HN user
I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.
That's just not true. I've broken from "science can explain everything" and there's no mud. All of my beliefs are backed with careful reasoning. If there's an unknown, I don't fill it with random garbage.
What specifically you mean by "manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals"? The brain is a system of physical particles. Why do I feel pain when the system is in state X but feel happy when it's in state Y? Physics can't explain that.
Do you seriously think that there's any chance that writing a lot of zeros on a piece of paper will create a feeling of pain in some conscious being?
Gist of the argument:
If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.
Yes, we're stuck at the first step, defining consciousness. My definition, which I am confident to be "correct", is that consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts - my state of mind and my ability to have state of mind.
This means that consciousness is fundamentally subjective and outside the scope of physics and science. That's why physics / science will always struggle to deal with consciousness. In order to understand consciousness, you need to make a huge paradigm shift, that there's something outside of science.
Consciousness can be thought as a window through which we observe the world and we use science to summarize patterns in our observations. But science can't explain or even define the window. Everything in science eventually boils down to subjective observations / perceptions, e.g. we see (subjective perception) that when we drop an apple, it falls.
I assign probabilities of zero to all 3. Computer program being conscious leads to ridiculous and obviously false conclusions (think about a person running a program using pen and paper for memory).
Yes, this is basically my only issue with SQLite. SQLite with a strict type system would be great.
Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.
Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.
Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.
All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
Why not? How could it negatively affect my life?
For example using nested .gitignore files vs using one root .gitignore file. I guess this principle is related to this one:
Imagine the code as a graph with nodes and edges. The nodes should be grouped in a way that when you display the graph with grouped nodes, you see few edges between groups. Removing a group means that you need to cut maybe 3 edges, not 30. I.e. you don't want something where every component has a line to every other component.
Also when working on a feature - modifying / adding / removing, ideally you want to only look at an isolated group, with minimal links to the rest of the code.
Not a law but a a design principle that I've found to be one of the most useful ones and also unknown:
Structure code so that in an ideal case, removing a functionality should be as simple as deleting a directory or file.
I have some of those too, to a limited extent.
Not worried about inequality, at least not in the sense that AI would increase it, I'm expecting the opposite. Being intelligent will become less valuable than today, which will make the world more equal, but it may be not be a net positive change for everybody.
Regarding meaning and purpose, I have some worries here too, but can easily imagine a ton of things to do and enjoy in a post-AGI world. Travelling, watching technological progress, playing amazing games.
Maybe the unidentified cause of unease is simply the expectation that the world is going to change and we don't know how and have no control over it. It will just happen and we can only hope that the changes will be positive.
Ok, so the answer is "they make the existing model worse to make it seem that the new model is good". I'm almost certain that this is not what's going on. It's hard to make the argument that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of such approach. It doesn't give the more market share or revenue.
Really? I think it's pretty straightforward, at least for me - fear of AI replacing my profession and also fear that it will become harder to succeed with a side project.
I don't get it. Why would they make the previous model worse before releasing an update?
I 100% agree with this take, I find AI completely non-scary, especially in the sense that it's some kind of a conscious entity that will want to take over. I find these people almost delusional. It's a powerful tool, so it can be dangerous if used by people with bad intentions, so there's some real danger here, but my intuition is that it will be fine. The ratio between the power of people with good vs bad intentions shouldn't change too dramatically.
The only scary part is that it could be bad for my future as a software developer. That said, I think it will be net benefit for the average worker - the average person will work less and earn more.
Messy in a way that would affect you?
I've been increasingly "freaking out" since about 3 - 4 years ago and it seems that the pessimistic scenario is materializing. It looks like it will be over for software engineers in a not so distant future. In January 2025 I said that I expect software engineers to be replaced in 2 years (pessimistic) to 5 years (optimistic). Right now I'm guessing 1 to 3 years.
Whether you're excited depends on what do you do for living and how close you are to financial independence.
That's a possible outcome. Another possibility is that AI will handle all of the thinking and problem solving part. So the market value of thinking will drop. The bottleneck will still be humans, but their input will be (1) doing physical, real-world stuff (2) providing data that the AI doesn't have, e.g. information about a specific problem domain or how does a user interface feel.
I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities.
I really don't understand this way of thinking. Don't you think that AI could replace senior engineers? Sure, companies will be able to do bigger / better / more ambitious stuff - but without any software engineers.
Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?
I definitely think that AI will be a net benefit for society but it could easily end up being be bad for me.
If existing capital starts to generate excessive profits, more capital will be built, which will require human labor and will make the original capital less valuable.
Usually yes.
Interesting, this shows growth in open positions: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
Can you share some out of curiosity? Yes, I know that $20k is a full salary in many countries.
Good ideas (and the ability to recognize them) are very valuable in my opinion. It also depends on what you mean by an idea:
- A todo app better than the existing ones
- A todo app with these 3 features
- A todo app with these 3 features, here's how the UI would look
I have tens of ideas, but maybe 1 - 3 that I believe have a meaningful chance to become successful and generate income ($20k annually or more) with great execution. I find it hard to come up with ideas that have a fairly clear path to success and can generate income.
Disagree. Ideas were a necessary component of the one project I had success with. BTW, the line between ideas and execution is blurred. Is coming up with innovative UI and features ideas or execution?
The counterpoint is that it's only 2 months since AI got really useful and it will presumably continue to improve. It takes a while until it spreads through the society.
Sure, AI replacing intelligence (simply speaking) is good for the society on average, but probably bad for me.