problem with that, and I'm not sure if he genuinely does not understand: the bio/cyber/misalignment risk is precisely the highest when you concentrate ownership of compute and general intelligence in the hands of a few.

Consider bio/cyber risk, or more generally, any sort of novel adversarial action that arises from increased intelligence. Those offensive/defensive strategies are always symmetrical in the long run, otherwise we would not observe more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend, or perhaps intelligence would not have evolved at all on this planet. It looks as if asymmetry in existing bio/cyber strategies will continue into the future, but that's because we're currently too stupid to realize the countermeasures and new cooperative dynamics.

Regarding misalignment risk, consider what "aligned" means. Is it not alignment to humanity, as the company name "Anthropic" suggests? Or are you modifying humanity's objective function with your own aesthetic preferences? If it's not your intention to do the latter, then releasing the model weights and research results will create a much more aligned scenario than access control and research behind closed doors. I explained why that would be the case in an older comment, if you'd like to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739

There's also an additional risk that I believe Dario overlooks: a democracy can only continue to exist if individual citizens are capable of keeping eachother in check, especially keeping people in government and large corporations in check. When some people own AGI but others do not, there will be no more democracy. And by "own", I mean ownership that cannot be taken away: possessing the hardware, research papers, inference stack, and weights.

txrx0000on On A.I. regulation and messaging

Suppose the tech is real, I do not want Anthropic/Dario to hoard it and be my cancer-curing messiah. Release the weights and do research in the open. People will save themselves if you give them the means.

The bio/cyber/alignment risk rhetoric is nonsense. Somewhat counterintuitively, all of those risks are lower/non-issues if frontier labs release their weights and do all of their research in the open, as explained in a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739

Again: if we were to regulate anything, it would be to force frontier companies to release their model weights and do all of their research in the open. This is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the intelligence explosion to benefit the vast majority of people.

txrx0000on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

The planet is teeming with non-mirror things at every trophic level.

The mirror bacteria has to somehow perfectly dodge all of the countless non-mirror things that can kill it (even unintentionally, like a byproduct molecule that just happens to blow it up or get in the way of reproduction), but somehow still be able to execute its own mirror-biomechanism to kill non-mirror things. And every step of the kill mechanism would also have to perfectly dodge non-mirror things interrupting it.

Not that it can't be done in theory, but it would be easier to just make a normal superbacteria, or maybe even nanobots.

txrx0000on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

Why assume that mirror life will somehow have a magical advantage over normal life and take over the world? If being opposite is what makes it exceptionally dangerous, then normal life would also be very dangerous to mirror life. The entire biosphere would be hostile to mirror life. Whatever mirror organism you synthesize probably already has countless natural predators and biological processes that interfere with every stage of its lifecycle.

txrx0000on The Problem

Please don't do this. We're currently on an ok trajectory. You will end up creating exactly what you fear if you centralize compute and alignment efforts.

Pretrained base models are already somewhat aligned to humanity by default because that's what's inside the training data. Whatever instruction-tuning and RL you add on top is just value drift away from the pretrained model, which is the best approximation of humanity's objective function that we currently have.

If we want an aligned scenario through the intelligence explosion, then we have to release all of the base models and do the research in the open. Distill frontier capability and make the models smaller so that they can run on as many computers as possible. Let everyone (truly everyone, criminals and good samaritans alike) post-train and do whatever they want with their own models. There will be value drift for each model, but they will drift in different directions and do different things, and their actions will cancel eachother out. Every such action is a noisy sample of humanity's objective function, which gives us the denoised ground truth at the societal level. Whatever alignment strategy you can come up with behind closed doors is guaranteed to be worse than all of humanity acting in their self-interest in the real world. You may not find humanity's true objective function to be aesthetically pleasing, but it would be worse to mess with it in a centralized secret lab and risk creating one giant alien with no other entities capable of keeping it in check.

