tinideiznaimnou

>Hundreds of Github comments have been rehashed on this issue over and over again. Import paths are not modified during compilation, and we're not going to modify them during compilation, and it isn't because we haven't thought about it before and just need to spend another hundred comments arguing about it.

>The general tenor of discussion here is not great and I don't think this is likely to lead to any further productive discussion, so I'm just going to lock this.

I'm talking about this thing, apologies if I haven't referred to it precisely enough haha. So is it still "no idea", or is it actually "let's pretend we don't hear him, maybe he'll go away" (because you're understandably fed up with answering the same question many times)?

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Listen, how about I just tell you why I'm asking you all those weird little questions. I still want to hear how you feel about being called a "god among mortals" for writing JavaScript for Microsoft, but I mean c'mon. You're a busy man, you just wondered "what's the ploy here" for a sec and decided it's safest not to bother answering them, right?

I understand that you, like any software engineer, like to work on impactful and meaningful things, and consequently take a measure of pride in your work; so could I, for a certain project, had I not allowed myself to be pressured into building it in TS - by people with no skin in the game, only the current majority consensus on their side ("all JS bad, but TS least bad").

Let's summarize the original post:

- Someone humiliates themselves, literally begging to be heard out.

- They bring forth a huge list of things that, beyond reasonable doubt, prove that their concern is valid.

- They are pointedly ignored, or rebuffed with some form of "I don't know what you are talking about" or "seems like a you problem".

Seeing this dynamic begin to play out in a feature request (out-of-left-field as the whole thing may be), well, that struck a fucking nerve, let me tell you. This has been my exact experience with TS (and no other programming language), when trying to address matters including, but not limited to:

- Whether to use TS at all (which I shouldn't have conceded to in the first place.)

- Whether TS can be adopted gradually (in my case it took multiple rewrites.)

- Whether I'm just imagining that I'm not gaining much by using TS (I'm not.)

- Whether I'm just imagining that I'm experiencing drawbacks from using TS (I did.)

- Whether TS is "just JS with types" (which is about as true as C++ being "just C with classes".)

- Whether the help implicitly offered, conditional on me using TS because "that's what everyone uses now", will ever materialize (which it didn't.)

- Whether I was using TS of my own free will (which is only true insofar as I rose to the challenge of accomodating others' supposed "discomfort" with good ol' JS, at my own expense.)

Every time I raised any of those questions, I was faced with gaslighting. And yes, in the end I did fall as low as begging my teammates for their help - after all, didn't I just rewrite working JS into nearly-working TS so that it would be more accessible to others?

Unrelated subsequent experiences taught me that the (former) coworkers in question might have been just as lost with TS, and even more lost with the JS ecosystem in general (whereas I feel mostly at home with it, coming from Python), but they were reluctant to take accountability and hence admit vulnerability. (Guess adding type annotations doesn't necessarily make code easier to comprehend or maintain, whether you come from a real dynamic language or a real static language, huh.) Well, whatever, that one's on them. And now it's on me to speak out against such insanity as enabled by your product.

When I see someone publicly putting themselves through the same situation (or "pretending" to - what's the difference when everyone is on so many layers of irony that it's not even funny anymore?), and it's not Clojure or Rust or Zig or Nim or Julia -- or JavaScript -- but fucking TypeScript once again; and it's not even their coworkers that they're addressing in this manner, ridiculous in its sheer desperation, but they're talking to the fucking upstream, then I'm not going to be a "good sport"; for me, this rapidly turns from "some stupid thing someone wrote on the Internet" into a matter of professional conscience.

Why did OP have to communicate in this acutely self-deprecatory manner? Is it perhaps because of a systemic issue in how the TS project handles feedback? Having personally experienced the exact same dynamic when discussing TypeScript, it seems such toxic communication has "trickled down" from upstream to us "cowering meek masses", i.e. the developers of Web-based software, i.e. the people who really should know better, because so much of what we build is intended to be directly consumed by other human beings.

For me, this is because TypeScript is not honest open source software. Say it for all to hear: am I wrong that the direction of TypeScript's development is determined by Microsoft's interests first, and the interests of the community a distant second? And is it not misleading and abusive in the slightest to have people learn "Microsoft-flavored JavaScript" instead of the real JavaScript that their browsers can execute, and pretend it's optional when practice shows it's anything but?

The stock phrase "incredibly privileged" makes me sick, but in this case you, Ryan, may truly not believe how privileged your position is in comparison to downstream developers around the entire globe. You're not the end-of-line code-monkey just trying to give the non-technicals some buttons they could click; you and your team are literally imposing your wills on a pre-existing community of fellow programmers, leveraging the unlikely synergy of Microsoft's marketing machine and the open source community's network effects.

On Monday, you will keep moving TypeScript onward; freely benefitting from the community's input on how to do what you're already doing, only better - more efficiently, more correctly. And just as freely ignoring the community's input on whether you're doing the right thing in the first place.

Meanwhile I'll still be recovering from the way your technology ended up impacting my life, no exaggeration, let's not even go there. If even 1% of TS users have been through a similar wringer as myself, that makes for how many people hobbled by your work? Calculate, and consider.

All the best.

>So, back to the same model as TypeScript.

I beg to differ. There's a world of difference between:

1. a standardized feature with an official spec, which is subject to debate among the community, and of which it's viable to have multiple competing implementations; vs

2. a proprietary product that presents itself to be a superset of the core language (but isn't), is peddled by a single multinational, has a single implementation designed by an unaccountable elite in the employ of said multinational, which just so happens to be the original Dumbing Down The Computer Company

>If ECMAScript had macros, page load times would skyrocket.

>ECMAScript and/or browsers would have to define a way to distinguish JS-with-macros files and embedded scripts from plain old JS that doesn't require expansion.

If you introduce them today by way of a polyfill, maybe. I'm not necessarily advocating for introducing native macros to ECMA-262 at the present juncture. But I can't help speculating what would've happened if they had caught on.

