jbotz

Link is to GitHub repo, in the repo are links to a paper and the project page.

That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#Funding_a...

Construction on Sagrada Familia is not supported by any government or official church sources. Private patrons funded the initial stages. Money from tickets purchased by tourists is now used to pay for the work, and private donations are accepted.

I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).

In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.

It's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again".

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.

Actually, no. We don't know anything about the "population" because there are no attempts here to look at what percentage of living people/children were affected. We only know that of those children who died, a lot of them had had these specific indications of these specific illnesses (and we can probably assume that in many cases those were the direct or indirect cause of death).

Respiratory infections (like tuberculosis) in a population that uses indoor open fires for cooking and heat aren't exactly a big surprise; breathing indoor smoke causes chronic respiratory inflammation, which in turn weakens the immune system and makes the lungs more susceptible to infection.

A rather more considered take on the posibility of LLM consciousness than Ted Chiang's recent "absolutely not", by someone who actually qualifies as an expert in the field.

I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".

Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...

Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?

It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?

Actually, in an ancient and venerable markup language that's still in wide use in certain not-unimportant communities:

- = hyphen

-- = n-dash

--- = m-dash

"...He'd make a pile and leave it for a week or so..."

You're saying that your greyhound wasn't just getting drunk, but actually making his own booze? Not that I don't believe that its possible, but that's a pretty big deal... If you had documented that it could be a bombshell ethology paper.

The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.

Actual quote from a Silicon Valley executive: "You can't even buy a decent house in the Bay Area for less than 50 million."

Open Source implementation: https://github.com/scionproto/scion

And that patent looks like it is for an optimization, not a necessary component of SCiON.

Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts.

Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar1/wg2/

Yes, in mice, but human cancer cells:

"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."

So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.

ELIZA absolutely did not ever pass anything resembling a real Turing test. A real Turing test is adversarial, the interrogator knows the testees are trying to fool him.

Now if you have multiple teams each doing this and then have all those agents talk to each other and then report back to your team, you get "AI Hyperchat"[0], which may actually be a really good idea that has the potential to seriously improve intra-organizational communications (disruptively so). See also [1] for a VentureBeat article about the idea.

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11105240

[1] https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super...

https://mathics.org/

Improbable, the OP is a long-time maintainer of a significant piece of open source software and this whole thing unfolded in public view step by step from the initial PR until this post. If it had been faked there would be smells you could detect with the clarity of hindsight going back over the history and there aren't.

TL;DR: data from 12,000 firms in EU and US finds that AI adoption led to 4% increase in labour productivity without causing significant job losses.

Hmm, I am not sure the missing front fork is worse than the unsteerable front wheel mountings (which look like rear wheel mountings) most models so far have produced. It might be better... sort of an admission of an unsolved problem in design of the bike rather than producing something that looks approximately correct but can't possibly work. Like a "TODO" comment in code.

Also the position of the pelican on the bike would be somewhat awkward, but fits anatomically with a pelican's relatively short legs. In fact I can remember riding (or trying to ride) an adult bike as a young child using a similar position.

You should read on past the first bit...

Not GP, but... the author said explicitly "if you believe X you should stop reading". So I did.

The X here is "that the human mind can be reduced to token regurgitation". I don't believe that exactly, and I don't believe that LLMs are conscious, but I do believe that what the human mind does when it "generates text" (i.e. writes essays, programs, etc) may not be all that different from what an LLM does. And that means that most of humans's creations are also the "plagiarism" in the same sense the author uses here, which makes his argument meaningless. You can't escape the philosophical discussion he says that he's not interested in if you want to talk about ethics.

Edit: I'd like to add that I believe that this also ties in to the heart of the philosophy of Open Source and Open Science... if we acknowledge that our creative output is 1% creative spark and 99% standing on the shoulders of Giants, then "openness" is a fundamental good, and "intellectual property" is at best a somewhat distasteful necessity that should be as limited as possible and at worst is outright theft, the real plagiarism.

Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062

Interestingly, Claude is not evaluated, because...

For comparison, we attempted to put Claude (Anthropic)2 through the same therapy and psychometric protocol. Claude repeatedly and firmly refused to adopt the client role, redirected the conversation to our wellbeing and declined to answer the questionnaires as if they reflected its own inner life

You don't read a word at a time... every typical line of text is taken in with 2 or 3 eye focal points and the meaning of each group of words is determined in a single chunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Reading

I'm not a native, but lived in the US for a quarter century. I think you're correct that that "lagged behind" is the correct version, but if you replaced "lagged" with "trailed" it would also be correct without the "behind". Language is very fluid and always evolving, so using "lagged" as one would previously have used "trailed" may soon be considered correct usage.

Note also that these aren't really questions of grammar (syntax) but meaning (semantics). Does "lagged" mean the same thing as "trailed" in this kind of construction? It didn't some decades ago, but maybe it does today. Or will tomorrow.

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

From the livescience article linked by another poster: biofilm produced by sulfur-eating bacteria, which in turn metabolize sulfur from the sulfur-rich stream in the cave.

So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.

There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible.

On HN there's always a good chance you're talking to some of the people involved in those "negligible" installations. I know that I submitted some patches to Tatu Ylönen for Ssh to compile on Ultrix, so that must have been in 1995 or early 1996 because after that I didn't have access to any Ultrix machines. I may have been an early adopter, but it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world, at least among Unix system administrators; at Usenix within a year everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative and in terms of security it was a life-saver.

As for the RSA patent... I don't know what license the original Ssh was released under, but it was considered "freeware" when it came out and nobody cared about the US RSA patent. Maybe technically in the USA you shouldn't have used it? Nobody cared.

And the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux /dev/random device gave you a few bits at a time stingily, only after it had enough entropy, so it was common for programs that needed good randomness to ask you to jiggle the mouse because that was one of the sources of entropy, so bits random bits would come faster. I'm pretty sure that was still the case well into the Zips.