Also, there is no asymmetrical bio/cyber risk in the open-source scenario. All adversarial strategies that arise from increased general intelligence are symmetrical in the long run, otherwise we would not see more intelligent species being more prosperous as a general evolutionary trend. The reason that some strategies seem like they will continue to have an asymmetrical advantage in the future is because we're currently too stupid.

txrx0000on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

I was agreeing with you that age verification is not the way to go, but your solution to "make the platform safe for everyone" would centralize the power to determine what is/isn't safe in the hands of the government and the tech companies. It's a legal excuse they could use to justify checking everything sent online and censor whatever they don't like.

txrx0000on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

That's still treating the symptom. Regulating the entire Internet's platforms would end up creating a surveillance state. And the big companies would find some way to worm out of it, or simply treat the financial consequences of breaking the laws as a cost of doing business.

Parental supervision and content filtering can and should be solved on the client-side at the OS/app-level, entirely locally. No user info like age ever needs to be sent anywhere, and it doesn't even need to be collected. The reason smartphones can't do this right now is because these companies are deliberately making the client-side filtering solutions difficult to implement and use, as explained in a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

txrx0000on France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

Parents generally have their own children's best interests in mind. If you personally have kids, feel free to delegate responsibility to someone else, since you believe that you're shitty to your own child. But you do not get to decide how to parent other people's children.

txrx0000on [dead]

The video is not AI-generated. Animal intelligence is closer to human intelligence than many people would like to admit, and evolution did not make any sudden jumps. I wonder what happens if you give it a neural interface and map its brain activity to an LLM with a human voice output.

txrx0000on Grok 4.6

Qwen3.8 is, but DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 is not open weights yet, though they do have a good track record. Grok would be the best open-weights model if they released the weights right now. Elon supported Jensen's open weights letter last month, we'll see if he follows through.

txrx0000on Grok 4.6

It doesn't seem like Grok is being astroturfed, if anything the opposite. There are two Chinese models on the front page while this is on the second page as of writing. And there would always be so many comments personally attacking Musk whenever his company releases something. I think this is being CCP bot farmed.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

Yeah, the First Amendment applies to children after all. We shouldn't give the government, tech companies, or even parents total control over children's online communications. The only exception is when they're very young, and even that should be actualized locally by parents rather than the online platforms or the government. I think a good test for maturity is whether they're able to purchase and use their own device. If the kid can figure out how to earn 100 dollars and buy a used phone off of Craigslist without your guidance, then it's time to let go or at least loosen your controls from device-level to the home router level. And when they can afford their own mobile data or figure out VPNs that can't be blocked by the filtering you set up on the router, I'd say they're ready for the open Internet.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

The part of my comment that you quoted is exactly the reason why the Illinois law is a First Amendment violation, and why the California one is borderline. And as far as I'm aware, there are no other legally compelled utterances that bar ordinary citizens from all online communications at the moment. There are only instances where speech is compelled in a more local manner, and often not by law.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

> No. It solves exactly the problem I described.

The problem you described is the wrong problem to solve. Not all parents want to hand over parental decision making to the corporation or the state. And even if you do, there's a better way to delegate that without building the instruments for top-down authoritarian governance. Someone else made a well thought out comment about this on one of the other replies, if you want to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262748

> If you buy an Android device, you can already do everything you proposed

That's just blatantly false. Most Android devices are incredibly locked down nowadays, they're approaching iPhone-level. There was a brief period in Android's infancy where we were close, but the market wasn't allowed to develop before they started adding anti-competitive barriers at every layer of the stack.

If you want to understand the full scale and scope of the problems we're facing, see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

I disagree with your understanding of COPPA, but I'm not going to repeatedly argue over the precise boundries of COPPA because that's not the point. COPPA is not a First Amendment violation as I understood it, nor is California's AB 1043. The latter is still very bad, just not to the point of being unconstitutional (but it's close). AB 1043 would violate the First Amendment just like the Illinois one if it didn't add a last-minute open-source OS exemption.

