croniev

> trick yourself into thinking something is beautiful

No. It's about directing your attention at the memories that, as you correctly say, scars may remind you of, and appreciating this. This perspective was hidden insofar as beauty standards reduced scars to the physical appearance, turning a blind eye to their signifying properties.

> Beauty is a word expression a sensation.

Interesting take. Is beauty the sensation or that which is being perceived? Are you meaning to say that the same tentatively beautiful things always illicit the same 'sensation' type in all people? What about the different kinds of aethetic experiences (such as the experience that viewing my scar might ellicit when it wakes good memories)? And what about cultural differences in what is perceived as beautiful?

> that you should be able to trick yourself into thinking something is beautiful is just as valid as the assumption that it will change the power of the word for you

Again, it's not about changing the word or tricking yourself. It is about directing attention and disclosing a new perspective on things. It's not black-and-white beautiful or ugly - it also depends on the context you are assesing this with. If there is a 6 on the floor and one person is standing on the top end while another is standing at the bottom end, one will say its a 6, the other will say its a 9. Who are you to decide that one of them is wrong? However, if someone claimed that its a spaceship, they are clearly wrong. Noone is claiming that you can do anything if you just use different words. Thats your straw people. What is hindering you from accepting the existance of multiple perspectives/points of view?

> It's positivity for the heck of it, to get clicks. In internet parlance, it's gas-lighting yourself.

You might have a point here. Some positivity is really shallow and performative. Whether that applies here I don't know. But even if so, they still make a valid point about the beauty of scars (from a symbol perspective).

It is only your straw-people that propose this kind of relativism. This was about gaining a perspective for appreaciating scars, as they carry memories. It is pointing at the beauty of scars. It is not inverting the meaning of the word, but aiming it at something thus far hidden. The fact that some scars for some people carry heavy trauma does not defeat the point in question.

Also, don't forget that there is no objective criterion for beauty - it is a judgment call. Therefore it is also mediated by language. Even if you correctly see that changing words does not on its own change the world, you are shooting past the target in denying that they have any unique power.

Are you implying that on a basic level or for simple arrangements transformers do explain what happens in the brain? If so, I would be curious to hear how.

What confuses me about this analogy is that it seems to imply this is a matter of a knowledge-base and logical inferences. But the whole reason why LLMs are so successful is that the logical approach was abandoned in favor of a statistical one (and huge amounts of data, compute, and weights). The argument is precisely, that what is not in the training does not find its way into the probability distribution. To claim that LLMs reason is a very far stretch that I don't feel comfortable to let pass.

Do you mean Daybreak and/or Patch the Planet? They are not new (https://openai.com/index/patch-the-planet/)

Or do you mean something different?

I like the idea! Now you're just left with the dilemma of what happens when you reach many people with it - will Scrappy be made for thousands of users, polished and flashy?

I agree, but there are also cases where it is blatantly clear that companies are not only on Trumps side but taking initiative themselves to corrode our political culture, and people here in europe are too comfy to make a switch, apart from a lack of similar alternatives.

X and Meta are most obvious, and I don't know about google's involvement, but have been trying to convince people to move away from it for years. It's a similar situation with streaming services.

I'm sorry but it sounds like you were trying to spread conspiracy theories, the way you are putting it. Do you have some examples?

In comparing neural networks to brains it seems like you are implying a relation between the size/complexity of a thinking machine and the reasonability of its thinking. This gives us nothing, because it disregards the fundamental difference that a neural network is a purely mathematical thing, while a brain belongs to an embodied, conscious human being.

For your implication to be plausible, you either need to deny that consciousnes plays a role in reasonability of thinking (making you a physicalist reductionist) or you need to posit that a neural network can have consciousness (some sort of mystical functionalism).

As both of these alternatives imply some heavy metaphysical assumptions and are completely unbased, I'd advise to avoid thinking of neural networks as an analogue of brains with regards to thinking and reasonability. Don't expect they will make more sense with more size. It is and will continue to be mere statistics.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke... I've been wanting to read that too! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell has been one of my favorite and most immersive books, absolutely brilliant!

