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lysium

965 karma · joined January 22, 2009

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lysium··on The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)
I think it depends on your definition for 'intelligence'. IIRC, Wikipedia lists 15 different definitions for 'intelligence'. One common ground is 'the ability to solve problems', which covers some aspects of how the term 'intelligence' is usually used, but not necessarily everything.

If your 'problem' as a cell is to feed yourself, it is a clever apparatus that solves that problem, and can be depicted as intelligent.

If you understand the 'fully automatic mechanism' completely, you agree that it solves a problem, but you deny that this is intelligent. However, the denial depends on your understanding of the mechanism. If you assume that the world is deterministic (that means, every effect has a definite cause, to put it simply), we cannot be something other than a 'fully automatic mechanism', however a very, very complicated one that we do not fully understand. Indeed, in a deterministic world nothing can be different from a 'fully automatic mechanism', and, by your implied definition of intelligence, nothing can be intelligent. This conclusion leaves the definition of intelligence as something 'other than fully automatic mechanism' rather useless, as it does not distinguish anything. (If you do assume that the world is not deterministic, a similar argument still holds, as long as you do not imply that a person can determine the outcome of the non-determinism, which sounds strange to me to imply.)

I think what you want for something to call 'intelligent', is that you don't immediately understand how the mechanism works and the assumption of some kind of thought process and/or planning. The first property unfortunately depends on what you might consider your own intelligence, which makes it difficult as an objective measure of intelligence so that you can argue about it in a forum. The second property (thinking/planning) might be present in the cell in a way that you don't see (eg. see storage of the current value of 'now') and, similary, it might not be present in us humans in the way self-perceive it.

More than once did I experience a seemingly 'intelligent system' that I found fasciniating, which, after I studied it, I did not think of as intelligent anymore (eg. my first impressions of Weizenbaum's Eliza), which for the aforementioned reasons I think is kind-of silly of me.

lysium··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
If you haven’t quoted it, I think you’re fine.
lysium··on Anthropic removed session and weekly usage progress bars from Settings
"Update : It seems to back on all platforms. Things seems to be fixed."
lysium··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
Others mention quicker startup of the app, more native-look, less head-ache w/ RN.
lysium··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
There is a mobile version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49638121
lysium··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
Have you tried the continuity plugin to VSCode? I think it’s still rg‘ING the source but you get control over AI edits / review and quick own edits.
lysium··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
At the second you got an interesting answer, though
lysium··on The real prices of frontier models
I was wondering, too. Maybe this explains it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899135
lysium··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
This only shuts down the account you have bought in the first, plus a few others if it is shared.

> Use any metadata to identify related accounts

How does that work? I think this is the most important part to have an impact on the „thousand“ bot accounts.

lysium··on There is minimal downside to switching to open models
I understand your point, however I don’t buy „there's just no legal way to remove him“. With so low ratings where are the daily protests against such type of government? Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.

lysium··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
I read it as „calling it from two places“
lysium··on Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"
That article was flagged because it seemed fabricated by AI (see one of the comments).

I understand your wish to have simple rules that you can understand but I’m afraid this is often not the case with machine learning algorithms, e.g. neural networks.

lysium··on Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"
> Algorithmic decisions should have audit trails.

I'm afraid it won’t help as much as we’d like. The algorithm might consider thousands of parameters all of which have scientifically been shown to correlate with some outcome.

A famous example is a denied credit application where one parameter is the battery level of your mobile.

A trail won’t help you decipher why the algorithm decided a particular action.

lysium··on The bottleneck was never the code
FWIW I see the red dot only at the top of the page, flashing slowly. It does not annoy me, in fact I only discovered it because of your comment.
lysium··on The bottleneck was never the code
Can someone explain the title? I think the author illustrates that the code was the bottleneck and it has shifted to context. What am I missing?
lysium··on GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty
Please excuse my ignorance, what is a „biorisk“?
lysium··on Gender Equality and Work
I think the argument is the other way around: fields that women prefer pay less, ie. the field pays less because women prefer it.

I don’t share that argument, I just wanted to point it out.

lysium··on Canada's bill C-22 mandates mass metadata surveillance
Clearly, list the specific cases instead of letting the judge feel what is appropriate is the way to go. Also helps the judge doing the right thing.
lysium··on Apple, What Have You Done?
Thanks, man! Appreciated
lysium··on Apple, What Have You Done?
How did you do this? I once tried and it seemed impossible.
lysium··on Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community
What are you talking about? Germany would be more energy independent if it had adopted solar and wind power when Greenpeace was advocating it fourty years ago, like China is showcasing today!
lysium··on Date is out, Temporal is in
This will result in incorrect behavior when, between converting to UTC and back to the original timezone, the timezone database has changed, which happens more often than you think.
lysium··on [dead]
Why posting something only for subscribers?
lysium··on Show HN: 0xDEAD//TYPE – A fast-paced typing shooter with retro vibes
That's a fun game! I found out I have muscle memory for j/k meaning up/down, instead of w/s.
lysium··on I automated my job application process
What do you mean with licensing? What’s the difference to a university degree?
lysium··on Seconds Since the Epoch
That’s not a standard format. ISO format is yyyy-mm—dd. Also, sorts nicely by time if you sort alphabetically.
lysium··on Boeing's deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage
After reading that piece, I’ll do my best to avoid flying with a Boeing airplane. I hope the author survives his article.
lysium··on I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
I was wondering how „bob@[rocket]“ works… Thank you for clarifying.
lysium··on EU coal and gas collapse as wind and solar ascend
It takes decades to build new nuclear plants. This won’t solve anything until they are built.

Renewables /are/ good for reducing CO2, as every kW produced by renewable is not produced by CO2-emitting alternative. Plus, they make you independent from foreign energy sources.

lysium··on ASLRn't: How memory alignment broke library ASLR
I wonder how this is left unnoticed for so long. Yes, there was a bug tracker but for one year there’s no fix? Clearly, I don’t understand enough about it.
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