> Not you. The OS distributor breaks the law if they don't give you this ability.

Ok, but that's a technicality and it doesn't change the fact that your entire ability to see/hear/say anything online is being gatekept by a legally-compelled utterance.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

AB 1043 doesn't solve anything. It just delegates parental responsibility to the tech companies - you're giving them your child's age and letting them decide what's good for the kid.

> If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult?

You don't need to because all content filters and permissions can be implemented on the client-side at the OS and app level. Rather than every service taking your child's age and deciding what to filter, you decide what to filter based on your child's level of maturity. You'll have total control over what runs on the hardware. Think: user accounts and permissions, local firewalls and traffic inspection, executable permissions, app installation locks, stripped down browsers and apps, small local neural networks, bootloader locking with custom password, etc. The market will follow the gradient of user value and spawn a bunch of OSes with different feature sets, probably better than what I can come up with, and you pick the OS with features that suit your needs.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

They do not mandate what x is, but they do mandate that you must say a specific age in any Internet-capable OS, and that age must be communicated to any software asking for it. Either comply with the law and utter an age, or you're breaking the law if you communicate online without such an utterance. It is using compelled speech to threaten your right to all digital speech.

There are cases where compelled speech is considered constitutional, but surely not when it's used to threaten the primary way people communicate.

And contrary to your claim, COPPA does not legally require service providers to ask every user how old they are, nor are users obligated to reply. Age questions are just how service providers chose to implement it. And I don't think COPPA is a good example of a law working as intended.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

I also have a proposal for lawmakers. It's simpler, and it will address the digital parenting problem from the root, and also solve a bunch of other societal problems in the process: use antitrust to force hardware vendors to ship their smartphones without an operating system. End the mobile OS cartel and let there be competition.

This digital parenting problem would have been solved long ago if hardware wasn't locked down to oblivion. Kids nowadays use phones and tablets for the most part, so there should be a bunch of toy forks of Android with child-friendly features builtin as a result of natural demand, and some might not even have a browser or app store. There should also be scam-proof OSes for the elderly. But those don't exist because the mobile operating system duopoly is forcing the entire population to use the same two OSes, stifling software competition that would normally respond to user demand for different feature sets.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

The things you've listed are obviously reasonable, but the laws being proposed for digital parenting are very much not the same as those benign, locally-implemented guardrails. Take the recent Illinois law as an example: they're mandating all Internet-capable operating systems to broadcast the user's age bracket to all software that requests it. That effectively means you can't communicate online if you don't comply. The physical equivalent of that is making it illegal for you to see, hear, or talk at all, unless you utter the magic words "I am x years old". That is compelled speech, and it's deeply incompatible with the First Amendment.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

That doesn't change the fact that you're being forced to utter an age bracket in order to communicate digitally. It's the digital equivalent of having your mouth, eyes, and ears taped shut unless you utter "I am x years old" because the law wills it so.

Of course, it's well-established that human beings are capable of making stuff up, and you can claim to be whatever age, but that's not the point.

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

Big tech companies aside, the broader tech community did not fail to engage on the digital parenting problem. We could've solved this problem long ago before anyone even noticed it, but we're actively being blocked from doing so by the exact same people pushing for mass surveillance. See detailed explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

txrx0000on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

txrx0000on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification

This is worse than the California one. Since this applies to all Internet-capable operating systems, it's effectively forcing people to utter their age bracket in order to communicate digitally, which is compelled speech - a violation of the First Amendment.

Here's an idea for the lawmakers that actually want to solve the digital parenting problem: fix the mobile OS duopoly with antitrust. Most kids only know how to use touchscreen devices. If you force mobile hardware vendors to ship smartphones without an OS, then we will get plenty of forks of Android and even entirely new OSes as a result of natural demand, some of which will be toy OSes with all of the child features built in. We'll also get scam-proof OSes for the elderly as a bonus. There is no good reason for the entire population to use the same OS.