aaimnr

There's no machine, and there's no ladder. However with sufficient people believing it exists and acting like it does, it becomes real in its own way.

Reminds me of Wilfrid Sellars: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”.

"Hanging together" doesn't impose as many assumptions as "having specific foundation". It's a very distinct philosophical stance to assume that any kind of human knowledge has a specific foundation, and a naive one at that.

Bonus task - reveal what prompt was used for the second agent (that was controlling the first's output).

That would be circular, no new information would be provided to the model.

I bet this sounds like a dream to at least 20% of folks here. I'd love to read about your transition, how does it feel after a while - that would be amazing HN submission. Good luck!

The part about hostility is a perfect observation. The reason is that compulsive thoughts are usually driven by fear.

Your mention about shaking your head is very interesting. How did you come up with that? Are you aware of Peter Levine's or David Berceli's work on shaking/trembling as a natural stress-releasing mammallian instinct that people are usually repressing?

Wow, didn't expect it here. Chapman is an amazing guy. Influenced mostly by Buddhism, has a good grasp of western philosophy and his insights into AI make things even more interesting (he was playing part in the GOFAI).

The message is very subtle, but much closer to reality than most of the other suggestions here. The difficult part is that it requires letting go a lot of views to which we are very attached. Not your typical feel-good motivational book.

For all the reasons you use any kind of backend. To access authenticated resources, to persist data centrally, to share information between users, to hide your proprietary code...

Indeed! Amazing talk and amazing mind, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of Rich Hickey (whom he mentions in the talk), similarly independent and deep thinking from the first principles.

"They've realised words don't mean anything in the absolute sense (they all rely on each other, cyclic referential) and are just part of a game, but are still neck deep in useless words instead of using evolutionary and RL concepts to concretely model consciousness and the game it plays."

That's a full-on nihilistic postmodernism. The fact that words mean something only in reference to other words doesn't have to mean that they are useless. Quine and other pragmatists (Buddhism does the same) argued otherwise - that concepts/theories derive meaning or truth-value from how useful they are in the real world (as a network, rather than individually).

Treating all philosophers as a one camp vs science is mistaken. Whatever any particular scientist or engineer say, there always will be some philosophical assumptions behind it. It's always better to make them explicit rather than be in the dark. The best scientists in history were pretty deep in philosophy as well.

Eg. Tononi is both philosopher and a scientist. He's clearly on Chalmers' side philosophically, he perceives consciousness as something fundamental, MUCH more fundamental than learning. He posits that even stable systems (so with no learning at all) can be conscious. Which makes a lot of sense from phenomenological point of view. He also adds a theory of how specifically consciousness may be related causally with the physical world. That's the scientific part.

Silvers, on the other hand, and the whole RL thing is not concerned with consciousness AT ALL! It's a completely different problem. Actually it may be the case that most of the learning processes in human mind are unconscious!

"There is no consciousness in itself, just consciousness of something. Learning is what ties together agent and environment..." Exactly - if you define learning as a relationship between a system and its environment, you don't need anything else (like cosciousness), just the actual and potential interactions.

Late Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others would be on the same page with you here, so again, let's not throw the baby of philosophy out with the bathwater. These observations were made in the first half of XX century. They apply perfectly to the naivete of old school symbolic AI (and a logical positivism philosophical stance behind it), as captured by Hubert Dreyfuss, who described all the problems with it from philosophical (phenomenological specifically) standpoint in "What computers can't do" and his more recent paper ( http://cspeech.ucd.ie/Fred/docs/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf ). RL seems to be step in the right direction in this perspective. However...

"[Learning] ... it's the building force of consciousness."

Well, this part just doesn't make sense. You want to focus on explaining learning? Fine. Do some work on RL, it's enligthening for sure. I completely agree that it's fascinating how new concepts emerge in AlhaGo around some specific baord configurations. It changed people's understanding of the game. But please, don't conflate it with consciousness. And if you do, be open about it and name your position in terms of Chalmers' recent paper. Is it some form of illusionism? Only then we can have meaningful conversation about your actual position on what consciousness is.