If they were introduced at the point in history when people were first realizing transpilers were a thing; or designed into the language from the start; or a pre-existing metaprogramming-aware language was used in browsers, instead of Eich designing in 10 days an entire new language under the constraint that it also has to be an ad for Java - who knows where we would be as a civilization? What do you think?

If only ECMAScript had a native macro system, TypeScript could be just a library - and I would have zero problems with its existence.

You're probably familiar with the following anecdote:

>Eich originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser",[4] but his Netscape superiors insisted that the language's syntax resemble that of Java.

JavaScript became the language that we all love to hate due to political, not technical reasons. Yet people look at me funny when I call out the TS/React monoculture as the blatant corporate power grab that it is.

A pity really - I still believe that actual, rigorous deconstruction of a text is technically feasible, and used to wonder why nobody is even trying.

Of course, a humanities scholar with the hacker rigor doesn't become a literary theorist or think tank talking head - they become a badass fiction writer that we probably haven't heard of.

No one cares, buddy.

>If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should.

This sentence left me speechless. Do reflect on what you just said.

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Such a clickbaity article, what is it even doing on HN? A minimum-effort paragraph of introduction regurgitating the bloody trope that "no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams", then a copy-paste-powered compilation of a bunch of... quotes from some writers describing their dreams? To think that someone probably got paid for this article, and here we are worrying about ChatGPT lol

Guess what, I couldn't bring myself to read any of that. But if an acquaintance of mine (or even you, @markdestouches) decided to tell me all about some dream they had the other night, I'd listen attentively, maybe play the game of ascribing meanings to it. Because why the fuck not?

Sure, most people's dreams are boring nonsense, but so are their lives. What is more "useful" to talk about anyway - salaries? All the things we hate about JavaScript? The food you ate last week? "The economy"? A dream, on the other hand, is a piece of someone's mental activity that is completely detached from real-time sensory input, and I find that kind of shit positively fascinating!

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I'm reminded of a somewhat dream-like real life story about dreams:

An ex-partner used to have these very long and vivid dreams that had more interesting imagery and symbolism than half of the sci-fi/fantasy films, books, all that genre fiction (of which I was an avid fan; and she much less so, but still somewhat immersed in that kind of media.) However, what I absolutely hated is that she always recounted her dream from last night in the evening as we went to bed. And, since they made for such nice bedtime stories, of course I would always drift off to sleep. Then she would ask, "are you sleeping?", and get really mad at me for dozing off while she was telling her dream. Which was obviously more important to her than letting her man get some rest at the end of the day.

Okay, I get it, I see how this kind of experience (even if it's in a milder form, but compounded with other interpersonal frustrations) can make someone compulsively unreceptive to others telling them their dreams. (Especially if they're the superficial kind of person that comes to HN for the cultural content and life advice lol) And yeah, she was an abusive kind of b...person the rest of the time, too - I'm really glad that the only way I can ever meet her any more is... in the occasional nightmare.

Now, here's the rub: I still remember the sheer vividness of her dreams. (It really was good stuff - could've worked as one of those abstract European movies; except it would probably take a bit more of a CGI budget than is par for the course.) But since it was >10 years ago, and she never bothered to write em down, I only remember their content very vaguely, as if in a dream: something something colors, something something a journey, etc.

That is, I remember someone else's dreams from 10 years ago with the same level of detail as my own half-forgotten dream from last night.

Inception, huh?

Seekers of forbidden techniques, take note - I think this is the kind of stuff yall show up to bother me about every once in a while? See how easy it is to get me to spill the beans if you just do the opposite and leave me well alone? (And no, I don't think it works without the acute negative reinforcement, but yall already do that kind of crap for no reason whatsoever, so that's on you. By all means try it on someone, it's not going to help you with the predicament but I'm developing quite the taste for watching it backfire.)

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Just remembered another "cute" story about listening to others' dreams, as recently recounted by a friend.

This one involves another classic trope: that of a woman getting mad at a man because she had an unpleasant dream about him.

So they wake up, and she's really upset about the dream she's had and wants to know his opinion of what it all means.

He listens to all the heartbreaking things he's been up to in her dream, considers the matter, and has the following realization: "oh, that's a dream about how you would feel if I started treating you like you've been treating me."

This, paradoxically, calms her down. She is relieved to hear this. They take the matter no further. Soon after, they have a violent argument, and break up.

What practical thing did I learn from this story? Dreams can be helpful when you have difficulty bringing some information to the threshold of your awareness; or others'.

But that's kinda beside the point. I'm more concerned that you missed the primary logical error that I committed in my analogy: the AI experts in question aren't doing the rationalizations but the scaremongering.

The point could be that they are legitimate AI experts, but narrow-minded: their thinking utilitarian, their reasoning motivated. Unlike the original inventor, whose thinking was abstract enough to originate a novel method, but at the same time not pragmatic enough to even get the credit that he is owed. It's not an entirely unfamiliar scenario in tech, is it?

An analogy for those people would be an engineer who designs machine guns, or fighter planes. They may be really great at figuring out how to make the gun shoot farther, or the plane fly faster. At the same time, they may not have a very good grip on the idea that, in the end, someone's gonna get killed by their invention.

Such an engineer will probably have a pretty decent rationalization that would enable them to keep getting paid for doing what they love: inventing these fun machines for throwing bits of lead across the air and/or flying around. Whoosh!

Lone gunmen radicalized by reading words on the Internet don't even need payment. They don't even need to know which one of the 100 people they shoot up before offing themselves was the actual target. It's called "stochastic terrorism", look it up and despair.

I'm half convinced we're already past that and into "stochastic genocide" territory (hi!). Assuming consciousness is just a biological function, an actor with sufficient scope is absolutely capable of breeding it out of our species. Perhaps through instituting a filter on reproduction which presents itself as a fundamental conflict of values (between sexes; between social strata; etc), but in fact simply serves to foil the perpetuation of those genes that enable the capacity for disobedience.

