carapace

55 ms·

631.
by carapace 4y ago
The idea that this letter would carry any weight at all with anybody is itself so foolish that it is self-invalidating. The signatories are ... I can't think of a polite way to say "regressive idiots" so I'm just going
632.
by carapace 4y ago
> all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue. How is that possibly surprising!? A sparsely populated coastline with abundant game? That's our evolutionary niche! Of
633.
by carapace 4y ago
See also Wikibooks' "C Programming": https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming
634.
by carapace 4y ago
> We feed a large portion of that baggage to them as their training data, to see if they can impress us with human-like behaviors. But we don't feed them only the baggage, eh? We also [can] give them all the writings and teaching
635.
by carapace 4y ago
> We had all the senses We have (I think the current recognized number is about) twenty-seven senses. > we didn't come up with even the motivation to do empirical science until the 17th century That's historically inaccurate
636.
by carapace 4y ago
The problem isn't really that it works or doesn't work. The problem is that once we accept digital "evidence" then we're on course to push-button corruption. Remember "Hacking Team" that got busted a few
637.
by carapace 4y ago
Well, that's the neat thing: we can give them "all" of the senses, eh? I suspect we're about to discover some very interesting things, like which kind of ghosts are real...
638.
by carapace 4y ago
Sure, give the machines empirical feedback devices (sensors) and they will become scientists. (The thought also occurs: What happens when humans spend time in a sensory deprivation tank? They start to hallucinate. Food for thought.) As Sc
639.
by carapace 4y ago
Check out: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html > Accepting the term &qu
640.
by carapace 4y ago
Hmm, then, from first principles, we should expect "ghosts" to arise in those systems. (These will not be the "virtual entities" that people talk to and call by name (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, etc., but more akin to fixed
641.
by carapace 4y ago
It seems clear to me that these systems think in a meaningful sense, but I don't think they are beings . In Cybernetics there is a result that says that any well-regulated system must contain a model of itself. This seems as good
642.
by carapace 4y ago
Have you tried reading "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?: a functional style and its algebra of programs" by Backus? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359576.359579
643.
by carapace 4y ago
If you could live in a Matrix-style creche it kinda makes sense to do it: you're physically safe, you're already in an intensive care unit if you ever get sick, and you can explore an unbounded world of experience... I could se
644.
by carapace 4y ago
First of all, money does in fact grow on trees. Second: UBI is a response to economic conditions, not a driver. Once the machines can economically/productively outperform most of us, UBI is an alternative to just letting us starve in t
645.
by carapace 4y ago
Same here. The kind of programming I love to do is now a hobby only. (It's a good thing, I think, because the machines will write bug-free code, but I'm wistful. And the money sure was nice!) I'm going to build toy compute
646.
by carapace 4y ago
FWIW, I think your first two points as well as the fourth will be answered by next Tuesday. That is, exponential advancement is a hellofa thing. The "wow" of GPT4 isn't just that it can pass the bar exam or be a decent Dung
647.
by carapace 4y ago
Here's a loony thought: what if the VCs just exited the whole Valley 'cause they saw the handwriting on the wall in re: ChatGPT et. al. dropping the floor out of the startup industry? It's not true, I think, but it makes for
648.
by carapace 4y ago
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "original" though, eh? Are you familiar with the "cut up" technique? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique It could be considered a mechanical ori
649.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962)(dougengelbart.org)
2 points by carapace 4y ago|0 comments
650.
by carapace 4y ago
You're not alone. I program for fun, mostly, and I'm completely uninterested in these talking computers. I'm a little wistful that my hobby has gone from a viable career path to just a hobby, but I believe the talking compu
651.
by carapace 4y ago
> designing a system that can answer correctly I think the solution is obvious: connect the computers to empirical feedback devices and make them scientists. Humans hallucinate too if they spend too much time in a sensory deprivation ta
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by carapace 4y ago
I was reading a book about the genesis of, I want to say the Nature Conservancy. These folks had done the numbers and they realized that Pacific Gas & Electric (the company that supplies most of the electricity in California) could meet
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by carapace 4y ago
It's purely inertia . These systems work. They scale (which is not surprising when you think about it, they are made of four-billion-year-old self-improving nano-technology that optimizes for exponential reproduction at all levels si
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by carapace 4y ago
It definitely feels different. I saw the output of a GPT4 code assistant the other day and my immediate reaction was, "well, my career as a programmer is over." I can still do valuable things (gosh I sure hope so!) but the stuf
655.
by carapace 4y ago
This. It's pretty obvious that any software that can be written by machine should be. (It's almost tautological, eh?) Otherwise you're doing what David Graeber famously called "Bullshit Jobs": pointless work
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by carapace 4y ago
See also Greenwave https://www.greenwave.org/ > GreenWave’s 10-year goal is to provide training, tools, and support to a baseline of 10,000 farmers to catalyze the planting of regenerative ocean crops and yield meaningf
657.
by carapace 4y ago
The whole Oberon system is great fun. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html It's a single-user workstation, developed from the CPU on up, compiler & language, OS with unique GUI, all
658.
by carapace 4y ago
I disagree, I think the value proposition for reproducibility is clear, it's just that the learning curve "is too damn high!" I'm highly motivated to learn and use Nix (or Guix for that matter) but I've bounced off
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by carapace 4y ago
Well, I just looked and all I could find were images that look like stock photos. There was one black woman in one of the images. Maybe you would be kind enough to link to what you're talking about? (In case it's not clear, I ho
660.
by carapace 4y ago
Well, my original point was just that increased longevity and caring for our sick and elderly are, anthropologically speaking, what separated us from the primates and hominids, eh? In re: the (sole, underlying) purpose of civilization, well

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