aSanchezStern

I agree that "proof of thought" is a misleading name, but this whole "computers can't think" thing is making LLM skepticism seem very unscientific. There is no universally agreed upon objective definition of what it means to be able to "think" or how you would measure such a thing. The definition that these types of positions seem to rely upon is "a thing that only humans can do", which is obviously a circular one that isn't useful.

Sure, but when you're walking all the time, none of that time is wasted, because you're helping your body and brain function better. When you use a car, you really are wasting all your transportation time. To get the same benefits, you would have to drive places, and then go walking recreationally after, which would clearly take much more time to get the same utility.

Cite?

I don't think that "arguing that something is against the rules" is in the CIA sabotage manual, because it's not generally considered sabotage. Maybe if you argue things are against the rules that you know aren't, to slow things down?

The answer it seems is, it depends on what kind of code you're looking at. The post showed that `for` loops cause a lot more variable-name-biased reasoning, while `ifs` and function defs/calls are more variable-name independent.

Yeah that's linked a couple of times in the post

Thanks for pointing that out, it's fixed now.

If you're interested in a more scientific treatment of the topic, the post links to a technical report which reports the numbers in detail. This post is instead an attempt to explain the topics to a more general audience, so digging into the weeds isn't very useful.

This post actually mostly uses the subset of Python where nullability is checked. The point is not to introduce new LLM capabilities, but to understand more about how existing LLMs are reasoning about code.

Many people don't think we have any good evidence that our brains aren't essentially the same thing: a stochastic statistical model that produces outputs based on inputs.

Yeah the link title is overclaiming a bit, the actual post title doesn't make such a general claim, and the post itself examines several specific models and compares their understanding.

The post includes this caveat. Depending on your philosophical position about sentience you might say that LLMs can't possibly "understand" anything, and the post isn't trying to have that argument. But to the extent that an LLM can "understand" anything, you can study its understanding of nullability.

Where would the "paper" part come in? Is that just based on the word "bench" in general?

"Didn't even win the democratic primary" might be a bit of a misnomer if it's implying that winning the democratic primary should be much easier than winning the general. Bernie has positions that are popular outside of democrats, many people think that if he had won the primary, he would have had a much better chance of winning than Hilary or Biden, since he had less baggage and his policies were broadly popular.

I mean, yeah, they are saying that you can commit a crime and they won't punish you. That's what "suspending enforcement" means. I think what you mean is that "law and order" is usually applied to poor criminals, where as what is happening here is refusing to enforce laws on the rich criminals.

Yeah this was totally debunked, I believe the programs that were said to be "going to terrorists" were actually promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.

SpaceX is a government contractor, immediately presenting a conflict of interest.

Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.

Actually exit polls say that most people who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would lower grocery prices, not because they thought he would make the government more efficient. So far grocery prices have risen significantly under his administration. As far as I know there is no evidence that there was a program to destabilize bangladesh that doge cut, that appears to be another case of doge not really understanding what it was cutting. But if you have a credible reference on that which isn't just saying "Elon said so", I'd love to see it.

Right, but we've already got limits on individual contributions, so even if you have a bunch of money, you can't have outsized influence through your individual contributions.

Anybody have a link to a description of the "Lot system" mentioned near the end?

The PHP in this refers to their product, and not the previously ubiquitous web programming language? This seems like a bad title.

Well like any political descriptor, "far right" is a generalization that applies to several groups. In this case, Elon is part of the corporate-techno-authoritarian far right that supported trump, while figures like Loomer who were posting the anti-H1B content are part of the white-nationalist/christian-nationalist far right (that also supported trump).

Actually many people on the right believe they have been censored by Musk because of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...

This post is about 20 years after WWII, so that timeline doesn't really line up.

You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.

I was talking to a French trans academic at a conference recently, and apparently there is a large community of trans people that make their own hormones from cheap precursors you can buy online. All secondhand obviously so I don't know the details but this is definitely a thing.

Well, technically it only establishes that there exist Klingons that look like the discovery Klingons in an alternate universe, not that there aren't also Klingons that look like discovery Klingons in the prime universe. That episode also seems to establish that there are universes that are temporally offset from the prime universe, as the transformations also include turning the Klingons into an older kind of Klingon ("proto-Klingons"), so it could just as well be that the discovery Klingons are just an older variant of Klingons.

This idea is strengthened by the fact that Discovery and Strange New Worlds are clearly shown to take place in the same universe, with Discovery introducing the characters and ship that appear in Strange New Worlds, and Spock from Strange New Worlds reflecting on the events of Discovery. And SNW later shows TNG style Klingons, establishing that both styles (as well as presumably TOS style Klingons) coexist in the same universe. So I don't think the Lower Decks episode resolves anything about the Klingon-look at all, it was just a fun reference/gag.

It could be that the shows exist in different timelines, but it could also be that any of the shows exist in different timelines that are just similar enough to make the references make sense. For instance, Lower Decks establishes that a Picard exists in it's universe, but also exists in many other universes (see the purple enterprise), so it doesn't necessarily take place in the same universe as TNG.

The infrastructure projects that China "gives" generally result in unsustainable debt burdens for the host countries that negatively impact their economies.

https://bankruptcyroundtable.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/24/a-ta... https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106866 https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2024/06/14/chinas-debt-f...

The thing that the author says they would prefer is already in Python, it's called NewType (https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.NewType)

They say "...so I can't create a bunch of different names for eg typing.Any and then expect type checkers to complain if I mix them."

`MyType = NewType('MyType', Any)`

is how you do this.

At the end, they suggest a workflow: "I think my ideal type hint situation would be if I could create distinct but otherwise unconstrained types for things like function arguments and function returns, have mypy or other typing tools complain when I mixed them, and then later go back to fill in the concrete implementation details of each type hint"

That's just doing the above, but then changing the `NewType('MyType', Any)` to something like `NewType('MyType', list[dict[str, int]])` later when you want to fill in the concrete implementation.