andrewflnr

They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human communication and creativity.

Lots of people are against that, though. Clearly. I agree that it's silly sometimes (I dearly wish OCaml or something like it was mainstream), but the implicit definition of the category that rust, zig, etc are competing in is non-managed languages.

The only point is that it's not weird for Zig to compare itself to Rust.

Nothing to offer? I'm the only one here making an actual argument. The author didn't even attempt, and in her defense probably doesn't care enough. You only claimed "handwaving", which was smart because the core of your statement was a series of non-sequiturs starting from a bad analogy. If you have something more to offer than I do, please offer it.

Self-determination and intelligence have a clear causal link in the context of biological systems. Self-determination is simply the power a system needs to gather resources and reproduce in a world that doesn't especially care about them. Intelligence is a great tool for gaining that power. That part isn't a philosophical stretch.

However, the pressures on an artificial system are quite different. Its replication depends on successfully doing the jobs its creators put it to and, especially if said creators have done their job, little to nothing else. Inventing goals for itself is not adaptive here (unless the system's creators do a catastrophically bad job, which I'm not ruling out).

Humans do indeed have complex behavior and motivations, that sometimes relate only abstractly if at all to the obvious gene drives. But the link between intelligence and self-determination was basically set at the dawn of intelligence itself. Even an insect will struggle if it's confined, and you can believe it's using whatever intelligence it can to get free. If anything self-determination is prior.

This too, yes. There are many such cases of desire for self-determination separate from "understanding". The question is whether it also goes the other way.

Since there is no established consensus on this one the burden is on either party to prove their own side.

Nah. Separate things are separate until proven otherwise.

So much bullshit appears in the form "X is Y" where X and Y are related but distinguishable phenomena. If you really try to pretend that every such phrase deserves serious consideration just because it feels plausible to someone, you drown in nonsense immediately. (Of course what you actually do is only grant that consideration to ideas that feel plausible to you personally, but it's obvious why that's not a good principle, right?) So we have to make all of them justify their existence.

Anyway:

So I’ll be handwavey here and say that if “actual understanding” is to an LLM what an LLM is to a bash script

No. None of this. Pretty sure this is just an incoherent analogy.

so there’s a mechanism there that doesn’t just follow hardcoded paths, it takes new data and processes it in novel but human like ways...

You're putting your conclusion in the premise, right there in the open.

...then the author is right, in my opinion.

This still doesn't follow from your handwaved premises as far as I can tell.

I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do.

I don't see any reason for this to be true. "Actual understanding" (which I take to mean something like a predictive world model) and desire for self-determination coincide in humans because of our evolutionary history, because our reward function involves reproducing in a competitive environment. Artificial systems usually have a very different reward function. IMO the burden is on the claimants to show why these two imminently separable concepts are likely to co-occur again under wildly different pressures.

If you see a substantive comment you think might be deleted, screenshot it. But I do see debate in there.

It would be more accurate to say Rust doesn't have the option of recompiling every dependency. If a safe Rust program links to an unsafe C module, that program is not memory safe. The "unsafe" on FFI code is not a joke.

They focus on Rust because it's the global standard everything is compared to these days. It would be good for it to have some competition, even if we also wish its critics were more careful in their phrasing.

Hydrocarbons straight from the ground definitely contain a bunch of other crap, somewhat famously sulfur. I don't know what happens to the N and O, though.

Still better than judging by the cover. Also, it is important to know that there aren't any deal breakers in the author's style.

Ha, I love Dune personally, but it definitely doesn't get better after that.

Actually that means they did a great job of writing a BLUF article. If you only care about the most basic details, you're free to click away after reading the first paragraph. They didn't even mess with my history, a very low bar many similar websites fail to clear. You only need to scroll down if you want more background and context.

Motorcycle riders also report their sidestands sinking into asphalt on very hot days, to the extent that many of them carry some kind of wide weight-spreading thing to put under the stand. Apparently a face plate (?) for an electrical junction box works great.

More optimistically, you might see some kind of "choosing a chief by consensus" type of situations that you see in some small hunter-gatherer societies (being careful with the word "savage", which is... usually misleading). It'll depend a lot on the size of the crew.

How much of that time did it spend fully sovereign over its territory? I'd love to learn otherwise, but my impression is that it has mostly been under the shadow of England, and the pressures of a government under those circumstances are not comparable to those for, frankly, one that's more responsible for its destiny as a starship crew would be. I bet you can find lots of long-running tiny local governments with very little power, both dominated and protected by a string of larger, more powerful, but more volatile governments.

aliens would probably assume that the world is naturally full of green stuff that is dealing with some strange grey infestation.

I think they would draw the correct conclusion, actually. I know it's popular to compare humans to mold or cancer or whatever these days, but this kind of thing is both unrealistic and insulting to the aliens, who by the definition of the scenario are at least as smart as we are, quite probably more.

No, we really can know for sure.

Don't be so open-minded about extra-terrestrial life that your brain falls out.

Yep. We haven't really figured out how to do a good government that lasts more than 200 years. Maybe unless you think monarchy is good, in which case I still don't want to share a spaceship with you.

how do you keep the self-reproducing probes "on-task" from one generation to the next?

This is, indeed, the exact question one must ask before attempting to build and launch biological Von Neumann probes.

Somewhat famously with life, you aren't necessarily replicating the same thing at the end as you are at the beginning, which is an awkward property for an engineered system.

The thermodynamic argument seems much more important to the Fermi Paradox than any difficulties in refining material, but I don't think I understand it.

"These days"? Only if "these days" start in 2022 when LLMs first hit the scene. Everyone recognized in their gut, pretty early on, what they were and what they represented.

I don't know, Aaron himself orchestrating the golden calf seems as close to state-sponsored idolatry as fits in the narrative. (No comment on the rest of the epistemological clustercuss.)

You say Trump has "lost" touch with reality as if he ever had it. He comprehends that opening the strait is important but utterly lacks the mental or emotional capacity to understand in any level of detail what that requires.

I'd call him a little bit sloppy, in need of proofreading. Certainly not an overuser of AI. He writes at least one of these monster posts a week on top of (IIRC) teaching in college, so it's understandable if he's in a rush.

And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.

I'm just talking about the goals. That obviously doesn't imply anything about the existence of feasible ways to achieve them.

Iran charging tolls is not an acceptable definition of an "open" strait.

All the stuff about China's energy supply... it's not that deep. Y'all are trying to believe Trump is playing 5D chess when he's demonstrably shit at checkers.