whatevertrevor

I see your perspective about the inevitability of death causing a forcing-function directedness for agents, but that's a much much weaker claim than (emphasis mine):

> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.

My original question was why could agency not exist without death, not why it was hampered without it. For clarity, I'm coming at from an analytic philosophy angle, not its more rhetorical counterpart that I struggle to wrap my head around.

I don't really view death or evolution as a necessity for agency. Nebulous AGI predictions aside: if a self-aware, conscious and intelligent being, capable of affecting consequential changes to its environment, becomes functionally immortal, it doesn't somehow lose its agency. I'd actually go further and say losing the forcing function of inevitable death is the biggest freedom a species can aim for. Without it, our agency is limited to solving problems of survival, in one form or another.

The existence of death is ultimately arbitrary and random, as random as our existence in the first place. The "direction" we get for evolution as a result of it, is another random function on top, also taking: the random circumstances the soup of organic molecules live in, as another parameter. Only once this random inevitability is conquered can we truly shape our lives and environments in ways that are a true reflection of who we are. Only then are we genuinely free. And "agency" without freedom is impotent at best.

(Addendum: I know positing "Immortality is good actually" can cause negative associations with "billionaires who want to cryopreserve themselves". This association has melded with the general romanticization of death in various philosophical and religious beliefs that has existed since millennia, further empowering the distaste against trying to reverse aging and eventually remove death as moral goals. While I personally have no plans (or means) to cryopreserve myself when I get old, I do believe it's a goal worth fighting for. One of the more important ones, alongside ensuring we have a planet to live on in the interim)

> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.

I don't follow. If we, in some distant future, find a way to make humans functionally immortal, does that magically remove our agency? Or do we not have agency to begin with?

If your position on the "free will" question is that it doesn't exist, then sure I get it. But that seems incompatible with the death prerequisite you have put forward for it, because if it doesn't exist then surely it's a moot point to talk prerequisites anyway.

If the porous surfaces are saturated then you'll basically be maximizing the vapor pressure of these gases in the air you breathe. Check out my sibling comment, extrapolating just from the data in the article an active ventilation system should help.

EDIT: And yes, charcoal filters aren't as effective if they're not part of your critical airflow/ventilation path. :D

The GP comment is talking about active ventilation though, through an ERV/HRV system. Also the article states this:

> The lifetime of these compounds indoors can be extended via partitioning to the surface reservoir as modulated by ACR. Higher ACR, which may be achieved by opening windows or through mechanical ventilation, leads to shorter t_half_surf because once indoor compounds partition from the surface reservoir to the gas phase as controlled by gas diffusion across the boundary layer, they would be removed from indoor air more quickly before repartitioning to the surface reservoir.

So they do state active ventilation can help, as you reduce the vapor pressure of VOCs allowing them to partition back into the gaseous env, where they can be promptly ejected. How much exactly is hard to ascertain from their graph since I don't have the exact data they used in the plots. But from squinting at it, it seems 1 OOM change in ACR gives you close to 1 OOM change in the VOC half life, which seems substantial to me.

So adding an active ventilation system might be a good idea for this particular concern. Of course it will add to your energy bill.

-- "Divide" an integer into two or more integers that sum to it too. :D

As pointed out in another comment HEPA filters don't work well for VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), which are gaseous in nature. They're intended to filter particulate matter.

For VOCs you need activated charcoal/carbon filters usually and replace them from time to time.

You are interested in debating against the narrowest possible literal interpretation of a sentence while selectively removing surrounding context as it suits your argument. That's not the kind of conversation I'm interested in, sorry.

I think what they meant is something along the lines of:

- In Math, there's often more than one logically distinct way of proving a theorem, and definitely many ways of writing the same proof, though the second applies more to handwritten/text proofs than say a proof in Lean.

- In programming, there's often multiple algorithms to solve a problem correctly (in the mathematical sense, optimality aside), and for the same algorithm there are many ways to implement it.

LLMs however are not performing any logical pass on their output, so they have no way of constraining correctness while being able to produce different outputs for the same question.

You need sources for the fact that there are celebrity Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit accounts? You can easily find many of these, just some google searching is required. Not accounts owned by celebrities mind you (of which there are also many), pseudonymous accounts that have become celebrities over the years.

As for evidence for people actually miss old Twitter, sorry I can't prove to you I have friends who mention that multiple times a month. You can take it for what it is (someone sharing their experience) or you can assume that I'm making this up for the sake of a throwaway internet conversation. Your choice.

That neither addresses the core of what I'm saying nor is factually accurate, as I know many people mourning the loss of heyday Twitter.

Eh people can develop those with pseudonymous accounts too. There's a reason why people bemoan the death of early twitter "communities" and whatnot. There are plenty reddit celebrity accounts as well.

People do project their general behaviour patterns on social media regardless of the form, though some forms are more malleable to that than others.

There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?

Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.

Again, the service host and request id is part of the certification request, so you can easily separate a legitimate signup for multiple different websites from suspicious multi-signups to the same service for the same govt id.

It's a tough line to tread.

Arguably, a lot of unending discourse about the "abilities" of these models stems from using ill-defined terms like reasoning and intelligence to describe these systems.

On the one hand, I see the point that we really struggle to define intelligence, consciousness etc for humans, so it's hard to categorically claim that these models aren't thinking, reasoning or have some sort of intelligence.

