roughly

I suppose that depends on whether you’re a human being who lives in a place or an investment portfolio. A lot of people seem to get confused about that, but as a human, I’d say I don’t love the outcomes here, personal portfolio performance notwithstanding, and might be willing to trade a couple points for a living environment that isn’t a soulless budget management exercise.

As a friend once noted, the great thing about living in America instead of Europe is that we make enough money living here instead of there that we’re able to take vacations in Europe.

I’ve never mugged someone either, I suppose I should give it a shot before I go passing judgement.

Contingency exists, I get that, and if you're truly in that state, sure, I don't judge necessity. A lot of our cohort seems to confuse a studied disinterest in looking beyond the end of their own nose for the sage wisdom of adulthood, though.

Wait, so you’ve been the person who wanted to keep people from scraping your site, the person who’s trying to scrape your site, and the person getting paid to help someone scrape your site? Brother, what are you doing with your life?

I am a big booster of both solar power and electric vehicles, but boy, Aptera’s trying to thread a needle I just don’t think we’ve got the technology to thread yet. The efficiency of solar panels isn’t high enough to consistently generate enough power to propel a vehicle made of currently practical materials that meets modern automotive safety standards far enough fast enough to be useful, and I suspect they’re going to have to get esoteric enough in the materials, electronics, and manufacturing that the price is going to be prohibitive at the scale of the market willing to make the sacrifices the vehicle will require.

I don’t know if it’s theoretically possible to do what they want to do at some point - I don’t know if enough energy is present in the sunlight that falls on the space available on a normal car to power something that meets what the average person would consider their mobility needs - but I just can’t see it with the current state of the art, unless I’ve missed some big shifts in the last few years.

I’d love to be wrong, I prefer to be an optimist, but my inner engineer is just sadly shaking his head no.

What’s interesting about this is, as you point out, the “negative impact” side of this is extremely situational - many of the most talented engineers I’ve ever worked with were very much on the spectrum, and within the bounds of the work we needed them to do, they were phenomenally better adapted than the more neurotypical members of the team. We accommodated them instead of making them accommodate us and they were absolute superpowers for our team.

Tbh the jay would be more likely to eat the hat than wear it. He also was extremely clear that the bounds of our friendship did not include me touching him at all, but he’d usually just peck my finger, not actually fly away.

> Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.

I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.

A friend is someone you’ll spend time around given other options. If you’ve spent any time getting to know crows (or jays, or any other corvids), it’s quite obvious this is the case. I had a scrub jay who’d perch on my foot while I read in the morning. I considered him a friend, and by that standard, he me.

Oh interesting, I didn’t know that was the distinction - thanks!

From what I know of cell biology (read: committed dilettante), the notion that one gene does X is rarely correct. The way to think about genes and the proteins they encode for is less “blue eyes” and more “metric socket wrench #5” - the protein is a tool, and lacking that tool means any operation that requires that tool isn’t going to function as normal, which is why you see such weird disparate effects from mutations and also multiple genetic pathways to the same pathology.

Also nature is absurdly cavalier about using whatever it’s got at hand, so it’s not so much “metric socket wrench #5” as “the pry-bar/hammer/thing we use to hold the hood open” that gets fucky when the genes go wrong.

Ok, that makes sense - so ASD is basically that we’ve noticed some prototypical behaviors, which is where the grouping comes from, but it’s possible what we’re seeing is sort of the “carcinization” of mental operating modes - many different pathways into the same output point, which is why the genetic search has been so difficult - that right enough for a non-scientist?

What I know of the brain is that it’s basically a chaos machine - a ton of activity that’s just on the edge of a cascade, a bunch of feedback loops, a bunch of emergent behavior, and it’s kind of impressive we function at all to begin with, so it’s not surprising there’s so many ways to perturb the output behavior.

Out of curiosity, what leads us to treat ASD as an actual single disorder, as opposed to a billion different individual neurological profiles?

I'd expect one of the things that makes this difficult, too, is that there's a missing component of the "machine" - the genetics affect the pathways, which affect (maybe?) things like signal propagation or network regulation in the brain, but the actual effect of that is on the patient's experience of consciousness, and it's difficult for someone to get more than N=1 of those via commonly accepted legal methods - otherwise, we're all just looking at the outside of the box and saying "huh, this box acts differently than that box, weird."

Written by artists, built by businessmen and engineers.

If you’ve wondered why there wasn’t an effective political Left in this county for the last ~60 years, buckle up.

The reason the mini & studio work as well as they do for the use cases that have made them popular again is because the architecture puts memory, cpu, and gpu/npu on the same die, and puts storage right next to it, which is why you get the storage & memory bandwidth you do. The separability of those components would break that, which is why the Mac Pro didn’t survive past one generation in the Apple Silicon era.

