Amarok's recent activity

  1. Comment on Passing question about LLMs and the Tech Singularity in ~tech

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Turning a single cell organism like bacteria on and off with anesthesia has nothing to do with any brain function, because single cell critters haven't got brains to begin with. They do have...

    Turning consciousness off with anesthesia shows consciousness depends on certain brain functions continuing.

    Turning a single cell organism like bacteria on and off with anesthesia has nothing to do with any brain function, because single cell critters haven't got brains to begin with. They do have memory, and react to their environment, so how are they handling that processing without a brain, and why does anesthesia shut that down? That's the point people keep missing in this research - brains have nothing to do with consciousness. They aren't required for it and we've proven that. The fundamentals fit into a single cell.

    Bacteria are at the bottom of the curve, we're near the top on this planet but hardly alone in being able to recognize our reflections in a mirror. Animals have internal models of themselves and LLMs do not. I could list many aspects of consciousness they haven't got yet and will never get from matrix multiplication. We'd have to build those in as separate systems on top of the LLM just to catch them up to us. In fact we probably will.

    I do think we'll get there, but not on this hardware, not a snowball's chance in hell. It'd be like building yourself an any-terrain vehicle and finding out it also doubles as a functional spaceship by sheer luck, turns out you just needed a bigger gas tank and some new tires to get to orbit. That's about as rational as expecting our current processors to handle an AGI workload.

    I think LLMs tell us more about language and probability than consciousness. Everything they create is a mimic of the training data, the insight they provide when they provide it is because they hit on things we overlook. We're bad at going through terabytes of information rapidly and matching up small details in the training data, and they'll get better at it. That doesn't mean it's thinking - if it is, so is your pocket calculator, because all the LLM ever did to give you that answer was pick the largest numbers out of a matrix and they have the same hardware, just more of it.

    We're trying to make it to AGI on hardware whose design hasn't changed appreciably in almost seventy years, hardware that does two things only - add numbers and execute a couple of basic logic operations. Repeating 'context window' like a mantra doesn't make an LLM sapient, though it's great for driving up memory prices once you've invested in companies that make chips. Occam's razor doesn't favor the odds of this waking up in some kind of omega moment. That's magical thinking.

    The problem we've always had with the processor is answering the question, 'well, what do we replace the transistor with that can do a better job?' Nobody has ever had a good or even useful answer for that question. Basic logic and addition is a great place to start - but that doesn't mean nature bothers with either one of them, she could be doing something else we didn't think of yet. She uses physics to get to consciousness, while we are stuck using math to get there on computer hardware. That's a big disconnect.

    I'm willing to bet that by the time we unwind the microtube mystery we're going to find nature's answer to the transistor/logic gate problem, and it'll take us in new, better design directions. We chase that and we may very well top human intelligence, since evolution optimizes for 'good enough' but rarely 'best' solutions. A single human mind at 8Hz on 20w of power can still out-think a hamlet-sized data center that's draining the lake and raising the town's electricity prices. This is not hardware to be proud of. It's got a terribly long way to go to catch up to us and it's taking up entirely too much energy.

    That's where I'm at on all this, anyway.
    The singularity has been postponed indefinitely, until better hardware arrives. ;)

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Passing question about LLMs and the Tech Singularity in ~tech

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Yet we can turn it off and on with impunity in a way that shatters all prior theory with concrete scientific facts. That means we know where it is hiding in the biology for the first time. New...

    Yet we can turn it off and on with impunity in a way that shatters all prior theory with concrete scientific facts. That means we know where it is hiding in the biology for the first time. New information which completely redefines the problem space.

    You can wave hands and quote platitudes about the impossibility of flight (which we could see happening with our own eyes even if we couldn't duplicate it) or about how people used to say there would never be color television. Everyone who studied these topics was better informed than the general public and smarter than base platitudes, which is why we have drones and 4KHD now.

    Consciousness is just another problem to solve, the same way they were, and we've made real progress.

  3. Comment on Passing question about LLMs and the Tech Singularity in ~tech

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    In the sense that you can turn consciousness off and on like a light switch by doing nothing except interfering with whatever it is that happens inside of a micro-tubule. All other biology is...

    In the sense that you can turn consciousness off and on like a light switch by doing nothing except interfering with whatever it is that happens inside of a micro-tubule. All other biology is unaffected and shutting down their activity stops consciousness. This works on humans and on single cell organisms, so this is a simpler problem at the root than brains are. The consciousness problem is locked in a box now, even though we don't understand how it works or why it works. The only logical explanation for this is for the activity in the micro-tubules to be a fundamental necessity for consciousness, and other factors like neuro-chemistry are already ruled out. Brains and all of the fancy things that neurons do were built on top, much later.

