mitthrowaway2

Maybe someone can find a way to make transparent diamond.

Maybe I have to say it again.

1/sqrt(2) |alive> + 1/sqrt(2) |dead> is a valid solution to the Schrodinger equation. That cat is half alive and half dead.

That is different than |A cat that feels half alive and half dead>, which is its own completely different state. For a cat to feel like it is half alive and dead, or to notice that it is half alive and half dead, there are distinct things that happening in its brain that don't happen in either the |alive> or |dead> basis vectors, let alone any linear combination of the two.

We could even put all those states in a superposition!

1/sqrt(3) |alive> + 1/sqrt(3) |dead> + 1/sqrt(3) |half alive and half dead>.

That's exactly what we're doing. Obviously I don't believe the initial conditions of the universe were set 6000 years ago, and just look billions of years older by mere coincidence. My point -- directed at its parent comment -- is that we can scientifically prefer one hypothesis over the other, even though they're indistinguishable by any experiment because they make identical predictions.

Instead, we can use other forms of reasoning, such as probability and Ockham's razor. These are perfectly valid approaches.

You seem to agree with me on this point, so I direct your attention to the grandparent comment:

> I'm interested in logical arguments for why I should be convinced that something completely impossible to ever test, not even in theory, is correct.

How do you test whether the dinosaurs once existed as living animals, vs as fossils that were embedded in the Earth when the universe began 6000 years ago?

Because I only believe one of these propositions, even though I can't imagine any test that would discriminate between the two.

I think the alternatives would be more absurd:

- That humans can't be put into quantum superpositions, or

- That a human being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B would feel at all to that human like being in a quantum superposition of two states A and B, when neither of those states is "a human feeling like they're in a superposition of two states A and B".

Follow this to its conclusion, and you end up with a superposition of A and B meaning: "the universe is in a superposition, containing a component where a human believes that they're in state A, and a component where a human believes that they're in state B. Within both branches, the human thinks their wavefunction collapsed in that state". This is exactly the way that all interpretations of QM already understand things to work with particles in superpositions.

But we're not in one of them. We're in all of them. Yours is a misunderstanding of how it feels to be in a quantum superposition. There's no component of the wave function in which Schrodinger's cat experiences anything other than being alive or being dead. There's no component in which it feels like it's in some ghostly combination of both outcomes. Both components of the wave function exist in superposition, and to the extent that they are decoherent, they do not interact and do not even notice that they have company. I don't mean this only as an academic statement; it's also true of you and me, at this very moment.

Signal, NordVPN, Psiphon VPN, Tailscale, Windscribe, and DuckDuckGo have already confirmed that they will stop offering their services in Canada, and not route any of their European services through Canadian proiders.

This is why we used to have blockbuster!

Speaking for myself, although I never expected that I'd pass on hard skills to my child (unless they showed a particular interest), at least up until 2019 I felt confident that I could guide them in a general direction to be successful in life. How to do well in school, how to develop a work ethic, how to learn and pursue the things that interest them, how to approach planning a career, how to market their skills, how to manage risk, how to balance doing what they love vs what pays the bills, how to approach relationships... things like that. Regardless of whether they wanted to become a piano tuner or a park ranger or an astronaut or a homemaker.

But right now I know almost nothing at all for what to tell them. I don't know if any moticum of the experience I have that put me on a successful path will be valuable in the future at all.

Basically my plan is to just spend time enjoying time together and having fun, and cross my fingers and hope that things turn out alright.

This number reports, basically, how good it is to live inside a country, while the comment that you are replying to is entirely a list of foreign policy complaints (regime changes, etc).

It's kinda like meeting someone on the street who's protesting about animal cruelty in slaughterhouses, slyly handing them a chart showing them the nutrition facts of beef, and then walking off without another word as though you've settled your case.

Like, I get the point you're trying to make, but I hope you're aware it's a non-sequitur in context?

A driver's license suspension would be sufficient, say for six months or so?

I remember when all the nuclear energy companies were like "our reactors are so powerful, they might melt down and destroy the entire county, maybe even half the state!" and investors loved it and went wild, and then Chernobyl blew up and everyone thought that the Soviets faked it to make their nuclear power plants look more powerful than western ones.

It takes a few words to communicate an idea; it takes a lot more to defend it. Which one is the blog post in question trying to do?

I see. I believe the original "Passkeys are a trap" article was written from the point of view of the person logging into a service, who doesn't by themselves control enough market power to compel the service provider to support their preferred configuration of passkey. And thereby might find themselves forced to use an Android or iphone in order to access the normal infrastructure of society, such as banking or government services, when hardware-attestation passkeys become prevalent enough that, like Chrome, vendors can simply choose not to support alternatives.

I don't think they intended to make any argument that passkeys could be a trap to service providers.

A lot of sheep analogies here. To add my own: there was no grass inside the fence, and the sheep busted out and into a neighboring farm to look for some. (They didn't find any, but they expected to).

The fence also turns out to be shoddily built, so this isn't necessarily a stunning example of the superhuman proficiency of the sheep at fence-busting. It's mainly important because, for some reason, there have been tons of skeptics who didn't believe sheep would ever try to escape from a fenced pasture because the sheep would understand the shepherd had intended them to stay inside it; that they'd be bred for obedience, because they're sheep; that strong fences weren't necessary because sheep are dumb; that liability for damages to neighboring farms would in any case be sufficient to ensure shepherds build sufficiently strong fences; that even if sheep escaped, they couldn't do anything without opposable thumbs; etc.

