Amarok's recent activity

  1. Comment on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube in ~tv

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I think the reason why is simple - it's JMS' way or the highway when it comes to his productions. He doesn't play politics and he says 'no' every time someone pitches him a dumb idea. You bring...

    I think the reason why is simple - it's JMS' way or the highway when it comes to his productions.

    He doesn't play politics and he says 'no' every time someone pitches him a dumb idea. You bring him focus group data saying the show needs more fistfights or comedy, you get an episode that makes fun of focus group data as a decision making tool in a scifi wrapper. He writes deep challenging scripts that give no easy answers because he would rather showcase an idea and consequences than take sides on things. This makes him 'hard to work with' if you just want to treadmill some average drek down the pipeline, or push an agenda with the shows.

    We've seen how well that worked for Marvel, Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Lord of the Rings - black holes consuming profits is all that's left of them. Stargate appears to have lucked out, their new series has the entire original cast and creative teams on board so we know we'll get a quality show.

    I suspect the sentiment that it's not B5 without JMS is near-universal, so Netflix is going to get flayed alive by the entire fan base if they try to go forward without JMS. I'm not sure that they are aware or care about that, though. Shovelware is most of their media. If it were up to me I'd sign JMS for B5 regardless of price and then put him in charge of every show on the platform after it's done. :p

    5 votes

  2. Comment on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube in ~tv

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    The reboot is exactly the reason they are doing this. Studios have been sniffing around for a couple of years looking to reboot it, JMS has even written a new pilot episode multiple times but it...

    The reboot is exactly the reason they are doing this. Studios have been sniffing around for a couple of years looking to reboot it, JMS has even written a new pilot episode multiple times but it never quite makes it off the ground. Partly that's because Warner was a studio run by idiots, which is why they no longer exist. B5 is going to be a very, very expensive show to produce. A lot of youtube activity helps justify the cost of making a new one. Netflix has the B5 rights now so it might get made this time.

    Bad news though - last I heard JMS was out and Netflix was fishing around for a new showrunner to create the reboot. That's the fastest way I know to get it cancelled after three episodes. There is no Babylon 5 without JMS, and there is no one who can fill his shoes in this role. I won't even bother tuning in if he's not writing.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on Robert Duvall, all-purpose actor with few peers, dies at 95 in ~movies

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Beat me by two minutes. ;) That film is on my short list of overlooked gems.

    Beat me by two minutes. ;)

    That film is on my short list of overlooked gems.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    You don't, but then you are probably a lot more intelligent than most of our leaders. ;)

    You don't, but then you are probably a lot more intelligent than most of our leaders. ;)

  5. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I'm simply saying I can see people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or a handful of government agency types believing in all this and basing all of their decision-making on it going forward. Who...

    I'm simply saying I can see people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or a handful of government agency types believing in all this and basing all of their decision-making on it going forward. Who needs an apocalypse to wreck the world if our leaders run it into the ground preparing for a doomsday that isn't even real? :p

    5 votes

  6. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    That's harder than it looks at first glance, this rabbit hole is deep. Earth has a bit of a secret. It has to do with Earth's slow moving rise and fall as it roams around the galaxy. The solar...

    That's harder than it looks at first glance, this rabbit hole is deep. Earth has a bit of a secret.

    It has to do with Earth's slow moving rise and fall as it roams around the galaxy. The solar system moves up above the galactic plane and down below it again, taking about twelve thousand years for the trip. Somewhere along that path, it passes through the galactic disc and a large debris field that is not itself part of the solar system. When that happens, it's raining rocks for decades, but that's not the worst of it.

    The sun gets jammed up eating all the dust and debris, forms a bit of a crust from all the infalling material, then goes mental and blows all that off again in a micro-nova - which means Earth gets cooked hard by solar flares and impacted by that debris. Apparently he thinks we get occasional burps/waves from the galactic center on a somewhat regular basis that compound this effect - not sure exactly how that works and neither is he. It sounds wild, but there's evidence for it all over the lunar surface and Ben makes a pretty interesting case that finding this evidence was the point of the Apollo missions - not beating Russia.

