irenaeus
irenaeus on Hacker News
There are actually a lot of trivial reasons why that couldn't possibly be the case, such as the observation of non computable physical phenomena.
I have far more epistemic humility than someone who thinks that consciousness arises out of the abstract form of a calculation rather than the physical substrate of a calculation. Believing that consciousness is tied to a specific physical substrate is on-its-face reasonable whereas believing that consciousness is tied to specific abstract forms is on-its-face unreasonable because to do so requires believing all kinds of absurd sequela.
I believe that a microprocessor is what it appears to be, that is, a microprocessor. That is the most epistemicly humble approach. You are rushing to ascribe personhood to a microprocessor with a certain kind of software running on it, or at the very least, saying that we can't rule personhood out. You are the one making the leap, not me.
Intelligence != consciousness, because believing that is so would require one to believe that the pain of a cognitively normal person is more real than the pain of someone with a developmental disability.
Also, I do not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. Rather I have ruled out a particular answer, that is, the answer that consciousness arises from calculation in the abstract.
Who says I don't include octopi or dolphins?
They worship something far worse than money.
Roughly, a brain like the one that is in your skull. Just because I can't off hand describe the physical composition of a brain doesn't mean it's not obviously different from the physical composition of a GPU.
Neurons are different from GPU logic gates and the physical mechanisms by which a network of physical neurons computes answers is extremely different from the physical mechanism by which a GPU computes an answer.
The answer is yes, it is a p-zombie. What is so difficult about that?
Being able to make someone think a computer program is conscious does not make it conscious, because by that logic a Duke Nukem soundboard is conscious.
I will believe that an AI model is conscious when someone runs a simulation of water on a GPU that can make someone wet.
Consciousness is a physical phenomenon and only emerges from a specific set of substrates. Intelligence != consciousness.
This is what I was missing. Demanding that porn sites block VPN traffic (or only accept residential traffic) would mean that everyone everywhere using a VPN gets blocked not just in Utah.
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
Yeah but the state of Utah could just tell them to knock it off because they're the state.
So it would be possible if the state demanded that VPN companies provide adult sites with continuously updated lists of their exit nodes.
It also seems to me like Utah could just demand that adult sites only accept traffic from residential ips.
This requires a lot of extra work though, and extra work is downward pressure on the behavior (underage people looking at pornography) that the state of Utah is trying to exert downward pressure on.
The inability to immediately and perfectly eliminate a behavior is not a good enough reason to be against any attempt to eliminate that behavior.
Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?
I am aware and mostly agree with the dogma about how decision-making power should be delegated to those with the most relevant information to that decision. In fact, that to me seems a bit tautological and beside the point.
My point is essentially that there are situations where a monopoly is the best system available especially if you can rely on those involved to act in good faith. For example, I think the government holding a monopoly on policing power is the best available system. Within that monopoly power can be delegated a whole manner of ways, but ultimately the public good of policing is distributed through a manner of sub-institutions all answerable to a single institution.
I think the real delta in our views is I see the values of the people within a system as of equal or more importance to the structure of the system itself. It seems to me that you reason about this topic in an almost purely abstract manner, attempting to posit a "perfect" system which could work no matter who was actually implementing it, and indeed would be the best no matter who was actually implementing it. I used to think this way, but came to the conclusion that it was impossible.
"In a high trust society people aren't trying to con you but they're still subject to structural constraints."
In a high trust society people are not, generally, trying to con you whether or not they are subject to structural constraints.
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
The Book of the New Sun is probably my favorite "sci fi" series. It's so incredibly different in terms of tone, content, philosophy, and style. How's "Chronicle"?
"A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient."
Actually it very literally does.
We are not talking about chainsaws and excavators, we are talking about LLMs. LLMs have different risks in terms of scale and kind and must be considered differently.
Banning hardware and banning software are very different things, and the latter is orders of magnitude easier than the former. Physical and non-physical things are different!
I must have missed the part of the letter where China's cooperation was necessary.
I thought his points were legitimate and well argued. I think that it's very easy to say "X should be unrestricted". I also think that eventually one of these models will be used to do something truly destructive and insane and that some level of "compelled responsibility" to the open-weight model ecosystem is inevitable.
I've read some allocator walkthroughs before but I thought that this line stood out:
"to get individual free() working, the allocator needs to remember something about every allocation it handed out. and that’s the moment metadata stops being optional."
That's just a very nice distillation of an important concept.
It's strange to me that adolescents are (or seem to be) wired to want to wake late and sleep late, since waking early and sleeping early is a predictor of a predictor of lower all cause mortality!
I read the abstract, pretty interesting. I did a word search for "wake" looking for if they talked at all about early waking times being correlated with overall regularity, as that has been my personal experience. Unfortunately they didn't talk about it, or if they did I couldn't find it.
Good for you. Personally I just take four zzzquil ultras every night.