    When we figure out what exactly is going on with this - a much easier task now that we can do it by studying single cell organisms - we'll be in a position to figure out what brains did to build up from this base and optimize it. Then we can begin to tie in neuro-chemistry and electrical activity and finally understand what is going on and why it gives rise to a conscious experience. That's when we'll be able to duplicate it in hardware, if we want to.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Passing question about LLMs and the Tech Singularity in ~tech

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Marketing - that's why. It's a central tent pole in the never-ending tech bro scam cycle. They are selling Roko's basilisk. As for my own intuition on the matter... I tend to toss out the math and...

    Marketing - that's why. It's a central tent pole in the never-ending tech bro scam cycle. They are selling Roko's basilisk.

    As for my own intuition on the matter... I tend to toss out the math and look at hardware. We know for a fact that consciousness, whatever it is, however it works, comes to an instant stop the moment you shut down the micro-tubules using anesthesia. We also know for a fact that this works just as well in a single cell organism as it does in any other living thing. There are no living things without these micro-tubules as part of their structure, it's in every cell. That means evolution itself has selected for them so strongly that we have no examples of life or consciousness or sapience without them.

    There are no micro-tubules present in a computer. Further there is also no stand-in present for the quantum effects these micro-tubules generate, which is provably required to be present for consciousness. By this reasoning, there are no conscious machines, yet - and we wouldn't even expect to see any become possible until we are running light-based hardware that is designed to perform the same functions we see in living things.

    Evolution has had several billion years of uninterrupted uptime to perform field testing more brutal than anything humans have ever done with code. I think it's a bit premature to assume that evolution itself hasn't already begun to approach some hardware optimization limits that machines wouldn't be able to push past with impunity. Nature may already be nearing those limits. Something better might be possible but we're sure not going to figure it out until after we answer the how and why of biological consciousness.

    We've invented syncopathic librarians that are more convenient than search engines in some circumstances, and are suitable as a pocket grad-student in others. Too bad people still need to check all of their work all of the time. It might be enough to make robots about as useful as a teenager at doing the chores. If you want more than that out of it, you've got to specialize the diet you feed to them during training, that's still 'narrow'. It's a very useful tool that can be embedded into just about every other tool... but that's it. Something else is still missing just to bring it up to our level.

    The current tech bubble will continue, it seems, until they manage to stuff the entire corpus of human knowledge into the context window, or they run out of funding. Meanwhile, all the AI power you'll likely need in anything you're doing yourself will come free, bundled in your next graphics card upgrade. I'd give it a couple years tops before someone figures out a way to train them better on those cards and on small (even tiny or micro) data sets. That's the point where people finally realize the data center model we're rushing now is a scam.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on Do you have your invite request email? Post it and let's find out what drives people to want to be a part of Tildes. in ~tildes

    Amarok
    Link
    I think it was sometime in late 2016, on my old deleted reddit account I got a PM from Deimos. I nuked that account long ago, but the gist of it was simple: "Hey, I made a better reddit software,...

    I think it was sometime in late 2016, on my old deleted reddit account I got a PM from Deimos. I nuked that account long ago, but the gist of it was simple: "Hey, I made a better reddit software, wanna check it out?"

    I remember thinking at the time with all the reddit alternatives popping up and dying, if there's even one worthwhile project in the pile of them worth betting on, this is it. The one designed and coded by the veteran moderator of /r/games, who also created automoderator, subreddit simulator, and reddit gold.

    Tildes is still here, nearly all of those other projects collapsed. Just chilling until people decide they've had enough of corporate-run internet communities.

    5 votes

  6. Comment on Massive winter storm expected to dump snow and ice across United States in ~enviro

    Amarok
    Link
    Updated forecast for the entire storm event from Ryan Hall. This is the most precise zero-hype all-science weather forecast channel I know of, and if Ryan is calling this a historic event I...

    Updated forecast for the entire storm event from Ryan Hall. This is the most precise zero-hype all-science weather forecast channel I know of, and if Ryan is calling this a historic event I believe it. He will be covering it live, which means tons of storm chasers on call and thousands of people caught in this thing will be sending him videos. It's top tier coverage.

    If you're anywhere in the gargantuan ice zone, you are going to be without power for several days - and the cold front behind this thing is brutal and will persist for several days. The USA is not going to warm back up afterwards, and being without power in below freezing temperatures is a significant risk of death.