    There's another part to this having to do with pole shifts that I'm not completely sold on as the evidence is a lot thinner. All this solar activity heats up Earth, and she expands, which breaks the continents apart and sends them floating freely around for a little while. The weight of the ice caps at the poles pulls the crust around and all of the continents rotate 90' in the course of a couple days or weeks - kicking off the oceans which slosh around and produce mile-high tsunamis. Plus the continents are rising and falling, so new ones pop out of the ocean and others sink under it. Literally no way to predict where is safe in this scenario - other than air or in a big damn boat. It's like that 2012 disaster movie, only much worse.

    Then it all settles down and we all forget it happened - except for biblical or other historic references about falling stars, worldwide floods, mountains moving out of their places, volcanic eruptions, ancient calendars marking the end of the cycle, etc... until the next time it happens again.

    I'm not saying I'm fully on board with it, but it's the best story going around by far to explain all the crap that I've ever seen. It's worth pointing out that this is a variable apocalypse. We might get off light on some cycles and get clobbered on others.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    My current favorite theory for the apocalypse is best articulated by Ben Davidson. He has a recently released documentary about it (1.5h) but some may prefer a more in-depth long-form podcast...

    My current favorite theory for the apocalypse is best articulated by Ben Davidson. He has a recently released documentary about it (1.5h) but some may prefer a more in-depth long-form podcast instead. (3h)

    His theory does ring a bit truer than other woo-woo conspiracy garbage to me, there's a frankly disturbing amount of circumstantial evidence for it. I'm sure he believes it and isn't doing this for a grift, considering what espousing this theory already cost him personally and professionally - there are far easier ways to make money.

    If this is the 'big secret' that the elites believe and refuse to share with the rest of us, that would also explain most of the activity they and various governments are engaging in - and it also explains why they don't care about trying to prevent societal collapse. Ocean current failure and weather changes are a walk in the park compared to this stuff. :)

    5 votes

  8. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    The castling phenomena always struck me as rather stupid. If any system collapse occurs they will not survive the month. It's not the rioters or looters either - it's the people they pay to stand...

    The castling phenomena always struck me as rather stupid. If any system collapse occurs they will not survive the month. It's not the rioters or looters either - it's the people they pay to stand behind them with loaded guns. As soon as the economy collapses, they will have problems paying those people without money, and defending rich folks from armed vengeful mobs is probably not what their guards had in mind when they signed up. The guards will also have their own families and well-being in mind, not their rich boss.

    What's worse, their contacts list, business and/or economic knowledge, everything that made them 'rich' becomes worthless. At that point a rich person is just another zero real-world skill pleb in the chaos. There comes a point where the guards will realize it's better to loot and scoot - or just bury the boss and take over the compound for themselves.

    9 votes

  9. Comment on AI fails at 96% of jobs (new study) in ~tech

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    The video covered newer RLI testing using current up to date models near the beginning. There was a very tiny improvement. The larger context window still helps, but it's not moving the models up...

    The video covered newer RLI testing using current up to date models near the beginning. There was a very tiny improvement. The larger context window still helps, but it's not moving the models up in the ranks here like it does with the usual benchmarks.

    I do like this method of testing and ranking the various models. Deceptively presented benchmarks have been a problem in tech since the beginning, and that's how I'd characterize most of the benchmarking in this field. Simple direct questions no matter how deep and technical are biased in favor of what an LLM is good at - mirroring its training data. Nothing wrong with that if you want to compare a model's ability to analyze.

    The problem is that the companies instantly generalize all of that into claims about real world performance and automating all the things, then tell us it's just a short hop to AGI from here. This benchmark is biased towards what humans are good at doing - charting a path through chaos. When confronted with that reality, suddenly the best LLMs are sitting right next to the worst ones in the rankings and a teenager can clobber them all.

    Challenging the models with real world tasks rather than just the usual Q&A is a great way to cut through the hype around automation. It forces the fundamental problems with LLMs into the spotlight.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on AI fails at 96% of jobs (new study) in ~tech

    Amarok
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    Dagogo delivers a nice sharp pin to the AI bubble with a look at their success rate in the real world. He also shares some insight from leading AI developers talking about why this looks like the...

    Dagogo delivers a nice sharp pin to the AI bubble with a look at their success rate in the real world. He also shares some insight from leading AI developers talking about why this looks like the proverbial end of the line for probability matrices as a pathway to artificial intelligence.

    8 votes

  12. 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

  13. 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.

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. 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
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    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

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

    Amarok
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    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

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

    Amarok
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    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

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

  20. 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