plastic-enjoyer

> I'm constantly frustrated by the amount of coverage these get when, if you've ever studied any kind of neuroscience, you realise quite how vague the data is, and how much over-interpretation goes on in the advertising for these products.

I blame engineers here. I have a neuroscience background myself and know what you're talking about. Engineers, in my experience, can't really grasp the nature of neural signals and do seem to over-interpret them quite alot or just misuse them.

>Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".

Controversial take: AI shows that people simply don't give a shit and just confirms that mass culture is a mistake and the death of everything that is good and sacred.

Interesting! Do you want to tell us how you do research with AI, and what your workflow is? I've thought about using AI to research papers and find ideas more faster.

Have a balanced life, keep living costs low, have enough money... But maybe I'm just too European to understand American engineers

> Everyone who does not spend whole weekends and evenings coding/vibing/working/writing is lazy. Also it is society fault that I do not have friends and cant find a partner

I think the idea is that devs find meaning in "the mission". You grind for a higher goal, not just a paycheck. That works for some places, like Musk's companies or academic research, where people actually believe in what they're building. But most software engineers are just cogs building the next app to make ads more efficient. The grindset just makes them better-oiled cogs until they burn out.

How do philosophers argue about logic?

Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb becomes highly relevant here

Isn't philosophy the best example that you can organize your thoughts in natural language? Of course, there is the tradition of analytical philosophy. However, the vast majority of philosophy was and is written not in a formal language.

Even after the singularity the almighty AI has to work to pay rent...

The American mind can't comprehend European Catholicism

>Because who decides when its not in the people best interest? Oh right, not the people since they clearly voted for them for a reason.

In Germany we have laws to ban parties that work against our constitution, exactly because of what happened in Weimar. The AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist in five states. Starting a ban process is more than justified. The process is not arbitrary. Only the Bundestag, Bundesrat or government can apply, and the Constitutional Court decides after checking if the conditions are met. Also, just because a majority votes for something doesn’t make it right.

> How can you ban a party that receives the majority vote of the population?

Why not?

A few years ago I was in a computational neuroscience research group. We built mechanistic models of specific brain areas and neural pathways and ran them in neurosimulators. We used them to explain psychophysical experiments and to predict which neurons would be active during them. At one point we even wired several of these models together to simulate an agent in a 3D environment that had to solve simple tasks. I don’t think anyone in the group ever believed what we’d built was conscious, or that the simulation was the real thing.

> the scientists applied a sensor that records tactile data to the 26 letters of the Braille alphabet.

> They converted this data to electrical stimulation patterns and presented the organoids with the different patterns to see if they would produce neural activity that could tell the scientists what stimulus they’d received.

> The organoids’ patterns of neural activity were classified using a simple machine learning algorithm, a support vector machine, that could sort the patterns and detect whether given signals corresponded to specific letters.

What I don’t understand is this: do the organoids actually learn (in the sense that there is an adjustment of the synaptic weights), or do they simply pass on the electrical signal in a different form?

Marx doesn't make a prediction here, but merely identifies the necessary precondition for communism, namely, the material abundance generated by capitalism. Fully automated luxury communism cannot emerge without this foundational framework.

However, it is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Post-scarcity and automation do not guarantee a transition to communism

Maybe for now, but hard to predict this will hold in the future. Where there is strong economic motivation to secure software, innovation in protective technologies inevitably follows.

Marx viewed capitalism as a necessary precondition for communism. His argument for this was, that communism cannot be built out of poverty. It requires the immense material wealth and industrial capacity that only capitalism can generate. It's probably why the historical communism was such a failure, as it was built out of poverty and not out of abundance.

In this regard, China seems to be closer to Marx' vision of a communist society.

It really seems to break some people's brains that China, a self-declared communist nation, is actually successful and the most probable contender to break American hegemony

Do you think engineers are not financially motivated—in the sense of cutting costs—and wouldn't cut workforce, if feasible?

That has relatively little to do with CS 1.6. If anything, it looks and plays like one of the many Unity asset flips. RIP those burned tokens

What is understood by intelligence?

Who are those higher-ups?

Just as previously, crash and burn.

> AI already has better judgement than many senior people in some tech domains

How would you quantify this?

I don’t think the blame belongs with corpo culture. It belongs with engineering culture. Engineers have always been at the forefront of technological disruption, and for the most part they’ve been spared its consequences. The people displaced by those efficiency and productivity gains stayed invisible to them, or were written off as a necessary sacrifice for progress. Those people lost the old way of doing things and were told to keep up or get left behind. The irony is that now it’s engineers getting hit hard, facing the threat of being made obsolete in the name of efficiency and productivity. They’re finally going through what so many others went through before them. And they can’t expect any compassion or help from their own kind.

Even the NYTimes writes that the evidence for "RF Brain" scans are questionable

>The scientific basis for this technology, which reads brain waves, is scant. Results from BEOS tests are inadmissible as evidence in Indian courts, but the technology has been applied in hundreds of high-stakes cases, including those of murder, rape and terrorism.

People who worked with EEGs (what is probably meant here with RF brain scans) know that getting any good data from EEG measurements is cumbersome. There are currently no known neural correlates suitable for lie detection that could be measured with EEG, and even if they were, the robustness and reliability of them would be highly questionable.

> This reminds me a lot (mostly for worse) of the industrial revolution. The industrialization of textiles didn't help weavers weave better clothes.

I don't think comparing it to the industrial revolution is appropriate, as the political and social conditions were completely different. I think you can compare the disruption that is introduced by artificial intelligence more with the deindustrialization of regions such as the Ruhrgebiet in Germany.

I was never the best programmer and never was to keen on building things or providing some value to users. I'm more interested in how systems work, especially computers and the OS, and so far, LLMs haven't taken that away from me. If programming and solving problems had been important to me, I'd probably have a problem right now. While I feel for OP, what interests him most—namely, understanding things and developing an intuition for them—is not a productive activity in the sense that it’s not about building or producing things. But the job of a software developer has always been exactly that and LLMs take an ongoing trend to the extreme. I think people like OP have no choice but to separate their personal interests from their job, as hard that may be.

Oh, it's another "you're going to be left behind" article, how daring.

I always thought the ML stuff was boring... Computational Neuroscience on the other hand ;)