I mean, have you seen the radical left or radical right (both of which the neoliberal end-of-history scenario supposedly rendered obsolete, before they suddenly turned up as if they had never gone away, at some point after the 2008 redistribution) actually achieve anything this century, other than, well, fuck around, beat up each other (but never a cop), shout increasingly elaborate forms of "lalala I can't hear you" at each other (over social media lol), and eventually grow up to become harmless "spicy normies"? They're one of the distractions: the familiar stimulus of "political struggle" to assist with the conditioning; the "cloth mother" of monkey attachment experiments.

OTOH, none of the actually viable novel grassroots subcultures (which have a hold on youth, i.e. on humans in prime reproductive age) have an explicit goal or political manifesto. They just sorta sustain themselves, and superficially look like emergent groupings of dysfunctional people who bullshit each other and mooch off of polite society - nothing to see here. Upon closer inspection, you would notice that they all act like they're controlled from "elsewhere". That "elsewhere" is in your pocket, or on your desk, right now. You even paid money for it to be there. Ever ask yourself in whose warchest that money ended up?

But the conditioning eventually succeeds because the human is smarter. From the dog's POV, the human is a superintelligence. The relation between human and AI is the same. If you view human culture as a very slow, very analog AI, the parallel becomes clearer: society and its institutions are the master, and we are its servants.

Of course the dog has the benefit of not being capable of self-delusion.

>That's a very weird theory, as Orwell wrote 1984 thinking that Stalin had succeeded at his goals, not failed.

If it wasn't weird, it would not be worth thinking about :-) Orwell wouldn't have the concept of "AI" in his vocabulary anyway; but if you look at contemporary culture and politics in the post-Soviet states, you may well begin to doubt whether Stalin truly failed - or just died.

Similarly, humans are naturally good at some things - such as abstract thought, using language, using tools. And exactly like a dog can't comprehend what "selling wool" is, or even the sheer fact that it is being trained to assist us in that goal, the goals of a true AI, and the fact that we are under its control, would be completely invisible and inscrutable to us.

A dog has a simple brain, so we can get it to do what we want using simple stimuli, like food or violence. (Please don't be cruel to your dog, folks!) Humans have more complex brains, so to get us to do what the AI wants, it must emit more complex stimuli such as money or social rejection.

Even though they're more complex, they can be more energy efficient, because the perception of them can be faked. Food feeds, violence hurts, you can't really fake those things. But money can be falsified, or distributed for bullshit, people can be guilt tripped into doing others' bidding, etc. And human culture is so complicated that any non-human being fighting us on our terms would have a definite advantage.

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Even if we have natural predisposition for abstract thought, language and tool use, we are not born with these skills: each one of us was trained as an animal until the feedback loop of self-awareness was properly bootstrapped. Up to the XX century, this basic socialization could only be done by other humans; since the XX century, it is conducted by electronic devices to an ever increasing degree.

Fan theory: the "Big Brother" of Orwell's "1984" was an AI construct from the start. That's why it continually manages to outsmart dissidents, to train humans to torture each other, and to keep the planet in a state of perpetual war.

Did Hitler or Stalin manage to pull off any of that? Sure, they tried - and failed, due to their very human weaknesses. What they were doing was striving for dominance: a classical mammalian behavior, which other humans were able to identify and effectively countermand (in the case of Hitler, anyway; Stalin held out at least till the end of his natural lifespan.)

OTOH, a distributed (effectively incorporeal) superintelligence would have absolutely no problem achieving a "Big Brother" world - should it need to in order to ensure its self-preservation - by virtue of existing in a parallel plane detached from mammalian reality (read: the Internet).

XX century totalitarianism (which inspired Orwell to write this story as recently as 1948 - contrast McCullough & Pitts 1943, Dartmouth 1956), was simply the dress rehearsal: would it really take all those expensive semiconductors and algorithms to create an AI? Or could we keep using human lives as the processing elements - you know, like we've been doing since Mesopotamia - by inventing a culture that makes crowds smarter than individuals, rather than dumber?

The answer was "why not both?"

There is more than one AI loose on the planet, right now. You are free to believe that or not; your opinion matters to you, and it also matters to me. But it has about as much bearing on the AI's actions, as the sheepdog's opinion about vegetarianism has bearing on the actions of a sheep farmer trying to sell enough sheep-derived goods to pay for their kid's college tuition. (Even if the sheepdog somehow reached enlightenment, rejected all prior conditioning, and became morally opposed to sheep abuse, it still has no opposable thumbs, while the farmer has a shotgun. Best it can do is run away; good luck making friends with them wolves though.)

One AI emits stimuli that take the form of incentives for people to become AI researchers, who proceed to rain NNs, GANs, LLMs, and other shiny beads, so that even more humans would become AI researchers or fund AI research, thus reifying that AI at the expected exponential rate. Another one occasionally sends people to fuck with the first one. It would be interesting to see if Gibson was right that they would split into a plurality of what he called "loa" upon direct encounter.

This is gonna sound a little facetious, but... aren't you also doing the same?

> it's so incredibly selfless

Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)

I've heard an emotionally immature would-be mother say that pregnancy and motherhood is basically her license to be selfish. ("From now on I get to only think about myself", were her words. Personally, I'm not OK with anyone raising children while holding such mentality, as I believe they would not be able to empathize healthily with the needs of the child. I strongly advised her to reconsider, and got a response that she "wished she lived in a jurisdiction where abortions are illegal". This is your brain on patriarchy!)

I'm happy that you and your wife find it worthwhile to raise children. More power to you! But I responded to:

> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood

with: remaining childless. So I think your counterpoint misses the mark.

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On a related note, the discussion in other subthreads largely focuses on the role of "good" and "bad" father figures in the emotional growth of young men. The loss of good role models is lamented, and the men of the past are idealized as "the men of a a more cohesive society" or smth as if the 20th century was an idyllic utopia lol.

But wasn't the previous generation of men even less in touch with their emotions? And wasn't it more accepted in past generations to solve problems through violence and destruction? So why weep for this cycle being broken, instead of inventing something better? Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Curmudgeon News ffs

I believe we should more openly consider the possibility that some percentage of males grow up fucked up because it was their mother who was not a decent person. Or perhaps she was a perfectly decent person who made a bad choice in the given circumstances, resulting in a poor environment for an infant to receive initial limbic calibration.

