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Very well, I’ll take that as a sort of compliment lol.

So I guess I start where I always do, do you think a machine, in principal, has the capability to be intelligent and/or creative? If not, I really don’t have any counter, I suppose I’d be curious as to why though. Like I admit it’s possible there’s something non-physical or non-mechanistic driving our bodies that’s unknown to science. I find that very few hold this hard line opinion though, assuming you are also in that category…

So if that’s correct, what is it about the current paradigm of machine learning that you think is missing? Is it embodiment, is it the simplicity of artificial neurons compared to biological ones, something specific about the transformer architecture, a combination of these, or something else I haven’t thought of?

And hopefully it goes without saying, I don’t think o1-preview is a human level AGI, I merely believe that we’re getting there quite soon and without too many new architectural innovations, possibly just one or two, and none of them will be particularly groundbreaking, it’s fairly obvious what the next couple of steps will be as it was that MCTS + LLM was the next step 3 years ago.

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You’re describing like 95% of the entire USA though, and 80% of the entire world. I am also prone to judging humanity as not so great, but we literally need them for the revolution. Well maybe not the initial part, but we’ll need most of them to get with the program in short order.

it constructs a concept in a more abstract way then progressively finds a way to put it into words; I know that arguably that’s what it’s doing currently,

Correct!

but the fact that it does it separately for each token means it’s not constructing any kind of abstraction

No!!! You simply cannot make judgements like this based on vague ideas like “autocomplete on steroids” or “stochastic parrot”, these were good for conceptualizing GPT-2, maybe. It’s actually very inefficient, but, by re-reading what it has previously written (plus one token) it’s actually acting sort of like an RNN. In fact we know theoretically that with simlified attention models the two architectures are mathematically equivalent.

Let me put it like this. Suppose you had the ability to summon a great novelist as they were at some particular point in their life, pull them from one exact moment in the past, and to do this as many times as you liked. You put a gun to their head, or perhaps offer them alcohol and cocaine, to start writing a novel. The moment they finish the first word, you shoot them in the head and summon the same version again. “Look I’ve got a great first word for a novel, and if you can turn it into a good paragraph I’ll give you this bottle of gin and a gram of cocaine!”. They think for a moment and begin to put down more words, but again you shoot them after word two. Rinse/repeat until a novel is formed. It takes a good while but eventually you’ve got yourself a first draft. You may also have them refine the novel using the same technique, also you may want to give them some of the drugs and alcohol before hand to improve their writing and allow them to put aside the fact that they’ve been summoned to the future by a sorcerer. Now I ask you, is there any theoretical reason why this novel wouldn’t be any good? Is the essence of it somehow different than any other novel, can we judge it as not being real art or creativity?

The model was trained on self-play, it’s unclear exactly how, whether via regular chain-of-thought reasoning or some kind of MCTS scheme. It no longer relies only on ideas from internet data, that’s where it started from. It can learn from mistakes it made during training, from making lucky guesses, etc. Now it’s way better as solving math problems, programming, and writing comedy. At what point do we call what it’s doing reasoning? Just like, never, because it’s a computer? Or you object to the transformer architecture specifically, what?

Look I just don’t think that’s a helpful mindset, there are still good people who don’t understand and or don’t agree. They probably treat these videos and news as misinformation or just tell themselves it’s a necessary evil in a fight against an even greater evil, remember they think that gazans are mostly united in their hatred against Jews and would like to see them eliminated woldwide, not that this ought to make much of a difference in the calulation of whether or not to kill an entire culture with no power to fight back… but I have to admit that if I believed this to be true I would be less invested emotionally. Or they just haven’t seen the information at all, that’s probably the bulk of it actually.

It’s incredibly hard to let go of an ideology, and liberalism and to a lesser extent democratism are quite powerful and seductive from the standpoint of someone embedded in American society who hasn’t seen the light when it comes to the whole America being evil thing. As emaciated and I’ll defined as our culture it, it is still a culture nonetheless, or it appears to be at least, it’s something many people cherish and will want to protect, and when an inclination is so deeply ingrained it creates enormous potential for self deception and willful ignorance.

So do I have trouble not hating them, yes, but on the other hand I also see where they’re coming from, their experiences have likely been quite different from my own, and that means there may be potential for conversion via the inception of new experience You have to admit it’s already happening to an extent, there are a lot of libs out there who have been partially black pilled by this whole genocide thing, which they still see as merely another war, albeit a particularly gruesome one. They’re on the right path. Are they moving too slowly, more disinterested in completing the journey of enlightenment than they need to be, perhaps not even aware they haven’t reached the end? Yes. Will most of them never make it? Probably. But some will and I happen to believe that if you are potentially a future ally you should not be treated as an enemy, at least in the absence of other mitigating circumstances.