Whatever is the relationship of concepts and sensations, however these two aggregates relate to each other and evolve in the mind, consciousness seems to be something more fundamental. Are you saying that AlphaGo is already conscious? If not, can it be made conscious? How? By adding more CPU? A webcam? We can't escape these questions.

What does learning have to do with consciousness? These are orthogonal issues. That's the whole point of Chalmers argument.

Giulio Tononi is the guy who's arguably brought the most interesting perspective on consciousness (information integration theory) since the original Chalmers' problem statement.

Here's him explaining why the problem is hard and how it could be approached, in the middle of some kind of artifical jungle: https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s

Chalmers is the guy who coined the hard problem of consciousness. The reception varied extremely, some people refused to even admit that there's any problem at all with explaining consciousness. So now, after many years of multiple disputes he describes the meta problem - that the base problem itself is so controversial.

The clearest example of the meta problem is Daniel Dennett, another prominent philosopher, who not only doesn't agree that the problem is hard, but also insists that the consciousness itself is illusion, so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place. Quite mind-boggling statement to most people, including HNers, as far as I remember from other threads related to the subject.

"It’s amazing how quickly our Russian allies turned into our Cold War enemies at the end of WWII."

The 'our Russian allies' part sounds a bit strange. Are you aware that the Soviet Union started the war on the Hitler side? What's amazing is that in modern Russia most people don't believe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_World_War_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

We've no idea how neurons actually work but hey, sure, let's copy the whole brain! Most articles concerning brain recently are some kind of infotainment porn.

There are things that one _should_ understand intellectually. You need some kind of a map, even very general.

There are three types of knowledge in Buddhist tradition - information you acquired from others, information you intellectually grasped and finally information from direct experience, insight. Each requires some amount of the previous kind to form.

You're right that we are not in direct control of our minds and we don't understand it directly as much as we think we do, but we can understand some important general causal principles which allow to learn how to influence the mind through the right causes.

So it's not about not thinking at all, it's about right kind of thinking. We need thoughts, right constructs, to point the mind in the right direction. As in the raft simile - only on the other shore we can let these skillful constructs go.

Profound philosophy needs to take into account messiness, but cannot be messy itself in its use of concepts, reasoning etc.

By being strict one can realise the limits of the very cognitive tools we use. Godel and Quine come to mind. The concepts are limiting, but that's all we have in philosophy.

The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

For instance Rumi composed all his verses in a specific rhythms (obviously lost in translation) that, when sang and danced to, were meant to induce a specific states of mind.

Buddha explicitly said that metaphysical questions are orthogonal to the problem of suffering that he was solving (or just meaningless).

To make things even more complex, there are some similarities between teachings of the Buddha and western pragmatists.

The main problem (or the most fun part) in such discussions, is that there's no common ground to make such inter-paradigm comparisons. We always have to pick one of these viewpoints as a base and compare it to another one from that perspective.

Most of the things you mention are considered anti-patterns in OOD nowadays anyway:

- singletons

- getters/setters everywhere (but not in favour of public fields, which just as much introduce tight coupling, but 'tell don't ask' style which allow to localise functionalities prone to change)

- introducing interfaces upfront - it goes against Reused Abstraction Principle or Rule of Three (discover rather than design abstractions, apply interface only when you have at least 3 classes that would adhere to it)

Both OOD and functional programming try to reach loose coupling and composability by different means. All these 'patterns' have usually some more sane general architectural concern standing behind. It would be interesting to know whether old school procedural approach allows you to achieve all those architectural benefits in large scale applications.