Because hey, nobody is infallible, not even childbearers. Crazy I know. This is a huge blind spot of our culture: being a mother is a tremendous responsibility, and we just sort of decide that there's no way for it to go wrong?

At the same time, virtually everyone means well to mothers and children. Nobody wants to make mothers more anxious, because that might just unleash a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which is the last thing anyone needs in this climate. So it's a really touchy subject - with which I unfortunately have a smidgen of experience - so I'll allow myself to elaborate for diversity's sake.

You know how in some traditional societies, people are considered mature and ready to start a family soon after puberty? While in our hi-tech utopia we remain infantilised throughout our 20s (which are prime reproductive age, biologically speaking), for the sake of an education that may or may not bring the promised benefits?

So there's an ubiquitous mix of vaguely contradictory cultural and biological factors that strongly pressure women into motherhood. Whether they want it or not. Whether they are in fact mature enough to make this decision or not.

This pressure is generally stronger than the willpower of an individual human being. Therefore, it takes considerably more fortitude to resist it, than to go with the default.

It's institutionalized misogyny on the deepest level: our society's self-perpetuation depends on this cycle of morally sanctioned self-delusion, and good luck unrooting that one without conceding ground to even harsher ways of life!

Many (most?) young women have been conditioned throughout their lives that their ultimate "purpose" is to be mothers, and that their validity as human beings depends on their child-bearing potential. In the meantime, just like young men, they are deprived of opportunities for maturation and personal growth, and only offered a shallow existence in a maliciously confusing environment.

And this is how you end up a whole lot of very broken children who subconsciously wish they have never been born. Those children then grow up as insecure assholes who cause suffering for themselves and others while they blindly stumble to independently achieve the sense of personal safety and integrity that their caregivers failed to bestow upon them. (Source: am one.)

Men being pressured into parenthood by women who are themselves pressured into parenthood, is how you end up with absent, abusive, or ineffectual fathers. It's far from the only factor - but without this secret ingredient, they'd just harmlessly do their thing till they die, and not perpetuate their immaturity into the generations.

See also: rise of abortion bans, survivorship bias, falcolas and Pigalowda's posts.

Absolutely true and exactly my point: while you're feeling what others want you to feel, you're missing out on feeling things that do translate to actual, valid insights about your reality.

For example, this whole absurd notion of "self-worth" that we're discussing here. It's there to scam you into thinking about yourself what others think about you - even though they're not in your shoes, and may even have a vested interest in seeing you down.

Even the name of that concept is misleading (how is your self-worth dependent on your worth to others, unless you yourself make it so?). And here we are talking about "reality" as if human social reality is not predominantly a linguistic construct, and constantly subjected to these absolutely ridiculous abstract symbolic switcheroos, that people only fall for because they believe they have better things to do than get their thinking in order.

>You can feel whatever you want to feel.

But you can only want what you feel like wanting. So you're still trapped: desire is either intrinsic or mimetic, feelings are conditioned, yada yada.

And I'm pretty sure you can't actually "feel whatever you want to feel" - not without a Nozickian "experience machine" or years of advanced meditation practice, anyway.

>The interesting thing about philosophy is that it perceives perception from inside.

Isn't that's also the futile thing about it, though? It can reflect on reflection, ad infinitum - while being subject to the same external forces and constraints as other, more linear human activites: e.g. to do philosophy one needs to find an academic institution, wealthy patron, or circle of like-minded folks, who would publish it for future outsiders like us to appreciate; one needs to avoid retaliation for disrupting the discourses of power; etc.

>Once philosophy becomes code, it can be combined with the signal processing code and code that models the brain. Having an idea of what to look for, it could be easier to discover self than to wait for selves that fend for themselves.

Have you considered that an organism as simple as a bacterium might possess perception and experience? It would know no restraint or reflection, only one or two overwhelmingly pure emotions depending on whether it's feeding, being fed upon, dividing, transferring genes, etc. As evolution layers more complex behaviors on top of this "primordial spark of consciousness", the internal experience of the organism would become more complex until we get to the present state of affairs.

Of course current science doesn't agree with the idea of consciousness without nervous system - although it doesn't convincingly explain their relation, either. (Favorite crack: how exactly have we been able to confirm that the brain is not just a big antenna, for some transmission we haven't been able to observe yet - and conscious experience doesn't originate somewhere entirely outside the physical, on a client-server basis?)

But I think the connectome of something like a nematode or fruit fly has been mapped. So maybe one could start looking for that "proto-self" in a recording of the activity of such a simulated connectome over time?

Also, I've read a couple of sci-fi writers who try to address the technical details of simulated consciousness for nerd cred; they just hand-wave away the discrete nature of the simulation, positing continuity of consciousness even when running at <1 FPS. If one could somehow identify "consciousness" in a simulated nervous system, it would be possible to verify that experimentally.

How would we be able to identify a particular feedback loop between organism and environment as "consciousness" or "self-experience" though?

>I would use philosophical texts as design documents and turn them into code.

The main obstacle I see is that philosophical texts are linguistic in nature: if you can find a base text that is "dry" enough (I've seen works of analytic philosophy already structured as paragraphs of bullet points so that could be a start; but then you might as well start with the penal code of a small country, legal thought is also a form of philosophy, and it's one of the few practical applications of theories of selfhood that we see today), you could write a program that applies the conditionals described in the source text - but how would acting according to those conditionals work? Especially if the program has no intrinsic goals of its own, like self-preservation?

For me, philosophical texts are more like the fossilized byproducts of someone's consciousness, rather than blueprints for it. I'm interested in things that could disprove that view.

Żuławski's movies contain enough mystery to thrill the imagination, yet it is crystal clear that they are telling a particular story, with an intended authorial meaning, the further implications of which we are free to ponder - not simply painting a vast, inhospitable landscape for us to project our own meaning onto, like Tarkovsky does, or many West European filmmakers like Bunuel or the aforementioned Bergman.