What lies between us and the truth of this situation is a window crystal clear to you, to me, to some still in the “progressive” category who keeps themselves well informed. What we sometimes forget is that it is our ideology and education and personal inclinations give us X-ray vision, we see certainly things with such clarity that we forget the window is there at all, and that it is opaque to certain frequencies of light. But that type of vision is not yet available to all, some may have ways of devoping it to various extents, but they all will involve some level of pain, guilt, loss, grief, and sheer effort.

The effort, we’re all quite tired, we need our sleepy time, and yet some person, who my friends tell me I should hate or ignore, is telling me to get out of bed and embark on some spirit quest which, if my friends knew I had gone along, could jeopardize our relationships? Oh and this person btw appears to be even more tired and quite miserable compared to me, and filled with anger? No thanks, I’ll just get a good night’s sleep instead. After all I have work in the morning.

We have the majority very roughly on our side, but we need even more and we need to smooth out that roughness, that is part of our job right now. We need to recognize when this is and isn’t feasible and accept that polishing a surface is sometimes a many step process, especially if that surface is particularly hard or too brittle, but if we are too picky about the tools we are willing to apply, the raw materials we’re willing to work with, we are using our labor inefficiently and we end up with fewer and lower quality products which might otherwise have been unique items of great use in enacting our plans.

Eh, but this sort of thing is an actual practical use case of crypto, the problem as you pointed out is off ramping to a fiat currency, this is actually a sovable problem, you can wash your crypto funds, there are methods for literally perfect money laundering if you know what you’re doing, and as long as you know someone who can cash them out and get the money to you you’re good to go. Unfortunately it’s annoying AF, I’m sure Hamas and whatnot are doing something like this but not your average Palestinian.

I have kids so yes, I must in a sense hope in order to maintain the tiny bit of sanity that holds my life together

And to be clear I don’t expect reform from within to save the country, but perhaps it may buy the world enough time for revolution

The one lingering hope I have is that the democratic party will suffer such a catastrophe that it can be remade or replaced. I have an unpopular opinion which is that I think we are running out of time for actual revolution in the US, as in overthrow our terrible government, I don’t expect the system to collapse on its own as many do, so I must maintain this hope

Hope in humanity, Kamala do what Kamala do she is brat after all, I expect nothing good. What I do need is for some kind of attention on what her policies might look like from the media

I just fucking can’t with this shit, if the election takes place without her clarifying her position on Gaza and she doesn’t catch some major mainstream criticism for it, I will have lost all hope

This wouldn’t even be possible at the place I work lmao. When I started there there was still a physical server in the building that housed my now empty desk (yeah it’s still there after 4 years of work from home) hosting some of our applications, there was a room that had a filing cabinet filled with punch cards, we had to fill out paper forms sometimes to get access to a database. Our security team has no idea what they’re doing, like they’re not even technical, we have basically one very good dev ops guy frantically duct taping over processes designed, badly, in the early 2000s, their job will never be done and they’ll never pay for another person if that calibre to join the team.

The idea of this happening to a bleeding edge 100 billion dollar tech company is fucking hilarious, I guarantee you the devs were constantly complaining to management about the possibility of such a scenario, and some poor overworked programmer is going to lose their career while their boss gets another high paying management job after the company goes under, or just retires out of savings.

Yeah still quite problematic “attacked by IDF dog”, as if the dog was responsible. Even if the dog attacked unprompted, doubtful, it clearly bit this poor guy for quite some time without any intervention by the soldiers. “Left to die”, by whom?

How about this: “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome and autism dies after attack by IDF dog during raid on household, denied medical attention or access to family in his final hours”

“Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC”

I think I object to these stealth fixes, the original headline should be considered a correction and clearly indicated

They changed the headline, not sure if that is good or bad

Vibing with everything you said, except I do have kids so I fear for their lives and happiness. I almost died at least once (car spun off and miraculously came to a halt on pure ice instead of crossing over to the other lane and hitting a semi), probably a few more times also…

How’d yours happen?

No he’s not an oracle, just a well centered (in his analysis), very smart and observant person. If he offers an opinion on something I don’t know a lot about I consider it plausible by default. So, since I know very little compared to Matt about the facts surrounding the JFK assassination, the fact that he holds or has held this opinion lends credence to the idea that the shooting yesterday was part of a similar conspiracy to what he was imagining.

So if we find out the the shooter was some kind of expert marksman who had a perfect opportunity and should have made the shot, I would be going hmmmm, likewise if the shooter appeared to hold some extremely complicated ideology ala Oswald.

I mean, yes unlikely, but wasn’t Matt Christman’s best guess at the JFK assassination that they were trying to stage a close call failure to send a message and keep him in check? Remote possibility but not completely out of the question, to what end I could not say