monkeycantype

One of my favourite conversations I ever had with another human being, was with someone who was telling me about a book he was reading, which he evidently loved very much. He spoke almost no English, and I spoke absolutely no Cantonese, so the entire fifteen minute conversation was conducted with gesture, intonation and the phrases: 'one man' 'many mans' 'some kung fu' 'many _(* n)_ kungfus!'

I love the left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, all the hainish books, but I have never loved any book as much as my conversation partner loved his book about many many Kung Fus.

I only know your mother from a distance, although sometimes that was only few blocks apart on the map, I'm not aware of even passing her on the on the street, I knew only the part of her revealed in her writing and records of her public speaking, but even from that distance she has been one of the most influencial people in my life, her writing had deep impact on me, my view of the world and the person I have become.

yes I agree it's not the angle of the article, but it is my entry point into the idea/concern/unanswered question at the end of the article “My worry is not that these models are similar to us. It’s that we are similar to these models.” - that the enormous difference in the medium and mechanics or our minds and llm's might not be that important.

before i go any further, let me first reference The Dude:

     - "this is just like, my opinion man."

I’m down with the idea that LLM’s have been especially successful because they ‘piggyback on language’ – our tool and protocol for structuring, compressing, and serialising thought, which means it has been possible to train LLM’s on compressed patterns of actual thought and have them make new language that sure looks like thought, without any direct experience of the concepts being manipulated, and if they do it well enough we will do the decompression, fleshing out the text with our experiential context. But I suspect that there are parts of my mind that also deal with concepts in an abstract way, far from any experiential context of the concept, just like the deeper layers of a neural network. I’m open to the idea, that just as the sparse matrix of an LLM is encoding connection between concepts without explicitly encoding edges, I think there will be multiple ways that we can look as the structure of an AI model and at our anatomy so that they are a squint and a transformation function away interesting overlaps. that will lead to and a kind of 'god of the gaps' scenario in which we conceptually carve out pieces of our minds as, 'oh the visual cortext is just an X', and deep questions about what we are.

Until we have a testable, falsifiable thesis of how consciousness forms in meat, it is rash to exclude that consciousness could arise from linear algebra. Our study of the brain has revealed an enormous amount about how our anatomy processes information, but nothing of substance on the relationship between matter and consciousness. The software and data of an operating LLM is not purely abstract, it has a physical embodiment as circuits and electrons. Until we understand how matter is connected to consciousness, we also cannot know whether the arrangements and movements of electrons meet the criteria for forming consciousness.

Hello Rohan. This is really great. If you are able to included parameters to expose the intermediate data as inputs and outputs, so that this can be run to a step in the process and output the data, or run from a step with pre-prepared data. It would mean that other people could build on what you've done to create other diagrams and renderings.

as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people

no, chi and centrifugal force do not really exist. But because everything we percieve is essentially a metaphor, a model of reality, sometimes chi or loosy goosey uses of the word 'energy' really can be a valid heuristic for the things that you can do to optimise your 'ability to do work'. As long as you remember its a vague, subjective, context restricted heuristic, and don't try shooting chi bullets, I say max your chi flow friend.

I think it's the theory in the article linked just above by renewiltord

Ah! That's the thread, not the source I read but I beat if I read the referenced paper I get there , thank you

I wasn't but that's intriguing Thank you

no there is a very specific reason, related to mapping the 2d surface of your body to a 2d mapping on your brain that allows the areas of your brain that process sensory input from your skin to be adjacent to the processing of the areas that are adjacent on the skin that only works with a flip, I can remember what that is, I only remember the tingle of understanding it at the time

can you be my collective memory for a minute, I remember the existence of a very satisfying engineering explanation for why the representation of various body parts needs to be flipped left/right in the brain that came down to the topology of the wiring, and explained why unflipped isn't feasible / or perhaps it was just less efficient, it was one of those 'mind explodes' moments, but now I can't recall the logic.

I disagree, these are not anonymous people, but real work collegues that I enjoyed working with, who would love to be able to settle in Australia, and would make a great contribution to the country. Australia without post war migration would be a much duller place. The fact that companies use immigation as a lever against fair wages, doesn't mean that there are not also skills shortages in many areas. I don't think we should conflate that with the need to care for citizens, which I would rather we approach with fair tax systems, maybe some resource extraction royalties and using the increase tax income on vastly increased infrastructure and social spending.

Blaming immigrants instead of systematic explotation and inequality takes us down the disasterous Brexit path.

I'm ont talking about anonomous people, I'm talking about remote-work collegues whose name I know. They were not slaves, they were absolutley paid wages, but not equivalent wages to local hires.