Books are not distraction machines in the sense phones are. Book may be a distraction from something else, but when you are already reading a book, you are concentrated, attention is stable and all cognitive faculties are being trained in positive direction (keeping the whole story in mind, imagining the plot etc.). Phones, on the other hand, are distracting you while you are interacting with them. Attention is switching constantly between apps, even within a single app you may be constantly swiping through content in order to get gratification. In this mode you're UNLEARNING the stability of attention, that books help develop. There may be specific apps and games that cultivate concentration as well, but the way the average kid uses their phone is definitively detrimental to their mental capabilities.

If Christianity is Java and Buddhism is Haskell then Stoicism is like Scala - easier to digest from the Western point of view, but not all the way there.

"- My favourite thing: everyone tells you how easy and simple Rx is: it's just observables. In his book on RxJava the creator of RxJava says that it took him several months to understand Rx. While being tutored by one of the creators of ReactiveX. It's "easy and simple" in the same sense as "Haskell is easy and simple" or "rocket science is simple and easy" or <any branch of human knowledge> is simple and easy once you know and understand it."

The problem here is that "simple" and "easy" are two completely different concepts. "Simple" is absolute, "easy" is relative. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

"Custom Elements, the interoperability aspect from the Web Components Spec, are a good primitive for integration in the browser. Each team builds their component using their web technology of choice and wraps it inside a Custom Element (e.g. <order-minicart></order-minicart>). The DOM specification of this particular element (tag-name, attributes & events) acts as the contract or public API for other teams. The advantage is that they can use the component and its functionality without having to know the implementation. They just have to be able to interact with the DOM."

Seems like an interesting idea, but it's barely supported at the moment: https://caniuse.com/#search=custom

Mark Seemann, TFA's autor wrote a highly praised book Dependency Injection in.NET and then slowly gravitated towards F# and Haskell. He presents lot of perspectives on FP often in the context of OO alternatives making it easier to appreciate FP advantages not just in theory, but in the context of practical application problems.

I've found his Pluralsight course on Functional Architecture pretty interesting.

Let's say you're writing a crud app on an express server that communicates via http to a database service.

As a side note - a 'database service' that's only job is to serve as an HTTP wrapper over DB seems like an anti-pattern. Service boundaries here are not related to any business concern (if you're thinking along the SOA lines) and rewriting already existing DB remote interfaces via http seems like overengineering (if you're doing n-tier architecture). Some additional reasoning on the matter by Udi Dahan: https://vimeo.com/113515335

Would be interesting to hear your thoughts if you think otherwise.

From TFA: "I don't think anyone should approach management as a thing they move in to permanently. It's psychologically disfiguring."

Such a great quote. The longer I only do management-only work, the more anxiety creeps in silently about not being able to do these things on my own, not being competent enough, being a fake etc. The moment I decide to solve some problem for myself all is cool again - and I'm more trustworthy for the team as well. The problem is that such an approach tends to create conflict of interest - as a manager you shouldn't interfere too much and allow the team to solve the problems. Maybe the notion of manager is a problem in itself. It's a tempting perspective, but as far as I remember Google thought so as well and at some point they had to step back and reintroduce classic managers again ( https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man... ).

Slatestarcodex in the article cited here multiple times made a point that men didn't push out women out of other high paying fields like law or medicine. If the theory is right, why did it only happen in IT?

I stumbled upon this edit war concerning Huffman Coding article on Wikipedia [1], where the ANS algorithm author (Jarek Duda) justifies his edits back in 2007 as a way to "shorten the delay for its [ANS] current wide use in modern compressors, leading to unimaginable world-wide energy and time savings thanks to up to 30x speedup."

Sounds dramatic, but today it seems like he had a point. The other guy (guarding Wikipedia against self promotion) has a point too, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHuffman_coding

Being one of the most expressive and efficient (I am not talking about clock cycles here) languages I've used

"Productive" seems to be the right word here.

It may be a creep in the sense that otherwise it would be a truly public space rather than closed private one. The government may be treating it as a kind of 'outsourcing' and public space gets gradually privatised. So it's not the opening of private properties, but twisting of the public ones.