Too bad Susanna Clarke got CFS, a very ill researched illness :/

Timeshift does not work for me because I encrypted my ssd, decrypt on boot, but linux sees every file twice, once encrypted and once decrypted, thinking that my storage is full, and thus timeshift refuses to make backups due to no storage. At least thats as far as I'm understanding it atm

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you:

This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people will argue that there is some sort of static meaning hidden behind the actual words which enters the consciousness of the listener, others will say that the meaning is only generated by the person hearing the words.

This is as philosophical of a question as it gets, and has been debated even more heatedly ever since Wittgenstein.

If you do not see that debating these questions is relevant and interesting, but would rather reduce all of philosophy to that first obvious-seeming and thus "not a real problem" position, then I wish you a good time bathing in your ignorance.

However, if you comprehend that what we take for granted in every area and discipline can be subjected to reasonable reflection, then I welcome you to the dark side. Nothing is clear, no knowledge absolute - many engineers seem to forget this while over-indulging in an overly simplistic world view :)

Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. One mission of art is to find a different dimension, out of the curves reach, until eventually it becomes more common and the curve can be fitted to it again. AI cannot think outside of the box because it cannot think at all, there is no meaning behind what it does.

I'm in the following camp: It is wrong to think about the world or the models as "complex systems" that may or may not be understood by human intelligence. There is no meaning beyond that which is created by humans. There is no 'truth' that we can grasp in parts but not entirely. Being unable to understand these complex systems means that we have framed them in such a way (f.e. millions of matrix operations) that does not allow for our symbol-based, causal reasoning mode. That is on us, not our capabilities or the universe.

All our theories are built on observation, so these empirical models yielding such useful results is a great thing - it satisfies the need for observing and acting. Missing explainability of the models merely means we have less ability to act more precisely - but it does not devalue our ability to act coarsely.

I agree. Saying that "the establishment is pro fraud" is not helping at all, because conforming with such a simple label will make us blind to the actual reasons why fraud occurs. It is not that all fraudulent scientists are part of some cult or get taught to be fraudulent. The fraud rather results out of a long series of seemingly small decisions that stack up to the point where they hire paper mills, all the while not performing enough self-reflection. If you want to combat this, you will not be successfull labeling the people doing this as fraudulent. Some may take offense to this and not listen to you. Rather, apart from systemic change also more reflection and ethical awareness should be promoted (Please stop thinking and teaching that science has nothing to do with ethics - that just allows scientists to be blind to their own faults).

Would you say that GPT-4 can reason now? I am not convinced this is case, it seems like it has just become more consistent at providing us with an output that we consider reasonable because it was engineered precisely to do that.

The way that you put it here makes it sound like you have trust issues more than a solid understanding of how democracies (like actual democracies) work and how decisions are made in them.

Could you please explain what the consequences might be for the children?

I played and enjoyed the game, getting the hang of it quickly. What confused me though was that the tapping sounds were not always that consistent with the cutting and mainly that from the beat it sometimes felt like a rhythm game that makes sense, but sometimes was just completely off. Or maybe thats just a skill issue.

This is because knowledge is related to its application. It never stands for itself. The reason why we research something is because it helps us to solve a problem or do something, and thus the context is important. I quite like the definition of understanding as knowing what is possible and what is not.

The coffe shop reserving my place and having my order ready before I arrive sounds nice - but is it not an innecessary luxury, that I would not miss had I never even thought of its possibility? I never asked for it, I was ready to stand in line for my order, and the tracking of my behavior resulted in a pleasant surprise, not a feature I was hoping for. If I really wanted my order to be ready when I arrive, then I would provide the information to you, not expect that you observe me to figute it out.

My point is that I don't get why the small businesses should have the right to track me to offer me better services that I never even asked for. Sure, its nice, but its not worth deregulating tracking and allowing all the evil corps to track me too.

It's good at presenting existing arguments in a good way. But the problem is that such models can only give back what they have seen, consolidating the status quo. There can be no reflection and no outside of the box thinking.