    I'm in the zone that's going to get 13"-24" of snow overnight. No ice for me, just the joy of clearing two feet of snow out of a two hundred foot driveway. My cats are going to freak out when I let them out on Tuesday morning and they can't get through the snow drifts, it'll be their first real snowfall.

    By the way, do NOT let your pets get caught out in this, they will freeze to death or at least get frostbitten. It's impossible for them to move around or return home through this much snow or ice.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on Let's talk orchestrated objective reduction! in ~science

    Amarok
    Link
    What he did is convincingly prove a single cell organism is still fully, surprisingly conscious with good memory and just about every single reaction to stimuli that we have. With that one simple...

    What he did is convincingly prove a single cell organism is still fully, surprisingly conscious with good memory and just about every single reaction to stimuli that we have. With that one simple zen-like kill shot he deleted brains (and therefore all cognitive science degree-holders) from any future discussions of consciousness. This is once again a physics problem. That's in fact tremendous progress, no more brain-related bullshit on the table hiding the real answer to this question. :)

    Just recently Stuart appeared on Danny Jones (2.5 hours) and did a phenomenal job of explaining what he's talking about. It is handily the best conversation about consciousness I've ever seen. He brought the receipts too, citations abound.

    I'm not sure he's right about his and Roger's fundamental premise - that quantum collapse is itself a burst of conscious experience. It's an intriguing way of thinking about the universe, that's for sure, but we've got to pin it down with experiments. That's going to be tricky but he has got the problem in a bit of a box now.

    The implications of this if he's right are a fatal kill shot for sapient artificial general intelligence, because if he's right, no configuration of silicon is ever going to simulate even a single cell effectively, it's beyond our data storage capabilities. Kiss mind uploading goodbye along with the rest of the singularity crew's pipe dreams. Won't have to worry about AI waking up because it hasn't got the kind of equipment necessary in hardware to do the waking up - and we can prove it, so no rights for the robots after all. Electrons can't play these games.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on George Carlin - We Like War! (1992) in ~society

  9. Comment on George Carlin - We Like War! (1992) in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Carlin's comedy specials are in the must-see category for anyone coming to the USA - to be watched in reverse chronological order. You may as well find out what you're in for before you get here,...
    • Exemplary

    Carlin's comedy specials are in the must-see category for anyone coming to the USA - to be watched in reverse chronological order. You may as well find out what you're in for before you get here, and you just might want to reconsider the trip once you've seen this.

    The older ones are harder to track down. Don't forget to listen to him read his book Brain Droppings. There's also 'Napalm and Silly Putty', 'Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help', and 'When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops' amongst others. Then there's several audio-only albums from the 70s: FM & AM, Class Clown, Occupation: Foole, Toledo Window Box, On The Road, A Place For My Stuff. The man was one prolific writer.

    11 votes

  10. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    The Venezuelans are the biggest winners. They are about to drown in reconstruction money and oil revenues shortly afterwards. They are the ones that own and will work the wells and refineries....

    The Venezuelans are the biggest winners.

    They are about to drown in reconstruction money and oil revenues shortly afterwards. They are the ones that own and will work the wells and refineries. Their government will collect enough tax money to splurge on public works on a level we rarely see, like the Saudis trying to out-spend each other with crazy projects in the middle east (they'd do better terraforming the desert with it, but that's another discussion). They'll get penciled in as a top tourist destination rather than travel bans.

    Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world once, and will probably surpass that benchmark again in the future. The refugee crisis they went through fleeing the Chavez / Maduro tyranny was the second largest in human history behind Syria, displacing almost eight million people. All of those people are now free to return home if they choose.

    We have a rare moment here where politics, business, and ethics have lined up for a shot at a very good outcome for everyone involved, except for the drug cartels, BRICS, and fracking companies. Seems like a hell of a win to me. Makes me wonder who the shrewd as fuck genius is that spotted this opportunity and pitched it to Trump, no way in hell he figured this out on his own.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Drilling wells are a lot cheaper and cleaner than fracking wells, those are the facts. I doubt Trump polled other US energy companies that do the fracking to see if they liked this plan. The...

    Drilling wells are a lot cheaper and cleaner than fracking wells, those are the facts. I doubt Trump polled other US energy companies that do the fracking to see if they liked this plan. The losers here are Baker Hughes, Halliburton, and Schlumberger who will yield business to Chevron.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    That tells you who was really pushing the oil agenda. I doubt Trump cared about it that much, since the USA produces our own surplus. We don't need a drop of anyone else's ever again, by the time...