Whereas this outcome was obvious for years to anyone who believed that sheep graze on grass, and if you don't put the grass inside the fence they will keep looking harder and harder for an exit until they find one, and the exit they find might not be where you intended the gate to be.

So now the latter group are pointing to it and saying "see? See? I told you the sheep would try to escape!", because to them it's a clear early example of what they've been worried about, while the former group have moved on to saying "well, obviously they should have built a stronger fence; anyway the sheep barely caused any damage once they got out", "the sheep didn't break the fence, they're just animals, we should really see this as the shepherd using sheep to break down their own fence", and so on.

Who is "you" here? The person logging in (ie, the client), or the person providing the service (ie, a bank)?

Did, say, Yoshua Bengio claim that we'd have AGI by October 2026? I must have missed it.

That's why the article calls it a "trap". Like any trap, you have positive experiences until it's too late to leave. In this case, adoption of passkeys reaches a threshold where they all start requiring attestation, and now your fallback option is unsupported.

> Maudslay also devised an ingenious method that used two imperfect screws to guide the tool cutting a third. Equal gears turned both guide screws at the same speed. A bar joined their two nuts, with the tool fixed at its midpoint, so the tool's position was the average of the two nut positions. Where one guide ran ahead and the other lagged, their errors partly cancelled. Each guide contributed only half its error to the new screw.

Actually, this invention is Leonardo Da Vinci's! Here's what his screw-copying machine looked like.

https://cdn.britannica.com/39/60539-050-BCB3019D/machine-Leo...

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0661830/800wm/C0661830...

The screws can also be taken out and flipped end-over-end, averaging out the errors even further.

What predictions has LeCun made that were vindicated by events?

What? That doesn't make any sense. A political party can't threaten to take away anything when you stop voting for them. Instead, you simply get the policies of the party you elected in their place. If UBI is popular then there's nothing stopping the opposition from offering it, or even promising to double it. But even if they said "elect us and we'll take away your UBI", then that's just not getting a hamburger because you ordered the pasta.

And what aspect of that arrangement looks like servitude? I don't usually associate servitude with the idea of getting paid a stipend regardless of whether I choose to work. Do you know who has historically enjoyed such a stipend? The Lords and Ladies who had all the servants!

Also, there are plenty of implementations of a grocery subsidy that don't have the state giving money directly to big agro-business. For example where I am, groceries are exempt from sales taxes; this is equivalent to a flat tax plus a specific grocery subsidy applied at point of sale to the consumer. This benefits any food producer, large or small.

Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then? And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances. Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us, or even everyone via UBI. Why settle on diesel trucks as the thing to subsidize above others?

Can it perform valuable services in exchange for currency? Hack poorly secured accounts to obtain control oftheir money? Start a GoFundMe pretending to be a noble cause? Make some well-timed investments? Run a viral YouTube channel? Elevator-pitch a gullible VC?

There's lots of ways to pay for electricity, and many of them don't even require a body.

Yeah, so the ones who have credibility are probably the ones who said "you know, it's really hard to anticipate timelines, but here's the general directions that I see things will go..."

Then we miscommunicated, so let me be clearer. I'm worried about ~20 years from now (plus or minus), when AI decides to kill us all because it's misaligned and is capable of doing so because it's super intelligent. And then we all suddenly die without any idea what happened. I don't want that to happen to me or my daughter and I would prefer all AI capabilities development stops until alignment research catches up and figures out how to robustly prevent AI from ever trying to achieve such outcomes. If that means pausing AI capabilities development forever, I'm fine with that. If that means Anthropic and Nvidia lose all their value in a stock market collapse, I'm fine with that. I just don't want us to all die, I want the world to keep existing for humans.

I believe that other harms from AI, like criminals abusing them, or unemployment, or copyright infringement, or deepfake disinformation, are valid real harms that it's important to be concerned about, and I support efforts to deal with those, and I agree that they're already happening today, but my main concern is AI killing everybody.

My read is this puts me in the same boat as the authors of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and yet, I don't get invitations to Berkeley sex parties. Am I doing something wrong? At any rate, please don't discredit my opinions about AI based on the sexual preferences of random people who happen to share those opinions about AI.

I apply more of a penalty to people who are confidently wrong, and who don't, In retrospect, notice that they were wrong and analyze why they got it wrong . LeCun is very confident and doesn't seem to have done much introspection.

The rest of us seem to be talking about the people like me who view the AI safety issue as "an unsafe AI will kill all humans". And the main article is about a guy who quit AI because it wasn't being careful enough, not because it wasn't moving fast enough to accelerate AI. So why would anyone be bringing up the "we must accelerate faster" people as the safety people in such a context, while trying to discredit them as a sex cult? I struggle to understand.

Yes, I am describing a tragic outcome that I hope we can be wise enough to steer away from. Also, as a human, I can't help but keep our interests close at heart.

When I think to scenarios that no human would survive, I think of the end-Permian mass extinction event, which wiped out most complex plant and animal life in both land and sea.

One speculated mechanism for this was a mass release of hydrogen sulfide gas from the oceans, which is acutely toxic. Not only does this kill most air-breathing life, it also strips the ozone layer and irradiates the surface. The planet is then left to cook in this manner for some centuries.

Engineering an event like this would require immense industrial capacity, as well as a deliberate objective of wiping out humanity. But I don't think it's beyond our ability, if we were both clever and stupid enough to try it. There are likely chemical compounds that would do the job more efficiently than hydrogen sulfide.

Would you like me to design the pathogen for you?