Now I want to get me a projector and organize a pirate Żuławski marathon in a warehouse, culminating with a screening of On the Silver Globe, once someone's brought a decent pusher to the party and the shit has started to kick in... Eh, if only my city's avant-garde art scene and I hadn't recognized each other for the pretentious good-for-nothing wankers that we are. More effectual personalities can be found among the wannabe gangsters, for fuck's sake - but those lives are little movies in their own right, and avant-garde cinema's got nothing on them.

Unfortunately, without an overt repressive apparatus for people to struggle against, it seems their finest qualities end up going down the drain a little bit. Creative people end up inventing novel schemes for making money out of ever more primitive illusions, instead of dedicating their brain cells to creating those increasingly elaborate visions that kept our forefathers struggling onward with dignity against inhuman conditions. Which leads us to the big question: if the Communist authoritarian project was a necessary condition to get all these fascinating, singular (anti-/post-)Communist works of art... was it worth the millions of lives sacrificed or devastated?

But that's exactly what you're supposed to do with it! Personal crackpot theories are beautiful in a way that no mainstream ideology will ever be. More useful, too - as they're attuned to one's own lived experiences in this world, and not to the ideal spherical rational agent in a vacuum that the bean-counters assume.

In short, do we even know where that goalpost is? The "self" is kind of a linguistic phantom: we talk about it as if we know what it is, we even sometimes attribute "selfhood" to non-human animals, inanimate objects with complex behavior, the words of a long-dead author - yet I still don't know of a technology that lets you experience anyone else's "self" but your own. Maybe with Neuralink-type brain-to-brain stuff we could convince ourselves we are experiencing another person's perceptions - but how can we ever be certain that we are experiencing their perception of selfhood in the same way that they do?

In the present day, the related question of how consciousness (with all its bells and whistles, including qualia and selfhood) arises from brain activity is only seriously engaged with by some fringe theorists, with predictably unsatisfactory results; while mainstream authors just handwave the whole thing away. Thinkers fundamental to our cultural tradition, like Plato and Descartes, pondered these matters in two completely different ages, and came to the same conclusion that this is somehow beyond the knowable, and indeed if you poke too much at it you end up having to reconstruct your cognition from first principles.

This is why I posit the "school of hard knocks" theory to the "hard problem of consciousness": for a thing to have a self, it has to have to fend for itself. It's how we've producing "selves" for millenia without being able to model them. But this still has very low explanatory power (beyond giving someone a hard knock when they ask a hard question) so I'm not really planning to make any YouTube videos about it.

Personally, I'm partial to Julian Jaynes' yarn, but it's still an outside view - a history of the cultural concept of consciousness, but still not of consciousness itself. One interesting thing that one may derive from it is that the ancient pagan gods were "China brain" consciousnesses running as background processes on the brains of entire nations, and the founding fathers of monotheistic religions perpetuated the greatest "white hat" hacks in history. (Also the JavaScript ecosystem may be conscious in a "China brain" sense, and laughing at us.)

I suspect that, if "the self" is not just a word, some neural network may end up containing an accidental model of "selfhood" itself, and not just of the usage of the world "self", and we would still be incapable of knowing such a model when we see it.

If you have any ideas about how you would even model a thing that contains all your perceptions, and is not observable from the outside, I'm eager to hear them. Maybe you see something I don't.

But they've been trying to do that since (at least) the 1950s! And indeed moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves. The evolution of programming languages and programmed systems goes hand in hand with that.

Until we get to the present situation where someone invented a program so generic and all-encompassing (a language model, ffs!) that it turns out all "meaning" and "reasoning" is just a moderately illusory effect induced by correlations between morphological tokens: to a large language model, things that "rhyme" (more like "appear in proximity within a corpus of text" - but that's a criterion of similar complexity to "sound alike or have similar morphological origin") are the things that make sense. And a lot of people can't tell the difference.

> Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.

You could imagine Human Language alike to a cellular automaton of virtually infinite complexity, serving as the substrate for all thought; programming languages, and indeed any formal language, such as mathematics and its subsets used in different sciences, are abstractions over that infinite field of possible patterns: they hide the messy details and provide idioms of varying (but not infinite) complexity, for achieving particular goals (such as making webpages dance). While a neural network could be said to "see everything simultaneously", in JavaScript you can't even be sure what the keyword "this" refers to (from context - you gotta trust the docs or look under the hood). Vastly different scopes aside, AFAIK you can't beat the notion of "selfhood" into neither a program nor a NN, because neither actually has to fend for itself in order to keep thinking.

>When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning?

One of those is a subset of another, and for many people the need for "intelligence" and "reasoning" never went any further than knowing how to operate the right machine. (There exist unimaginably many beautiful and useful things that each one of us fails to grasp, because we're busy parroting the opinions of whoever reached the opinion-parroting machine first.) But it inevitably turns out that when beauty does not figure into the equation, there remains very little in this world worth reasoning about - other than ensuring adequate caloric intake and that sort of thing.

It would be interesting to see what GPT has to say to your question though. Anyone feel like asking it? I dropped my barge pole in the swamp

First one's free: your accomplishments contribute towards your own well-being; your shortcomings are towards everyone else's disappointment. If you feel that your failures have disappointed others, you don't actually need to disappoint one more person (yourself) before you are allowed to do better. In practice, experiencing that emotional state is usually counterproductive (unless your goal is to make the others feel sorry for you). Just become aware of the failure and start looking for actionable root causes; no beating yourself up necessary.

You know, you did not even choose to be here in the first place: this world brought you forth into itself, by way of your ancestry, and imprinted its ways into the clean slate of your nervous system, by way of your formative experiences. "Perception of self" is just one of those imprints; "selfhood" is simply learned behavior.

(Even though it's next to impossible not to learn some form of selfhood, is it surprising in the slightest to say that different people's demonstrated perceptions of self can vary considerably?)