On the other, it's also transparent that a lot of the words are chosen somewhat deliberately to anthropomorphize the capabilities of these systems for pure marketing purposes. So the claimant needs to demonstrate something beyond rebutting with "Well the term is ill-defined, so my claims are valid."

And I'd even argue the marketers have won overall: by refocusing the conversation on intelligence and reasoning, the more important conversation about the factually verifiable capabilities of the system gets lost in a cycle of circular debate over semantics.

I did, except for this bit that you added in an edit:

> You don't have to reuse the same certificate for several requests. You can get a new one for every request, for every person who is asked to verify their age and pays you $2, and if they're actually anonymous, there's no way to know you did this. Is a rate limit part of the proposal? Can I only sign up to one adult service per week?

This is trivially easy to detect at the attestation service. If someone is trying to repeatedly (and programmatically) use the same personal ID to generate attestations for different request IDs in a short time frame, you can throttle them, flag them, revoke their cert, whatever.

> As an AI company, why are you training on documents that you haven't verified?

Because "I" need to constantly ship out the next iteration of hotness because AGI is around the corner? Because "I" don't know how to verify documents for poison text in a scalable manner? Because "I" don't care? I am not an AI company, how would I know?

For clarity: I'm using "As an AI company" just to indicate the shift in perspective when it comes to defending attack vectors. Not literally indicating that I am (or affiliated with) an AI company.

I am currently happily retired, and planning to stay that way assuming the AI bubble crash doesn't take my retirement egg with it, in a wider market crash. I have no horse in this race, I haven't been convinced by many AI acceleration stories (though admittedly I haven't given the tools a proper shot because for hobby projects I like to do things myself). And it's definitely not my (entire) industry. So completely wrong read on many levels there, friend.

I address all of that in my comment? I'm not sure if you even read it at this point.

I don't think they're quibbling over semantics but providing constructive cautionary feedback. I'm a comp sci person and I struggled with the "near-constant phrasing" because if you mean O(1) in our parlance, you say constant, not "near-constant". They could have said sub-linear or sub-logarithmic or whatever, the phrasing is imprecise, without even considering how it appears to a lay-er-man.

Also I'm not a huge fan of defending jargon for the sake of it. Sometimes there are efficiency gains, sure. But the paper here is quite approachable generally speaking. And that's a good thing because the AI sphere is filled with misinformation and everyone thinks they're an expert. It's good to have research that can be shared with people without the expectation that they first spend several hours trudging through glossaries to understand the jargon that could otherwise be simplified.

As a user I'm worried about a + b sure. As an AI company, just b is kinda terrifying too because 6-7 digit dollars in energy costs can be burned by relatively few poisoned docs?

Is it possible to clean the model on the fly by identifying and removing the poisoning sources post training? Or do you have to start from scratch?

I think I'm fine with that tradeoff between effectiveness of age gating vs privacy gains of not having IDs sent over to corporations. To me, identity theft by targeting large stores of government IDs, is orders of magnitude worse than a teenager accessing NSFW channels every now and then.

I'm not defending age verification's existence in the first place btw, I don't think it's a good idea without secure protocols of central attestation for such things. But of course, governments aren't interested in solving the harder more valuable problem, they're interested in shifting the responsibility to corporations while crying foul.

Not necessarily. In theory, the attestation that someone is of age can be provided by a central service. The central service does not need the website account information to provide a non-fungible certificate, that you show to your service that has no way of knowing who you are from the certificate. All it needs to ensure is the certificate is used only once per account.

You can then prevent certificate forging by forwarding a cryptographic hash of the requester identity (generated by the website client), which will be included in the cert body so the website can verify the attestation was generated for this specific request, and it cannot be randomly reused.

Of course this doesn't solve the problem of using your grandma's id to bypass age restrictions, but I think that problem is worth the cost of privacy gains from corporations not validating IDs directly and screwing up like Discord's vendor did here.

Surely that's solved easily by ensuring a 1:1 association between the proof of age and account?

Wait how did she suggest people heat water for tea/coffee instead? I've never heard an environmentalist attack electric kettles before.

I remember a time when I thought we were past the Windows 98/XP popup malware era. Now every single website and application loves to shove popups in my face whenever I'm trying to accomplish a quick task. I don't think I have ever read anything other than the buttons to figure out which ones not to press.

Engagement metrics will be the death of us.

I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it.

EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies.

It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.

Ah fair enough, that wasn't completely transparent to me.

"Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.

I find trying to hide and wash away emotions tends to be a dangerous strategy long term. I get that sometimes emotions are unproductive for the task at hand, but the longer you keep washing them away with "logic", the stronger they keep returning at inopportune times. The long term strategy that works for me is to acknowledge them, actually listen to them, but also recognize I have the ability to act despite them. Easier said than done of course.

This is a question out of genuine curiosity and not intended to minimize misophonia in any way:

I do not see any examples of a "naturally occurring" sound there. Is the sound supposed to be human generated in some way? That would feel a bit incongruent with my understanding of it as a pure stimulus response situation.

Yeah I like to think of it as active roleplaying instead of having to put in an effort. Most people have to put in some effort in social situations, heck I catch myself saying unproductive things to my partner if I slip completely into passive mode.

I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.

With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...