    That tells you who was really pushing the oil agenda. I doubt Trump cared about it that much, since the USA produces our own surplus. We don't need a drop of anyone else's ever again, by the time fracking runs out we'll be on some form of electric transport. Haven't even fracked the northeast yet which has richer deposits than Texas. We don't even need a 'backup' oil plan since Alaska is loaded, we can have it whenever we decide to go get it. We already have more oil than we'll ever use, and ours is a lot easier to refine too.

    Chevron on the other hand would be oil corporation in-chief for life if they can resurrect the Venezuelan fields, which are the second largest out there - just a bit smaller than Saudi Arabia's fields. This is a jackpot reserve, though the crude is a nightmare to refine, ultra-thick and sulfur-contaminated stuff. Most of Venezuela's production is offline too due to ancient equipment and no maintenance for decades. It's all gotta be rebuilt, a twenty year project to get them back to 1950s level production. Small wonder that Chevron offered to pay for the reconstruction, they'll get lifetime management of the fields they build.

    I'd bet that Trump's fetish for American big business, not oil per se, is why he went in for this. He's always idolizing our corporations - US Steel, Ford, Tesla, etc. He doesn't care about securing us more oil that we don't need. He's interested in preventing that oil from going to our adversaries (50% of Cuba's oil is was from VZ) and he's interested in propping up what's left of Standard Oil (aka Chevron) because he wants us to have our own pet 900lb gorilla of an oil company. That puts the USA in a position that's immune to price-fixing actions from OPEC. In fact Chevron could do the price fixing itself. :p

    This is about forcefully creating big businesses that are aligned with the US, oil just happens to be the product involved. Trump was trying to do the same thing for US Steel when he was hammering tariffs on Canada. Now that I've noticed this I think I like Trump even less. Large corporations are corrosive to democracies in my view, especially multinational ones.

    Edit: I can see one silver lining in this mess, though - fracking is expensive and it damages the environment. If Venezuela reaches new peaks of production, it'll be cheaper to buy ours from them than it is to keep fracking. That means no new fracking wells, and when old ones shut down, no more new ones replace them. Don't even need legislation for this, it's just market pricing.

    We'd phase out fracking and rely on Venezuelan oil (direct pipelines), and that'd be a huge environmental win for us. Probably drive up natural gas prices in the long run too, since they are a fracking byproduct that we would lose over time. This is a lotta runway for the green revolution to get their tech sorted and take over.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    True, however the fact that they've had a taste of it makes it more likely that it'll work out than in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. That gives me some hope. If the CIA hadn't overthrown the...

    True, however the fact that they've had a taste of it makes it more likely that it'll work out than in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. That gives me some hope. If the CIA hadn't overthrown the Shah we might have avoided a lot of trouble. I think we owe Venezuela for letting our cartel problem become this serious, it was a key factor in their collapse. I'd say we owe Iran too since we sabotaged the best thing to ever happen to that country. If Trump wants to start blowing up weapon stockpiles and terrorist camps in Iran to give the protesters some backup, I'm sort of ok with that as long as this degree of precision is maintained.

    Some good news, I see reports the remnants of Maduro's government have decided to settle this with talks rather than try to take over. Apparently they've had enough.

  14. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Good point about Bin laden, I'd missed that. In this situation the claim was that involving congress would have tipped of Maduro, which is why they weren't told until it was happening. I'm not...

    Good point about Bin laden, I'd missed that. In this situation the claim was that involving congress would have tipped of Maduro, which is why they weren't told until it was happening. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, if our legislators are that leaky with information we're got other problems too. :/

    4 votes

  15. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    All I can say to that is one small point - Maduro lost the election. He was not a president of anything, legally, under international and Venezuelan laws. He was a wanted fugitive with a twenty...

    All I can say to that is one small point - Maduro lost the election. He was not a president of anything, legally, under international and Venezuelan laws. He was a wanted fugitive with a twenty five million dollar bounty on his head placed there by Obama I think, then increased by Biden. That's probably going to be the legal loophole that saves Trump's ass, this time. If he'd done this to anyone else this would be a very different conversation.

    You're right about the courts. The USA doesn't recognize any authority above its own... well, other than 'God' according to the money and (briefly) the pledge of allegiance. Lip service is usually where God stops in this government. Sometimes I wonder if America is God's greatest regret. Seems like a love / hate relationship to me. :p

    2 votes

  16. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Obama bagged Bin Laden and Reagan bagged Noriega the same way. They walked. Trump hasn't done anything (yet) worse than they did in this situation. At least Bush had congress authorize his...