That actually would be interesting - yes, the computer itself is basically a PCB, but it’s also wrapped in a couple pounds of aluminum, a power supply, cooling fans, and a few other things that don’t need to be consumables. Upgrade a mini or a studio by swapping the new board into the old case - yeah, you’re not saving much money, but you also don’t need to throw out the entire rest of the case, and you can ship the main board in the space of a couple CD cases.

It’s a very non-Apple thing to do, but it’d be pretty awesome if they did.

I’m not leaving consciousness undefined. I provided a definition and asserted LLMs were not conscious by that definition. I solicited an alternate definition and was given none. If you’d like to claim the LLM is conscious, you need to define what you mean, for both “the LLM” and “is conscious,” because it’s not passing any of our existing bars for consciousness, and the only thing you can point to are characteristics also present in other objects we don’t consider conscious, so again, the burden of proof is in fact on you and that other fellow to provide some definitions here, because as sits you and the other commenter are just saying shit and refusing to engage with any kind of rigor.

And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument.

You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.

I mean, it’s in the article. The Siamese Kingdom put on the trappings of western modernity because the lack thereof was being used as an explicit justification for colonization under a “save the savages” type zeitgeist.

Yes, except the West consistently used its professed internal principles to justify its external actions, and also didn’t adhere to those principles particularly well or consistently internally either. If one believes the principles to be sound - if one thinks the world would be a better place were they applied universally - then the western colonial project ought to be more widely recognized as a source of shame, but any time one discusses the “triumph of modernity” over the last two centuries, that hypocrisy is either ignored or justified and the march of progress is treated as some kind of universal law or natural process, as opposed to an act of widespread violence. We still treat people who don’t adhere to our notions of modernity as backwards, and we still fail to acknowledge the violence by which we enforce our lofty ideals.

Because we’re discussing civilizations and cultures whose histories stretch back millennia. The European colonial project lasted about a hundred years, and we’re still in the early days of the aftermath given the timeframes we’re discussing. When we’re as far from the present moment as the kingdom described on the stele in the article was from the moment of its discovery, we can talk about the durability of any of this, but at the moment, any impression of permanence is the myopia of the present.

Note that all this modernization was not driven by any internal desire to adopt western ideals and concepts, but at the point of British and French guns. The marriage of loudly professed noble ideals and naked looting was and remains the hallmark of the western civilizational project - we’ve not so much sold the world on the merits of modernity as looted their houses and then blamed them for not recognizing the wisdom of putting locks on their doors lest uncivilized people take advantage of their naïveté.

You're not engaging with the topic. Engaging with the topic is where one either asks questions and listens to the answer or actually seeks to increase one's knowledge on the topic. You're just saying things. That's lazy.

And, you're welcome to do what you want to do, it's your god given right to stay as ignorant as you want about any particular topic, but that comes with consequences. If you want to call that being socially conscious, sure, you do you, but if you're interested in why people keep getting annoyed at your loud proclamations of ignorance which you're trying to proffer as evidence of a curious mind, well, that's why.

There’s plenty. First, when we say “LLM”, what are we referring to? What is the entity that would be conscious in this case?

The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions.

There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.

Well, our current set of evidence is that it’s a mechanistic mechanical algorithm with an RNG embedded in it and we can both get it to repeatedly produce the same output for the same input and also get it to repeatedly do absolutely nothing at all, which are not characteristics we usually find in objects evincing consciousness.

LLMs bear absolutely none of the traits we’ve come to recognize as the external hallmarks of consciousness in biological organisms, nor anything that would seem analogous in a non-biological substrate.

That said, we don’t have a rigorous definition of consciousness that includes the actual phenomenology of consciousness, so I daresay if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary, I think the impetus is on you to define some version of consciousness that isn’t also satisfied by a book or a movie.

> An conscientious objection is definitely a right you have as a professional, but it's a neutral action, you refuse to do something, and you let someone else do it.

Yes, but it’s still the case that you didn’t do it. You cannot directly control the actions of others, just your own. Do that, at least.

Getting other people to also not do it is the rest of the political act. It’ll never be the case that nobody’s willing to perform an act, but if all the people who are doing so under duress stop, at the very least it helps one identify the proper size and shape of one’s political coalition and the power therein.

And, yes, people have bills. That’s what we mean by politics. We’re 50 years behind the curve on building the capacity for people to act in their own interest or on their own beliefs; that’s no reason not to start now.

> There's nothing that could convince me to do the opposite of what a proponent of a policy is advocating for than inconveniencing me to that extend.

This is a toddler’s logic.

“The point of a system is what it does.”

> you should not let it affect your life in any meaningful way.

Oh, I’ve got really bad news for you.

Yeah, there’s definitely good design principles, but as others have pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to build technologies that are not trivially dual-use.

And, to be clear, I’m not saying “politics” as in “did you hear what Trump said?” I’m saying politics as in “what is your city council doing, how are your neighbors doing, and what are the consequences of your work and economic choices and who’s paying them.” Most of the news is a circus; that stuff is not.