In my perspective this derives from the fact that "knowledge" itself is not some abstract, immaterial thing in the brain, but rather thinking and knowing works through the body and the practical application. Hence the saying "hands-on". Understanding something requires experiencing it, as experience (sensation) is inseparable from consciousness. (We call this phenomenological Emboiment, feel free to check it out!)

You cannot build an ideal society in theory as it will not be realisitic in practice, and you cannot explain reason and feel with words alone, but others need to walk the same experiential path as you did. But since you already figured it out you can help them walk it faster. Thats why we now learn in primary school what originally took a long time until some greek matematician worked it out.

I agree that there is a lot of blabla and that is not beneficial to anyone. But sometimes things that may seem as blabla actually may not be. You say that you care about technical information and every paragraph should contain some. But there is more than just tech, and it is important to motivate why we should care about the tech topic we are reading about. This will require paragraphs here and there that deal with ethical, social, philosophical considerations, and they may seem like space-fillers, however the contents are not trivial. Maybe you know that recommendation algorithms can have negative impacts, still it cant hurt to see arguments for this position. And other people besides you may not think so, and thus it is important to present them with such positions so that there can be a discussion. Whatever "average intelligence" is supposed to mean, not everyone knows the same things I do, no matter how "smart" they are.

> Having motivated, happy teammates is critical to getting things done.

Here it is, in case anyone was looking for a good reason to care about people's happiness

Separation of politics from economy is an impossibilty, and the company that you are describing is only turning a blind eye to its responsibilities to society. You want to make profit the only relevant variable, denying any moral or political factors? What you will end up with is a company that is blind to the effect it has on society and to the reasons of how and why it works. For example, say you have a lot of Nazi customers, for whatever reason (maybe you first openend in a nazi neighborhood and they like you). They say that they want you to stop selling immigrants, and following your profit maximation rules you are happy to accept, as immigrants are a minority here and would not give as much profit as the nazis. However, your opposition has to close shop because every nazi has now flocked to you and the immigrant customers are not enough to keep it running. You end up with extreme polarisation and a lack of freedom for a group of people. This example is super simplified and perhaps not satisfying, but in the complexity of the real world and of online businesses etc. there are so much more mechanisms that can lead to discrimination, especially if they are not reflected upon. This phenomenon, where complete rational focus on one variable is disastrous for other factors that are very important in different ways, is also known as the rationality of irrationality. Please read more about it here [1], you may find that your view of society is quite naive. I don't want to diss you, but I would not be surprised if you reckon its strictly the politics job to care about gender equality, antiracism, etc., and that you like yo blame incompetent politicians for the problems rather than rationalist business people who do not see the consequences of their actions. While profit profit profit may have kind of worked in the sixties, it is time to use our new gained knowledge about societal mechanisms and put them to good to fight more pressing problems than growing gdp.

[1]: https://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2012/09/the-rationalit...

Didn't know this journal does clickbait

> I feel that bikes and electric scooters are more dangerous than cars.

How do you get this idea? In a collision with a pedestrian, the person on the scooter/bike will come to harm more likely than the pedestrian. But such collisions do not happen too often, and when they do, they don't go as bad as car crashes. I live in a German City (Darmstadt) where next to the big roads as well as in the city centre bikes and pedestrians share a lot of place, and it is not a big problem that people keep getting hurt because of this. Most accidents in these places are because bikers had accidents due to bad roads, hidden stairs, car drivers, bad bike lanes, etc. If you ask me, making a city nore bike friendly, also close to pedestrian areas, decreases the chances of bikers getting hurt.

The argument that everything got more complex and bugs are harder to find now, so fun is avoided, does seem convincing, but I believe it does not account for everything. For a philosophical take: the kind of positive effects that easter eggs have, such as joy at work, team cohesion, flimflam - they are not physically measurable. They are immaterial. And the managers who are interested in making a profitable product will be focused on material measures, since at the end of the day that is what seems to be whats important on the market. To put it briefly, I believe that the materialistic world-view inspired by natural sciences and inscribed into our economies is not able to deal with more abstract benefits such as fun.

Or educated researchers with empirical studies and legit concerns