    Obama bagged Bin Laden and Reagan bagged Noriega the same way. They walked. Trump hasn't done anything (yet) worse than they did in this situation. At least Bush had congress authorize his invasion, though now we know they were lying through their teeth about all of the justifications for that war so I'm left questioning what value that authorization has in the first place. Congress happily approved a mountain of bullshit with a smile, there's no trust to be found there either.

    Trump's not going to get impeached (for this, anyway - Epstein is another matter) and I doubt the US government is going to stop doing this stuff. In this particular case it seems like the people who would be angry are instead quite happy with the outcome, that's less of a mess than Noriega. I don't think anyone was making a stink about Bin Laden, everyone hated him.

    We'll see how everyone feels in a couple weeks after Trump does this again in Iran. That man loves to push his luck. If he helps oust the Ayatollah and the Iranians are celebrating like the Venezuelans are now, I think I'm going to go resign from society and live in a hut in the Caribbean or something. This world line is giving me too many headaches. :p

    2 votes

  17. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I think he's making a big mistake there. At a minimum I'd put her in power as the interim leader and then get elections going again. If Trump tries to appoint someone by fiat that's going to...

    I think he's making a big mistake there. At a minimum I'd put her in power as the interim leader and then get elections going again. If Trump tries to appoint someone by fiat that's going to vaporize any goodwill we've earned. It's got to be a popular vote to mean anything at all, otherwise we're just playing dictator-swap and I'm truly sick of that behavior. The CIA should know better by now, they've fucked up enough regime changes over the years. I think the total might even be into the triple digits by now, and the good outcomes are probably in the single digits. This is not a track record to be proud of. :p

    3 votes

  18. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I'll give them credit when anything they build lasts for more than a decade without falling down, rotting from the inside, shorting out to make fires (like those electric vehicles are famous for)...

    I'll give them credit when anything they build lasts for more than a decade without falling down, rotting from the inside, shorting out to make fires (like those electric vehicles are famous for) or sinking to the bottom of the harbor on first launch like their subs and boats have done. Granted, that's happened to US ships before too but we don't make a habit out of it like they do. :p They have a real problem with durability and longevity in a lot of the things they build.

    They have no regulations on quality or enforced engineering standards like we do on public works, everyone cuts every corner even in their military production. Every scrap of concrete poured in that country will be dust within fifty years. Sure, they can make a two bit transistor that does the job for a while, but comparing their engineering to US defense standards and they aren't even in the same galaxy.

    That's ok, they spend billions on bot farms and celebrity youtube tourism to convince everyone that people in China live in the future, but covering everything in LEDs so it looks good at night and painting the leaves of dead trees green doesn't magically fix your infrastructure problems. It just sweeps it under the rug until the rot collapses your roads on your daily commute. If you think I'm even remotely kidding about any of this, I can supply you with an archive of video evidence of the problems.

  19. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Yeah, it's not looking very good to me right now. T says we're 'taking over' but we... already left. Not quite sure how that works. There's no enforcing this without people there to do it. Perhaps...

    Yeah, it's not looking very good to me right now. T says we're 'taking over' but we... already left. Not quite sure how that works. There's no enforcing this without people there to do it. Perhaps the CIA has assets and resources in play to back whichever faction comes together for Machado. Or perhaps Trump's just hoping a miracle happens. He does have a habit of pantsing his way through things until some kind of win pops up that he can glom onto. Call me crazy but I don't think flying blind is a viable regime change strategy. I'm curious to watch how this plays out over the next week.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on US strikes Venezuela and says its leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Game theory is at the heart of geopolitics. The ultimate never-ending all consuming prisoner's dilemma. For my money, the only good response here is to place María Corina Machado into power...

    Game theory is at the heart of geopolitics. The ultimate never-ending all consuming prisoner's dilemma.

    For my money, the only good response here is to place María Corina Machado into power immediately, since she won the last election. That's good, it saves us a ton of time where things usually go sideways running up to elections that are unnecessary in this particular case as they've already happened. All we need to do is reconstitute her government and put the security forces back together, tag in a big fat IMF reconstruction loan, then get the hell out. People will be a lot more forgiving of this 'intervention' if the USA walks away rather than meddling for years on end.

    Trouble is apparently Trump's strike missed the minister of defense and some other problematic members of the older regime, who are now trying to take power. We can't let that fester, it'll end badly. We're not done decapitating yet. Couple more snakes to scratch off the list - there will be another strike to deal with the leftovers.

    4 votes