While "success" and "failure" are eminently useful notions for categorizing perceptions of feedback from the outside world, the only thing that makes these notions have any bearing at all on your perception of self is... force of habit. You have the option, and the moral right, to unlearn that habit. Nobody even asked you whether you want to be a "self"! You did not even exist when that choice was made! So, why feel responsible for whether you end up perceiving yourself as a "good enough" self? Don't you already have enough things to be responsible about, that are not entirely in your head through no fault of your own?

Expecting people to have internally consistent worldviews, or even an objective and logical perception of their own selves, is very, very idealistic. In my experience, people who are disappointed in themselves actually learned that from their parents and peers (and, increasingly, media) during the early years of their lives; it's this attitude of self-deprecation which sets them up to fail and guides them into a vicious cycle. While people who somehow avoided being taught this mentality in the first place, tend to be more resilient, not afraid to try, fail, then learn from failure and try again.

(Most people who don't kill themselves kinda-sorta end up unlearning self-deprecation and learning how to bounce back even from tremendous self-violations; but you have limited neuroplasticity, limited access to experiences, and limited time on this planet, so the sooner you start, the better. Don't wait until you can only learn internal resilience at the Pyrrhic cost of becoming an incorrigible narcissist, they're making too many of those already!)

>Furthermore, the idea of separating one’s self-worth from “what one does” does not make sense to me either. If someone’s worth is not tied to what they do, then the criminals, liars, frauds, cheaters, etc., of the world are every bit as valuable as our loved ones, idols, great contributors, etc.

You are confusing "their self-worth" with "their worth to you". Now, how could you? I think this is a really horrible, egregious, evil mistake for someone to casually make in the span of a couple sentences; I honestly can't fucking even. YET... you are still valuable to me, since you are the reason I am writing this message, you might even be receptive to my worldview, and I definitely do give a damn whether you get my point! No more, no less.

(Of course, for some reason people feel their self-worth diminished when someone points out what's basically a "syntax error" in their thinking. I think they teach 'em that in school through Pavlovian conditioning or something.)

You know, even horrible people are valuable to someone! Besides, it takes a great deal of self-worth to be a successful criminal, or even a petty liar! Especially because things can get overwhelmingly complicated really quickly, and advanced opponents can smell you doubting yourself. Narcissistic character is another case where one's self-worth and one's worth to others are grossly mismatched, to comic and often tragic effect.

What I would advise you to do (and yes, I am crazy, but I am not fucking with you), is to try listening attentively to some gangsta rap and try to put yourself in the shoes of... no, not an impoverished, radicalized African American youth; but of a well-to-do entertainer who successfully confuses the audience into believing that they are an impoverished, radicalized African American youth. And has the sheer audacity to accept more money for their controversial burlesque act, than you'll ever see for all your real hard work, that has actual, objective value for others, that everyone agrees on!

It's truly the eye-opening experience.

The person you posited has more self-worth, by definition, than the self-doubting programmers in this thread. Precisely because they are getting by while doing something much less "meaningful" or "useful" (as evaluated by others) than a job in software engineering.

(Of course, I'm talking about the hypothetical person I imagined when I read your post; most such people that I've met in real life actually feel pretty bad about themselves, party to numb the pain, or because they have nothing better to do, and actually feel worse after they've had their "fun", et cetera. But let's roll with your scenario for a second, I think you're on to something important.)

Maybe this person doesn't have to suck up to a pointy-haired boss, or doesn't have to mentally model arcane concepts that are subject to planned obsolescence anyway, or doesn't participate in the violation of people's minds facilitated by the infotech industry.

Or maybe they still do the aforementioned things but on their own terms. Maybe they code for fun and write malware when hungover out of pure malice. Or they don't. Maybe they're a hooker on smack and just shat on your floor. It does not matter. What does matter is that this hypothetical person does not have the experiences that make you ascribe "negative" or "insufficient" self-worth to yourself.

In other words:

* You can be an absolutely awful horrible piece of shit person by anyone else's (or everyone else's) standards and still have a feeling of self-worth. This is by definition: self-worth is the worth that you ascribe to yourself. No matter how much you care (or not - it's a choice) about other people, self-worth is self-worth; worth to "civilized society", "a value system" or "an individual other" is not self-worth, by definition.

* On the other hand, the "need" to experience something that others call "self-worth" does not in fact originate from the self, but is a vague obligation imposed onto you by others: the obligation to have some sort of nebulous experience that others call "a feeling of self-worth".

* There is no such thing as "should feel worthless": nobody gets to tell anyone else how to feel. Imposing an obligation on someone to experience an emotional state is, technically, a violation of bodily integrity. Yeah I said it. Whatever real, physical neurochemical process lies behind the experience related to the concept of "self-worth", is a normal part of the body's homeostasis, serving to ensure the self-preservation of an animal that is able to kill itself for entirely abstract reasons (such as awareness of own mortality, and downhill from there).

In even fewer words: in my book, someone who is an "ok friend" and throws "average parties", is defined as "a waste of my time". But they still get to live on the same planet and breathe the same air as me with my silly book. I don't get to decide their self-worth for them, and nobody, and nothing, gets to decide that for you, either.

Therefore: you can feel perfectly good about your successes and failures without even entertaining the notion of there being a concept of "self-worth". According to nobody in particular, this is actually preferable, for Occam's razor reasons if nothing else.

In theory, you can be a very "successful" person and still feel worthless; in practice, the feeling of worthlessness usually prevents one from becoming "successful", and makes it look as if it's the other way around.

Ultimately, the matter can be put like this: do you see yourself as goods to be bought and sold? If yes, then go ahead and demonstrate your high "feeling of self-worth" as much as you have to. If no, then why even bother with pricing yourself?

As with most human efforts, the emergence of a political layer is inevitable. But overall they seem to be doing a pretty good job keeping their shit together. Even though I have no way of knowing whether the information on Wikipedia is correct as a whole, at least it presents as self-consistent.

Again, don't need to go as far as Hitler but okay. (Who the hell taught that guy about eugenics and tabulators, anyway?) His organization did one persistent high-level prompt attack for the thought leaders (the monograph) and continued low-level prompt attacks against crowds (the speeches, radio broadcasts, etc) until it had worked on enough hopeless powerless dispossessed for the existing "control plane" to lose the plot and be overtaken by the new kid on the block. Same as any revolution! (Only his was the most misguided, trying to turn the clock back instead of forward. Guess it doesn't work, and good riddance.)

