tatjam

The new learn to code haha! I personally find dancing to be the hardest of public hobbies to even think about doing, guess I'm too shy

As Ernest Becker would ask, then what is your "immortality project"? Even worse, what's the immortality project for the vast majority of humanity? Do we just bring back religion to Middle Ages levels? Or do we hope everybody goes through some kind of never-before-in-history spiritual awakening?

If we are going to go technical I would argue that artists generate a highly derivative work, i.e. they input the "training data" via their eyes, experience of the world, ruminating (is that the word?) about art... and then output motions of their hands, words, and so on which create new artistic work.

Diffusion models tune a series of numbers via a complicated but essentially straightforward and "pipeline-like" process from the training data, so their work is significantly less derivative, even if visually it looks different. I guess we all agree that say, a encrypted zip file of a song is not a derivative, it's the song after some data processing.

Maybe we should improve the definition of derivative work to express how many layers of indirection lie between training material and output? If I trace over a painting I guess most would agree I've barely done any art, and I think that the process is more or less "pipeline-like" (even if complicated): input data is immediately converted to "art" by my brain following the lines. An artist that studies Goya for years and slowly improves his Goya-like portraits is another kind of level of indirection between training material and output!

Is it even subsidy after the training? One could argue scientific papers are a huge fraction of the reason LLMs are good

To contribute my n=1, I consider that when using LLMs I do have a huge pull towards "just let the AI cook", and often it really approaches problems better than I ever could. I try to keep the Rust's LLM policy in mind, let it review, search and suggest but not create, and hopefully that way I can keep my brain function. That was (until now?) one of the few things that couldn't be taken away from you easily.

Dropping in to mention belief propagation networks, those things are likely being used right now by the modem on whatever device you use (WiFi or Ethernet, both use it!), and are surprisingly AI-like.

If I was Stephen Wolfram, i'd be screaming (in a very academic way) "you are just talking about computational irreducibility!!" LLMs are very close to computationally irreducible, no chance you can predict its output from the prompt alone. Source code meanwhile is fairly reducible (and is typically reduced to machine code by the compiler). And even complex source code is intentionally designed to be highly reducible via abstractions. Good luck making prompts that reduce the complexity of the LLM behavior!

This is a good take, but where does one consciousness end, and another begin?

Does my consciousness extend only to the central nervous system (and peripheral nerves and such are inputs)? Or am I my brain + all nerves? What about organs, does my consciousness include my liver? Is my liver another conscious entity? Going the other way, if I'm using a computer, does my consciousness extend to the computer? I use a computer for well over 8 hours a day, I can use vim motions more naturally than, say, move my earlobes or control my toes. Does that make it part of my consciousness?

Sadly, I don't think any answer to these questions can be achieved in our current times, or maybe ever if consciousness is somehow non-physical. So even the very reasonable claim that consciousness is an statistically defined property (like temperature) is too far fetched for our current knowledge.

You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.

Plus the fact that then you need the everything to be structurally strong to be able to support 1atm of pressure differential, keep the vacuum sealed, and keep material degassing under control, so you end up with some heavy duty, expensive stuff. Pretty sure a lot of steps in the chip fab are done under very very high vaccums tho!

The only possible way for this to do anything measurable if it somehow reduces the 50/60Hz AC hum impressed on your body. But either way with the wavelength of 60Hz in meat being like earth sized I dont think any significant electric fields will arise within two points of your body to do anything meaningful (as long as you stay AC coupled, if you DC couple to mains health effects are guaranteed).

I presume "anti-satellite campaign" means hundreds of anti-satellite missiles launched into LEO / MEO, at which point we do have a serious problem

Well considering the proof is pretty much accepted by mathematicians to be correct (I'll be happy with that!), it would be sort of unnecessary to cheat. Maybe if some aspect is really tricky to formalize it could have done something there? If I had to search for it, I would go for parts of the original proof that are "outsourced" to other mathematical works. Imagine one of the agents struggling to download a paper due to a paywall or whatever and just deciding to cheat lol

I think there's a big misunderstanding going on here, translating the proof to Lean is, well... a translation task. Formalizing the proof in a way that's useful (breaks the proof down into relatively independent blocks that can be used for other maths and, importantly, understood individually) is a quite bigger, more creative endeavor. Not sure if LLMs would be able to do it, maybe yes?

Makes sense, I presume any defense corporation (even small ones of the drone manufacturer style) could get one of these running in a few months if needs arise.

Now, for the defense model of "western" nations (once again, not saying this is a bad thing nor wrong), a dumb warhead that just lands wherever and explodes makes no sense, no tactic would be enabled by it, so I guess the natural course of actions is you get heavier guidance requirements (case in point, radar homing), then you get operation in GPS-denied environment, then some other part of the army decides it needs to be carried on fighter jets, and another team wants it carried on frigates, and suddenly you have developed a million-€ loitering munition instead of a 10k€ V1 tactical-analogue!

I wonder, at the point of such a simple thing as the Saheed (there are videos online of some of its electronics, not saying it's bad, indeed it's cheap and effective, but it's dirt simple), does the USA really need to reverse engineer it? Is it just a way to prevent project management turning the thing into a million dollar per unit thing?

I'm a bit of a victim to this mindset. I don't particularly play many video games, except the occasional one that clicks, but love making small game experiences and similar. I find that gamedev programming is very fun and engaging. Nonetheless, I don't think that I have the combination of skills and creativity (nor game knowledge) to make a game as great as those that have clicked for me in the past ;)

I'm running my remarkable on some ancient software version, and honestly for my use case (reading textbooks and occasional note taking) the old version is perfectly fine.

I don't connect it to the internet, just use the awesome RCU software (paid, but distributed with source code) to move stuff between it and my computer. I presume if I were to try to update it, I'll find the same fate! About exporting, the notebook format is relatively simple, I wrote a very bare-bones software that's able to convert the notebooks to PDF in a few hundred lines of Nim, or you could just use the integrated web UI.

Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)

In a twisted kind of way, this is an advantage of going to court in the US being SO expensive, even $500k may not be enough to justify it!

You can't use a solar sail for this, but if you use lasers, you can get a few newtons / GW of incident laser power. Sci-fi stuff but if you can make a very very light reflector that can somehow be cooled (microscopic IR dipoles come to mind), and a very very focused and powerful laser, you can go a long way. Not sure what the purpose of moving a thin metalized foil at a fraction of lightspeed would be, though :)

Galileo already contains this function for the navigation message via OSNMA, and GPS CHIMERA is soon to be operational, with the latter actually including crytographic "signatures" in the spreading code itself, so if you use these two constellations you become really harder to spoof.

Of course, they dont protect against jamming.

Uranium is not even that rare, it's just that when chemistry fails at separating atoms, you have to use physics, and 3 ~proton~ (EDIT: neutron) masses is very little to work with

This is a very cool idea, feels like a sane way to use LLMs in this crazy time! Could be a very good way to break the ice when starting a new project and everything is friction.

I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.

Aggh if only its LSP was better! I have always run into issues when using Helix with it (it kept crashing), and I'm absolutely spoiled by good LSPs in other languages :(

Wish I had the time and skill to actually contribute to the LSP, if you have ever used Nim it's a seriously underrated language.

Welp, I mean once the Rust rewrite is merged, isn't it vibecoded? Fair enough, it was vibecoded from a pretty detailed Zig specification :)

Precisely, I would say embassy is a satisfying middle-point between "baremetal" firmware and running something like FreeRTOS / NuttX that hides the event loop from you.

Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?

I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).