patcon

I'm trying to be optimistic about the animal thing too tbh :)

It's beautiful, but the animals are not thinking this about us.

They structurally cannot understand what we are doing at the place where we hit our ceiling. Only with our highest technology (well beyond their understanding) do we have the tools to go back for them, and try to bring them along and interface better with us (re: recent work in animal communication)

I dunno, lots of activity around https://celld.dev the last few months. Deno team has been high on my radar more than ever since I discovered it:

https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2105853283617440032

https://youtu.be/G-v1hkQ8Sf8

https://github.com/stars/patcon/lists/awesome-celld

I get the sense that they'd just been brewing things around durable objects, and I'm excited for it coming to fruition

That's such interesting context. Thank you!

> nothing like durable objects (with containers no less) really exists in other clouds

fwiw, celld is seeing a rush of building around it:

https://celld.dev/

https://tlockney.github.io/celld-book/

https://noite.now/ https://github.com/kentcdodds/kody-celld

https://celld-operator.io/ https://ewhauser.github.io/celld-operator/

> but why we do it and deciding which problems to solve can only be done by AI

Sorry, was there a typo here? Both sides of the comparison are AI, and in the affirmative?

I think it's code for "hey developer, if you're reading this, please upload to steam! Some people [maybe them] have deeply ingrained habits, and so would prefer to buy from a familiar market"

Which is totally fair. I have my own deeply ingrained habits :)

If anyone is interested, following Dr Michael Levin's Thoughtforms.life podcast is the cutting edge of where all this previously fuzzy stuff is becoming more concrete. So long as you can tolerate distinguished scientists flailing about as they discuss consciousness and life and developmental biology (and other less-obviously living things, like algorithms) as involving "free lunches" and "ingressing patterns from the platonic realm" :)

Not the OP, but my partner and his wife have done this for years.

I was inspired, and I did a variation of it with a partner at one point. It was really nice. Feels kinda like a synthetic version of an engaging conversation with someone you care about, but perhaps with words you can't muster yourselves at that time of the day. If you've chosen the book together, it's guaranteed to be the right thing between you. It's nice to feel like you're hearing or learning something interesting from the person you care about, even when one of you perhaps don't have the conversation or the story in you. (I have a high appetite for connecting over ideas, but sometimes people I care about can run out of capacity before me, so it feels like a hack for my relationships.)

I imagine swapping reader-listener roles is another variation.

I wonder who benefits from the postal service going under from scams like this

I'm not sure this is even conceivable, but... Imagine the bootstrap problem of intelligence systems going down, when no one knows how to bring them back up without the system itself walking them through it... Like if power and intelligence were to go down in a Carrington-class event in 10 years...

Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible

Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?

To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...

I am enraged at this comment

<3

but negligence is part of the system we'd have to prepare for. if the peanut gallery gets their way, the technology will be so ubiquitous that negligence will be endemic. I don't even care if they "faked" it -- they're just sneak-peaking a future ahead of its arrival date, in a way that's helping the public appreciate the implications and capabilities that have only just begun to emerge

holy heck, thank you for the moderating dose of sanity. HN comments feel like a death cult lately. All I can think is that this is intelligence addiction speaking.

I say this as an intense user of these tools. But they should rightfully be understood as terrifying, and their continued frontier development is imho not safe.

Agree to disagree, but I appreciate the sincerity, and I know that what you're saying seems very reasonable to many :)

> We're really far from the packing bags and leaving the country end.

Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc

Ugh, I suppose I perhaps seem as insufferably myopic to you, as you do to me.

Collapse is evident in that almost nothing survives being immortal except cancers and flatworms. You witness the evidence of this "collapse" all around you in that virtually nothing deigns to live forever and tell the tale (genetically speaking), and then you call me neglectful of some evidence?

And as for your challenge, you don't know the conversations I've had with people I love. The politics of immortality are so challenging that I prefer not to write my sincere beliefs on the public internet.

EDIT: I do appreciate the chance to engage with ppl so different from the sort I regularly speak with, and so am grateful for the words, even if it seems we are both a little frustrated by them. Which is to say, thanks

> sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice.

That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity.

And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales. A thing that makes you happy (heck, that makes a majority happy) might conceivably invite some variant of the endtimes. Something good for the health of some parts can be bad for the health of the whole.

Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one

True :) I recognize I had a soapbox moment, but yeah, it's complicated

> I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.

When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.

Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture.

Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.

I've been telling people for months that AI psychosis or mania must have been rampant during the Iran and Venezuela attacks... Just imagine what must be behind the news when there's the same manic SF energy in the hands of the ppl with the bombs :/

EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)

Agreed. This feels like pointless navel-gazing and a strange new language policing, and not something I look forward to. It's tiring and it lacks curiosity (e.g. "what's behind the affinity for the words elevated from wherever it is they come from?").

Imho people should just respond to actual ideas instead of constantly engaging in the second-order critique of how the language may or may not have been created.

It strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of "gossip" to be constantly engaging in second-order commentary on words. Of course gossip has its place and purpose, but if we seem to only let our minds live at that level, we're not moving between all the required scales of thinking that are required of this moment imho <3

I think they're pointing to the fact that RLHF means that the intention is from humans and not random.

I'm not sure if it's their intent, but I wonder if one could still consider these artifacts as "intentional", but not individual attention creating them, and rather an aggregate, soupy collective attention.

Obviously, important signal in the human experience is lost there, and we get a soupy middling sort of creation. But it's not random, as I believe the parent was pointing out.

EDIT: overall, I align with the article. am just thinking aloud about the contrarian positions, though not committed to them

Deeplinked reply from Prof Vincenzo Mantova[1], who is reviewing results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761718

[1] https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/4058/dr-vincenzo-l-manto...

Heh, I like this. but it should be pointed out that from the other point of view, software developers were the supernatural beings (dare I say demons), which the sorcery of a good project manager could tame (with more or less success) to perform the desired magical effect

I like this thought. Maybe some things are just like astrology, just Schelling points that everyone decided meant something, and simple "heightened awareness" gets scaffolded into it. That heightened awareness is the selective pressure for a set of observations to persist, even if arbitrary :) but sometimes there's a rhyme to the reason, and something that cant be clocked to one thing is somehow at the center of an idea

Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?

You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture

At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.

I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.

Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.

I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)

Heh sorry, I didn't realize I'd grabbed on from so long ago. You're right. But just saying someone who doesn't tow the line with Israel laid a big part of setting out the culture of a whole network, and continues to role-model his declining to tow the line