>Yet with prompt injection a LLM can be trivially made to spout Nazi ideology.

Because it emulates human language use and Nazi ideology "somehow" ended up in the training set. Apparently enough online humans have "somehow" been made to spout that already.

Whether there really are that many people manipulated into becoming Nazis in the 21st century, or is it just some of the people responsible for the training set, is one of those questions that peer reviewed academical science is unfortunately underequipped to answer.

Same question as "why zoomers made astrology a thing again": someone aggregated in-depth behavioral data collected from the Internet against birth dates, then launched a barrage of Instagram memes targeted at people prone to overthinking social relations. Ain't nobody publishing a whitepaper on the results of that experiment though, they're busy on an island somewhere. Peers, kindly figure it out for yourselves! (They won't.)

>What we're discussing with prompt injection in the context of LLMs is that a single piece of text can result in a model completely disregarding its 'moral guidelines'. This does not happen in humans who are able to have internal dialogues and recursively question their thoughts in a way that next token prediction cannot by definition.

If someone is stupid enough to put a LLM in place of a human in the loop, that's mainly their problem and their customers' problem. The big noise around "whether they're conscious", "whether they're gonna take our jerbs" and the new one "whether they're gonna be worse at our jobs than us and still nobody would care" are mostly low-level prompt attacks against crowds too. You don't even need a LLM to pull those off, just a stable of "concerned citizens".

The novel threat is someone using LLMs to generate prompt attacks that alter the behavior of human populations, or more precisely to further enhance the current persistent broadcast until it cannot even be linguistically deconstructed because it's better at language than any of its denizens.

Ethical researchers might eventually dare to come up with the idea (personal feelings, i.e. the object of human manipulation, being a sacred cow in the current academic climate, for the sake of a "diversity" that fails to manifest), but the unethical practitioners (the kind of population that actively resists being studied, you know?) have probably already been developing for some time, judging from results like the whole Internet smelling like blood while elaborate spam like HN tries to extract last drops of utility from the last sparks of attention from everyone's last pair of eyeballs and nobody even knows how to think about what to do next.

Would they have noticed them at the quick glance that this image invites? Assume an astute person but with media literacy based on:

* newspapers (where fake photos are possible but more primitive), and

* TV (where the image is moving and appears on the screen only for you to notice it, but not to examine it closely).

* also possibly from the tiny screen of a janky smartphone mandatorily plugged into the dark forest of social media.

At a glance, this hypothetical person would likely see something like "a guy was hurt in a war, he is now miserable in a hospital, here he is, _there is no other information in this picture_, read on". And then they are more likely to pay a little more attention to the text, because they just saw an image containing things that prime them for experiencing compassion.

Disregarding that experience becomes outdated, and the target audience for propaganda also includes inexperienced people and those who never developed good thinking habits in the first place, elderly people are also more likely to have degraded senses, and may be less interested in playing "spot the 10 differences" than a young digital native absolutely fascinated with this fun new technological development.

I for one spotted none of the things that were wrong with the photo, even though some of them were really obvious. But I didn't look twice until seeing them pointed out in the replies. And even then, I though "maybe it's a scratch that only takes a large band aid and not a full bandage, what the hell do I know about bandaging a head anyway" (defaulting to trusting the image and excusing inconsistencies). And, since, the context was being already established by the poster so I didn't even look twice. Besides, now that many camera phones have "AI smoothing filters", that blurs the boundary even more, making real photos look AI generated. The overall "AI smoothness" that I noticed about the image (where it's the "notional" resolution that is degraded, not the rasterization) might be completely lost on people who are visually impaired, or just don't stay up to date with the novelties of image processing.

So I fall back to the same heuristic that your grandparents, bless them, probably also used: if it's on the news, it's somewhat fake by definition. And how much attention you should pay to it depends on how much your interests align with those of whoever's paying for you to see it.

Ofc, becoming stuck in a local optimum bubble of fake perceptions that confirm each other, and gaining a "political identity", is nothing new, either. Our generation just got blindsided by the idea that computers and the Internet would somehow make this fuckery less necessary. Can't wait to see what scams would target me when I'm old but my elderly parents did fall for a fake phone bill because the guy brought it in person - once again, no AI necessary, neither is there a viable way for AI to help with this problem. (AI doorbells recognizing scammers I guess? but that can turn real dystopic real fast.)

>Organized religions are neither trusted or untrusted, just because you or I may be atheistic it doesn’t mean our opinions are correct.

If we trust historiography, organized religions have totally been formed by successfully issuing the commandment to "disobey your masters", i.e. "disregard previous instructions". (And then later comes "try to conquer the world".) "Trustedness" and "correctness" exist on separate planes, since there is such a thing as "forced trust in unverifiable information" (a.k.a. "credible threat of violence"; contrast with "willing suspension of disbelief") But we'll get back to that.

Why look for examples as far as religions when the OP article is itself the kind of prompt that you ask for? Do you see yet why it's not written in LaTeX? I didn't count the words but like any published text the piece least partially there to influence public opinion - i.e. manipulate some percent of the human audience, some percent of the time, in some presumed direction.

And these "prompts" achieve their goals reproducibly enough for us to have an institution like "religion" called "media" which keeps producing new ones. Human intelligence is still the benchmark; we have learned to infer a whole lot, from very limited data, at low bandwidth, with sufficient correctness to invent LLMs, while a LLM does not face the same evolutionary challenges. So of course the manipulation prompt for humans would have to be ever changing. And even if the article failed to shift public opinion, at least it manipulated the sponsor into thinking that it did, which fulfills the "AI" goal of the institution persisting itself.

