thinkling
thinkling on Hacker News
32GB Unified RAM max. Is that really the machine I want for running local LLMs?
I had the opposite take on LLMs using Kahnemann's framework.
Maybe I need to reread his book, but I think of System 1 as "fast, reflexive, instinctive" mental activity, and System 2 as "slow, deliberative, rational, verbal" thought.
So exactly inverse to this article, I characterize LLMs as 100% System 2, and would say that what's missing in AI is the more "embodied" System 1 intelligence.
My current thinking is that the experience of consciousness is closely tied to that embodied, emotional side of our nervous system, and is 100% lacking in LLMs. Anthropic people will say "the models have neural correlates of emotion", and that's fine, our cortex also has neural correlates for emotions and for much of what happens in the cerebellum and brain stem. That doesn't mean that that's where the primary function is implemented.
> the people at Whole Foods who have to people find their “prime code” in people’s apps because it’s impossible to find.
This used to be easy and then they moved it somewhere counterintuitive in the app that my brain refuses to remember. I swear.
Now they’ve put a QR code on the checkout console, and scanning that opens the Amazon app to the right spot. Scan a code to scan a code… modern life.
(WHat’s really ridiculous is that I’m paying with my Amazon Prime VISA card—why doesn’t that automatically get me my prime discounts? It’s my default method of payment on the Amazon site, it’s not like they don’t know about it. No, I need to jump through some other hoops to “enroll” or “link” my card or something for that to work. eyeroll )
I hope you have been installing security updates for the OS version you have. At some point, those end, and then you're looking at a different trade-off in not upgrading.
I think they were asking, "If this is a model produced by Meta with an API designed to be compatible with OpenAI models, but it's not actually an OpenAI model, why is Meta hosting it on Azure?"
In 2003, Gates was no longer CEO; I think he was President of the Board and something like "Special Advisor"? None of the people involved reported to him, so he may actually correctly have felt he could not tell them what to do?--so he stuck to venting his frustration.
> What makes it seem crazy is cars entering have right of way.
The thing that’s bananas is that this is a City of Paris rule. In the rest of France, traffic entering a roundabout must yield. Not inside Paris. Better make sure you know this!
And even more crazy, the Periphérique, the controlled-access ring road around Paris which tends to move at 40-50mph, is a city street and so traffic entering that highway-like “street” also has right-of-way.
Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.
A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.
Mmm, no, I don’t think it’s equivalent. I think they know that if you make the work hard, some employees will have trouble keeping up and will do things like peeing in bottles. And they’re OK with that, because they think there are enough people who can keep up that they can push the weaker people out. I think they believe that the peeing in bottle is relatively rare. I’m unsure whether that’s right or not. It’s been reported that it happens, but I have no sense whether it’s common.
Is there auto-updating of plug-ins?
Installing a plug-in and reviewing its code at that point is one thing. But if the plug-in can be updated withut you knowing, then there’s little guarantee of security.
Thanks for the inside insight.
I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work.
My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.
Interesting. I know that some smaller jurisdictions in the US (cities and counties) run non-partisan primaries and elections. Have party-less elections been done at the national level anywhere? Did they not result in de-facto party competitions? Curious to know where and read up.
What tech will be used for this?
I hope it’s better than other sensor tech in cars that think they need to warn you that you’re about to hit something at the front when the car is in reverse, that can't distinguish a bike rack statically attached to the car from the environment, and so on.
What do you dislike about the common proportional representation models?
Do they reconstruct the scene graph for each frame?! Maybe I'm overinterpreting the phrasing. Someone take a peek at the source?
A similar explanatory mirage happens in elections: when a candidate loses by (say) 1% of the vote, people go looking for factors that produced a 1% swing and declare, “it’s because of inflation! it’s because they took position X! it’s because the other team focused harder on turnout!”. You can find several such explanations and no single one is the causal one.
+1 on most of this. A small note: I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress. I take the Buddha to have said roughly, “I teach the origin of unhappiness and how to liberate yourself from it.”
One thing scientists are trying is to see what interventions in the brain seem to make consciousness go away. Continued work in that vein may well set bounds on how consciousness can and cannot be caused and give us some idea.
Do you think bacteria have will? Or plants?
When their actions are sped up to match the speed at which we move, movies of their behavior will start to look like there's intent and will. Plants move towards the light, tendrils "reach" for supports, etc.
Clearly this is humans projecting our mental model onto plants, but... are you sure we're not also projecting it onto ourselves?
Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.
The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.
Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software.
[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.
Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?
Seems to be offline, FYI.
Interesting! Seems like this could very easily be generalized. Tool sharing/swapping, ditto for books, rides to things other than the airport, etc. E.g. on the latter: some medical procedures like colonoscopies (basically anything that involves general anaesthesia) require you to have someone pick you up at the end, you're not allowed to take a Lyft home. That seems highly viable for trading favors, though hard to build trust on unless it's part of a larger sharing network.
Um, why would anyone be "holding the bag" and who needs protecting by society? He's not taking out a loan, he's getting capital investment in a startup. People are gambling that he will do well and make money for them. If they gamble wrong, that's on them. Society won't be doing anything either way because investors in startups that fail don't get anything.
I think they are reading it correctly. Year 1, they touched one drive and left 9 untouched. Year 2, they read one additional drive and left 8 untouched. Etc.
Agreed, would really like to understand what this (setting the LLM up to assume a role to improve performance) is doing under the cover and why it works.
Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"
My read was roughly that agents require constraining scaffolding (CLAUDE.md) and careful phrasing (prompt engineering) which together is vaguely like working in a DSL?
Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to if you’ve used the equivalent on the desktop. You’ll need to keep the iPad screen accessible to tap on UX elements. There’s also the issue that shortcuts that do exist may be hard to discover because there’s no menu bar to look in.