robwwilliams

You patent and protect (as best you can) the missing ingredients needed to get to AGI. Only half joking and also scary to contemplate. Qualcomm’s CDMA patent is on example. ARM and Texas Instruments two other examples.

There is no one-size-fits-all, even for programming.

For my quirky workflows I need 100K even to prep Opus 4.8 or higher to begin good work. Not programming, but a complex synthetic architecture for implementing more attentional autonomy for machines.

Not how I view it as a 74 yo. Patients get what their doctors want as part of a culture of minimal preventive care (it does not pay) and massive medical care (procedures pay handsomely).

Try to get a unilateral diagnostic mammogram. Sorry in the system I am in there is no code for a unilateral diagnostic, only bilateral, even if only one side actually requires diagnosis.

Why? Because 2X the charge and income fir little extra care cost. And who would ever complain about such “excellent” care? Recent experience.

Funny: This title is a classic statement of Martin Heidegger’s. Go programmers!

Share your concern.

One point is that this is not “mind reading”. This is “motor command reading”. This is really no different than placing recording electrodes near motor neurons that direct vocalization. Or in terminal nerve fibers that move finger and wrist muscles.

For Meta this is a PR stunt of the type that I saw staged at a Human Brain Project demo in Budapest in 2012 in with an EEG-instrumented operator tried to move a robot around the stage with HBP leaders trying to narrate the “wonders of it all”. Sadly it was one of those classic demo failures in front of 200 neuroscientists and EU science bureaucrats. Didn’t stop the EU from funding the application the next year. About 1 billion euros not well spent.

In academic research I have seen this same trend, particularly intensely in IT and security. Lock it down, lock it up, and slow down research. A hierarchy of admins and techs taught to cover their asses.

I initial thought this was a great tongue-in-cheek comment. I still think it is a joke.

Not how I see it. And I have seen Europe close up for 60 years. It is wealthier and happier than it was even 15 years ago. Visit Spain, Portugal, Greece, and of course the other larger northern states; no comparison. Immigration has served them well in wealth and health. Compare Europe to the hollowed out core of the USA and you will shudder. Visit rural America.

The European “problem” is they live to have a life whereas in the USA we seem to live to work.

Yes, sure, but not efficiently. Even Pops will not want to run four hair dyer GPUs 24-7 in the garage.

I think you are right when you factor in the much more efficient newer high end GPU. That is what may make the current GPu investments obsolete in 2-4 years.

Yann is on the mark. Almost amusing to see the EU along with its many former “subjects” realize they are at great risk of joint Chinese-American hegemony in AI. We should all be more terrified of a few nation states defining the agendas and policies of AI use than current Ai variants that a inherently without purpose or autonomy.

Great analogy to the fear of the printing press being really bad news in that it enabled the rabble to get aroused.

Completely agree. This is what Hofstadter means by a strange loop. Our current LLMs have no attentional autonomy by design. The recursion is superficial and without its own Now. Adding attentional autonomy is The frightening alignment issue.

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.

Great, and won’t we all be just as surprised when human self-attentional control turns out to be just as simple or just as complex! Our minds as a strange fabric built of threads of recursions without the benefit of any explicit clock.

Diderot’s Jacque, The Fatalist is a great example. Perhaps even moreso of endless recursion to the end.

Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).

What was the specific mathematical or factual error? It is not theoretical for me.

The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).

I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.

I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.

As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.

Not in my fields of science: Genetics and neuroscience. The combination of Opus 4.7 Adaptive used with well structure project folders is amazingly useful.

Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.

It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.

Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.

Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.

Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.

His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.

Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.

The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.

What made University of California Santa Cruz so attractive to undergraduates in the 70s was no grading of performance and engagement but instead written evaluations. I loved being able to concentrate on great subjects with the help of often excellent teachers and TAs. Swathmore is noted for this culture too.

No. Then the fraction of population variance attributable to genetic differences would tend to increase and heritably would also increase.

Agreed, the Dynomight article is on-the-mark. I work in this field and was really puzzled when I read this paper. Yes, it is obvious that excluding extrinsic causes of death will increase heritability estimates. But is death from influenza genetic or extrinsic?

The typo on the first page of the Science article is on the authors, not the editors.

We have many bits and pieces of causal structure for some human traits courtesy of GWAS and PheWAS but you are right that lifespan genetics of humans is seriously compromised by rapid changes in life styles and environments.

You are making a point that shares much with Foucault’s work: trying to understand why and how fields like psychology and sociology came to be crystallized into academic pigeonholes. Your frustration is what he studied.

If you want a deeper answer to your question read:

R. Rorty (1991) “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others)

Rorty makes the point that there are (at least) two ways to read Foucault: both interesting and also in tension.

Urban/industrial and refinery complex; not at all rural. Located about 8 miles southwest of downtown Memphis (3231 Paul Lowery Rd) on a bend of the river.