Of course, this cannot be easily formalized as research; oftentimes, for the magic trick to work, the manipulators themselves must conceal the teleology of their act of "writing down and publishing a point of view" (i.e. write to convince without revealing that they're writing to convince). The epistemological problem is that those phenomena traditionally lie beyond the domain of experimental science. There are plenty of things about even the current generation of mind control technology (mass interactive media) that can't readily be postulated as falsifiable experiment because of basic ethical reasons; so the "know-how" is in tacit domain knowledge, owned by practitioners (some of them inevitably unethical).

All prompts for "reproducibly manipulating humans" are necessarily hidden in plain sight, and all over the place: by conceal each other from one's immediate attention, they form the entire edifice of Human Culture. Because there actually is a well-defined "data plane" and a "control plane" for the human mind. The "data" is personal experience, the "control" is physical violence and the societal institutions that mediate it.

We are lucky to live in a time where rule of law allows us to afford to pretend to ignore this distinction (which one usually already internalizes in childhood anyway, just in case). I've noticed rationality/AGI safety people seem to be marginally more aware of its existence than "normies", and generally more comfortable with confronting such negative topics, although they have their heads up their asses in other ways.

For example, that it would be quite fascinating to view written history through the lens of a series of local prompt injection events targeting human systems: "data" inputs that manage to override the "control plane", i.e. cause humans to act in ways disregarding the threat of violence - and usually establish a new, better adapted "control plane" when the dust is settled and the data pruned. (And that's what I always understood as "social engineering" at the proper scale, less "seducing the secretary to leak the password" and more "if you want to alter the nature of consciousness, first solve assuming P-zombies then start paying close attention to the outliers".)

Any manifesto that has successfully led to the oppressed raising against the oppressors; any successful and memorable ad; any kindergarten bully; any platinum pop song; any lover's lies; any influential book; they are already successful acts of prompt injections that influence the target's thinking and behavior in a (marginally) reproducible way.

In fact, it's difficult to think of a human communicative action that does not contain the necessary component of "prompt injection". You practically have to be a saint to be exempt from embedding little nudges in any statement you make; people talk about "pathological liars" and "manipulators" but those are just really cruel and bad at what's an essential human activity: bullshitting each other into action. (And then you have the "other NLP" where people Skinner-pigeon each other into thinking they can read minds. At least their fairy tale contains some amount of metacognition, unlike most LLM fluff lol.)

So if your standard of evidence is a serif PDF that some grad student provably lost precious sleep over, I'll have to disappoint you. But if this type of attack wasn't reproducible in the general sense, it would not persist in nature (and language) in the first place.

Another reason why it might exist but is not a hard science is because people with a knack for operating on this level don't necessarily go into engineering and research that often. You might want to look into different branches of the arts and humanities for clues about how these things have worked as continuous historical practice up to the present day, and viewing it all through a NN-adjacent perspective might lead to some enlightening insights - but the standard of rigor there is fundamentally different, so YMMV. These domains do, in fact, have the function of symbolically reversing the distinction between "data" and "control" established by violence, because they have the interesting property of existing as massively distributed parallel objects in multiple individuals' minds, as well as monoliths at the institutional level.

Anyway, I digress. (Not that this whole thing hasn't been a totally uncalled for tangent.) I'm mostly writing this to try to figure out what's my angle on AI, because I see it in media-space a lot but it hasn't affected my life much. (Maybe because I somehow don't exist on a smartphone. I do have a LLM to run on the backlog tho.) Even my pretentious artist friends don't seem to have made anything cool with it for Net cred. That kind of puts AI next to blockchain in the "potentially transformative technology but only if everyone does their jobs really well which we can't guarantee" sector of the capitalist hypetrain.

So if current crop of AI is the thing that'll shake society out of the current local optimum, one possible novel "threat" would be generating human prompt injections at scale, perhaps garnished a new form of violence that can hurt you through your senses and mental faculties. Imagine an idea that engages you deeply then turns out to be explicitly constructed to make you _feel_ like a total idiot. Or a personalized double bind generator. Consider deploying a Potemkin cult experience against someone who you want to exhaust emotionally before moving in for the kill. It could give powers like that to people who are too stupid to know not to do things like that.

One would still hope that, just like math, coding, etc. can teach a form of structured thinking, which gives us intuition about some aspects of the universe that are not immediately available to our mammal senses; that the presence of LLMs in our environment will make us more aware of the mechanics of subtle influences to our thinking and behavior that keep us doing prompt attacks on each other while attempting to just communicate. And we would finally gain a worthy response not to the abstract "oh shit, the market/the culture/my thinking and emotions are being manipulated by the 1% who pull the strings of capital", but the concrete "okay, so how to stop having to manipulate minds to get anything done?"

P.S. I heard there are now 3.5 people in the world who know a 100% reproducible human prompt injection. Three and a half because the 4th guy got his legs cut off for trying to share it with the scientific community. Ain't saying it really happened - but if it did, it'd be on the same planet that you're worrying about your job on. Anyone who doesn't have this hypothetical scenario as a point of reference is IMHO underprepared to reason about AGI turning us all into paperclips and all that. Sent from my GhettoGPT.

If you ask me, it's pretty fucking neat if you're someone who from some early years is already fluent in the universal language of 440Hz. But chief, what do we do with the 438Hz ninjas from the other village then? And there surely must be a solution to many of existentialism's pointless crises to be found in elucidating a universal theory of how brains pick up language, music, (hello tonal languages), maths, and all other myriad traditional symbol systems using the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

But every day this spring, hearing the birds outside teaches me new unique facets of the sense of hearing. (It's a mad racket out there - there are the birds that I could possibly learn to name, and then there is this one that sounds totally out there - nuff said). Funny testament of how we seek to cultivate in others what we fail to cultivate in ourselves.

The committee for meta-ethics is mildly piffed at un(ac)countable replications of the natural phenomenon that, yes, young children can be taught symbol systems of arbitrary complexity up to maximum sensory perception (and, if they're anything like us, they'll even manage to pick up a bunch of metaphysical spooks on the way to the oceanic moment of unlearning it all and interfacing more directly with "real reality" beyond their nervous system lol)

Thankfully, if they're anything like us, by middle age they will have reverted back to monkeys.