neolefty

> It is especially telling that no matter what landmark we applied to the methodology, we have yet to get a negative result. There is, in fact, a real chance that you simply cannot get a negative result from this method.

My guess: The code is not shareable. Maybe its method is laughably disprovable?

It reminds me, oddly, of the debate over whether video games can be "art". A turning point was when they actually did something that art does: [evoke profound emotion and thoughtfulness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Colossus#Legacy) for the player.

(And before that, "[Can photography be art](https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/)?")

We may not come to something as simple as "machines can be conscious", but we will certainly have to understand consciousness better if we want to refine our questions.

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Edit: My point is that we don't need to be angry, but we may have to tolerate people expressing their exploration through overly-confident language, and be patient with that.

And Ted here is obviously exploring. His examination of Claude's constitution clearly shows some nuance. He asks:

> So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution?

And his conclusions are split, between this is useful and this is dishonest. It's a great tension IMO.

> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter. This might seem like a reasonable goal to work toward; I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as “You should kill yourself.” However, for all the times that “honesty” is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.

Like driving a car — it's transportation, and it will get you where you're going, but it doesn't use bones or muscles. It has many characteristics in common with builogical locomotion, such as energy requirements, intertia, and the need to navigate, but it doesn't involve proteins or sugars really.

Totally understandable; I don't think we can fully understand the human brain, using the human brain. We can understand its principles (firings and chemistry, structure and specialized areas, etc) but otherwise it's a capacity problem.

And while I can't fully understand myself, let alone another person, I definitely enjoy talking with people and sharing thoughts that I realize I wouldn't have had on my own.

I went to a weird high school in the US where that was the case. They just didn't have a lunch room, so everybody sat in the hallways at lunch time. But yeah, all the other schools I've heard of provide lunch. Most offer breakfast as well, as an option.

It's not the school's debt, it's individual families. If they fall behind on lunch fees, their children have to eat cold meals.

> Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes?

Depends. US schools are run by the states, so it varies from place to place. As other commenters have said, some states just fund lunch so debt isn't an issue. I'm sure some accommodate dietary requirements & preferences more than others.

My experience was that if you have specific requirements that the school can't meet, you just bring your own lunch. If you're lucky enough to have organized parents.

But yeah, the problem you point out — families can go into debt again — is real, I think.

Suddenly a life lesson.

> ... it finally let go of the hen and took off.

How was the hen afterwards?

This current chapter may need to play out, and constructive forces pick up the pieces.

So an approach might be to set only the values you can actually follow through on, and be clear when a value is aspirational. If you really do dig ditches (perhaps metaphorically, maybe by fixing deployment script bugs or something), then you can use it as a value.

To be clear: I'm definitely in favor of team values. Is there a way to make them achievable, but also grow them over time as you get better at them?

• 20+ years experience: 60% front end, 30% back end, 10% ops.

• Short- or long-term.

• Full-stack development, with a focus on UIs that are ergonomic and delightful. I can work directly with stakeholders or in a team.

• Friendly team member and mentor. I will help your team overcome deficits — both technical and personal — and gel. I will do my best to become redundant.

• Focus on continuity — good at picking up pieces and handing them off in a friendly & orderly way.

• React, Vue, Python, C#, Ruby, Linux, K8s, all relational databases and cloud providers, plus on-prem.

• Remote from Indiana (US Eastern Timezone) since 2019, can be on-site at least one week per quarter.

Contact: neolefty at gmail

  Location: Indiana (US Eastern)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No, but can travel regularly
  Technologies: Full-stack web (senior/staff), LLMs as components (novice)
  Resume/CV: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt
  Email: neolefty@gmail.com

Yes, this was a central simplifying fallacy in the article for me too.

Plenty of phenomena follow a logistic curve [1] — which starts out exponential but then flattens out when it reaches constraints or fills a niche or fully satisfies a need or something.

The initial exponential growth may have been a period where economic productivity was constrained in a major by energy availability. We still have some energy constraints, but they seem to be secondary — and in many areas energy requirements have fallen, as others have pointed out in this discussion. It's too complicated to simply flatten, but modern energy use does seem to broadly resemble a logistic curve.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

This discussion tells me we have not yet reached perfection in UI! Toasts are good for me, but definitely not good for the users you and others have described.

My hope is that small AIs inside UX can help here. Can you tell your UI framework something like, "Give them a choice between X and Y." and then "Clearly indicate they have chosen Y." (with a fallback of "Tell them something went wrong, and they won't be able to make a choice right now after all.")

Or is it simpler than that, and we don't micro-manage the AI-powered UI engine? "Get answers to these questions, and submit them to this API." — and UI engine does all the rest? I'm not sure.

Anyway, an improved UI would adapt to the user — think of the way a person providing a service adapts to the customer, intelligently and empathetically. For example a teacher watching for signs of understanding in a student, adjusting explanations. A car salesperson being quick and businesslike with one customer and listening patiently to another.

Remote: Yes

Technologies: React or other modern front-end framework, Python, .NET, GIS, all relational databases and provisioning workflows.

Links: https://neolefty.org/resume/resume.txt, https://github.com/neolefty, blog https://neolefty.org/

Email: bbbaker@alum.mit.edu

Hi, I'm Beecher, an experienced engineer (22 years) who can really help a team gel — I lead by example, mentor, and communicate well. Fully remote since 2018. Modern full-stack web since 2016, experience with startups, established companies, and scientific research. I love a good startup, can wrangle a crisis, help a struggling employee or team, and can handle legacy situations.

React is hobbled by the need to retain backward compatibility, but it is boosted by sheer scale and a solid underlying philosophy, design, and engineering.

Someday, we will probably find a fundamentally better philosophy for UI frameworks, but I don't know yet what it will be. React replaced its MVC predecessors with a functional approach, the Flux model.