I worked for a company that was bought by CBA, and this was happening while I was there. This would be great if: Indian workers were hired on equivalent terms, in Australia, on visas that give them a clear path to citizenship. If they were hired as individuals and not via contracing companies that force them to sign separate secret contracts that prevent them from pushing for their full legal rights under Australian labor law. Immigration has been great for Australia in countless ways. I get really upset about they way large labor firms have co-opted as immigration a lever for corporations to undermine Australian working conditions and exploit Indian workers and I really don't know what to do about.

Thank you. Is there somewhere I can read about the different theological viewpoints/practices of different branches?

Some influential people in my life were quakers, which has given me a lifelong interest in quakerism, but in my one interaction with a quaker meeting, I was surprised that it seemed much closer to bible based church than I had expected. I think I had expected a skepticism about holy texts as literary/cultural creation rather than the direct word of god, a philosophical attitude of god as an abstract anthropomorphism because 'god may be addressed but never comprehended', but apart from the chairs and egalitarianism, it could have been any other bible group.

Did I misunderstand something, what's your better informed take?

I wonder instead if what is being described here comes from a conflation of drag and maybe something from the BDSM world with trans? I think it does describe the experience of people who live a life in which they feel if not undesirable, then at least ordinary, who have an costumed highly sexualised alter-ego which they inhabit a kind of performance which put makes them a focus of attention, sometimes of desire, and sometimes in a position of power (not these are not exclusive) that is very different from their ordinary lives.

I also ask for any nested codeblocks to be delimited with ~~~, not ``` so as not to break out of the code block

pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.

[delayed]

But your eyeball, retina, all of it, would be producing the same light. Maybe if you had a special eye scrotum of low light producing tissue that hung away from the body.

If we all work on this, I think we can seed the chemtrails-verse with the belief that ancient hunter gatherer men saw nocturnal prey with their testicles, and that you can learn to do it now with a combo of ice baths and bow hunting naked

I have long deep close experience with people who create similar situations, who have no criminal intent, just a remorseless indefatigable belief that this time it's going to work, and I have witnessed many times that the vaster the vision, the more laws of physics violated, the more absurd the suspension of belief required to hold a narrative in your head, the more passionatley it will inspire certain people who are looking for a quest, a purpose so grand it will rewrite the story of their life in one bold move.

I remember from a few few years back that the lipid coating may have caused problems for the liver, when treating people for diseases that needed to target a lot of tissue, such as muscle disorders. Is that still the case?

I vote we aim the heat dishes at passing comets to steer them into moon to give it temporary oceans and atmosphere.

Finishing off above question…

Is that What this model is suggesting or is the uneven distribution of mass contributing too?

If it’s all a swirling spinning turbulent mess is there enough difference in relative velocity that we’ve had more or less time since the Big Bang than other places?

Importantly this is how I work on my own personal fun projects, so it really doesn't matter if is productive, I find it enjoyable so I'm going to keep exploring it, there will be pros and cons, don't have the final ficture on that yet

claude can't manage the big picture of what I'm trying to achieve, and claude and the others hallucinate all the time.

I have them all write simple tests for the code, so if they introduce me to a new library, I have tests to prove their assumptions.

And I review everything and tweak everything.

In my day job I work as a lead dev / arch, this isn't must different, working with Claude is like working with a large team of very inconsistent devs, with deep knowledge, but a tenous grasp on reality that struggle with attention. So not that much different from real people?

My dad wrote code generators, back in the 70's and 80's that I did some work on early in my career, those code generators which took a high level description of a program and output mainframe code, made most of the money that paid for raising my siblings and I. From that perspective I've been roboting myself my entire professional life.

I disagree with this negative take. I can use Claude to quickly explore libraries, I’m not familiar with, and have developed a development process where I describe the purpose of each class and method in a markdown file , and have Claude, Gemini, deep seek and Chat all pitch descriptions of how to implement it in shared markdown files. I correct their misconceptions and inefficiencies before any code is written, I can write this code myself, but I’m finding I can work faster like this.

leptin deficiency is rare, so supplementation does not produce an effect in most people.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199909163411204

There is more information about the family involved out there, but I can't remember where I read about it.

A thing I found interesting about the genetics of hunger, is the concept of mongenetic, v polygenetic traits Monogenetic traits - a variation in a single gene is has an observed often severe impact. Polygenetic traits - variations in a large number of genes and environmental are contributing In reality these traits exist on a spectrum of severity. The more sublte the impact of a gene the more people you need to study to tease out the influence of the gene, so monogenetic traits tend to be discovered first.