TL; DR: no aliens because this is a simulation focused on one planet.Notice how conveniently we are placed, far away from any other interesting objects in our galaxy. If you were designing a simulation, what would you do to keep your simulated beings guessing about the rest of the universe? You would make everything interesting inaccessible, and you would not attempt to simulate other species...
People who are knowledgeable in a particular obscure area tend to do the same thing.
The only thing they got wrong was Stephen Hawking-era TTS.
One day he called me with a fascinating question. He was making his first guitar, and he wanted to know: Where do I put the frets?
Without just temperament, we would never have had "The Well Tempered Clavier", Bobby Daren's "Mac The knife", and basically all of western music from the baroque period on.
It's also a well-established fact that many of the most famous musicians in history, from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky did not have perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch can even be a negative factor in one's musical training. For example, in musical theater, cabaret, and jazz, transposition is a necessary skill. Singers routinely ask the accompianist (on piano) to move the key up or down to match their vocal range. I have heard anecdotally that perfect pitch actually makes it difficult to transpose, because if you learned a song in a certain key, the transposed version sounds like a different tune.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.
Cray cray
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
For as long as I can remember, about once a week or so someone on Hacker News introduced their pet project, a new programming language. It almost seems like a rite of passage to, for some period at least, believe that you can beat the odds and come up with a way of presenting information that improves upon present methods and, just perhaps, goes viral and changes the world of software by some...
When I write piece of code that is elegant, efficient, and -- "right" -- I get a dopamine rush, like I finished a difficult crossword puzzle. Seems like that joy is going to go away, replaced by something more akin to developing a good relatioship with a slightly quirky colleague who happens to be real good (and fast) at some things -- especially things management likes, like N LOC per week -- but this colleague sucks up to everyone, always thinks they have the right answer, often seems to understand things on a superficial level, and oh -- works for $200 / month...
Shades of outsourcing to other continents...
But the insights gleaned from that battle are (for Claude) lost forever as soon as I start on a new task.
The way LLM's (fail to) handle memory and in-situ learning (beyond prompt engineering and working within the context window) is just clearly deficient compared to how human minds work.
Another kvetch: using car seats in taxis. Maybe it's different now with Uber but 20 years ago the drivers hated it because you have to find the seat belt and secure the car seat...
Switch to Claude (IMSHO, I think Gemini is considered on par). Use a proper coding tool, cutting & pasting from the chat window is so last week.
Another way of looking at it: there are 4 states going in (0 or 1 on 2 pushers) but there are only 2 states of the 'memory' contraption, so you lose a bit on every iteration (like classical Boolean circuits)
Exactly wrong. See the halting problem