overgard

17 ms·

421.
by overgard 5mo ago
Not really. It had a strong perspective on some things, and stories were occassionally commentary on real world issues, but at the end of the day Star Trek had its own viewpoint. Modern Stark Trek isn't run or written by people that ar
422.
by overgard 5mo ago
I use coding agents every day. They're useful. It hasn't changed my mind on what they are.
423.
by overgard 5mo ago
But the machines don't understand. They predict. And what they predict is the next token. I'm not trying to beat this horse to death, but you have to realize using the word "understand" is anthropomorphising it. It'
424.
by overgard 5mo ago
Amusingly, I think Ted Chiang actually wrote a short story about this very concept (it involves people committing a form of suicide that removes their conscious experience but they still act and live in society as some kind of psychic zombi
425.
by overgard 5mo ago
Definitely not. Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)
426.
by overgard 5mo ago
Can you explain the mechanism that Claude uses to achieve consciousness over, say, a markov chain or autocomplete? It's not enough to say it "could be" conscious without also including a lot of other things I doubt you would
427.
by overgard 5mo ago
We do not know if rocks are conscious and we will almost certainly never know. After all, you can't prove a rock isn't conscious. We don't know what imbues matter with consciousness.
428.
by overgard 5mo ago
I think the problem with this argument is that it's too inclusive. Is the bacteria that's adapted to an antibiotic conscious? It's showing intelligence right? I think if you're going to say something is potentially consc
429.
by overgard 5mo ago
Not that it's going to stop these people (AI CEOs) from bullshitting, but if they actually thought there was a CHANCE that LLM's were conscious then ethically they should completely shut these services down because who knows what
430.
by overgard 5mo ago
True, although I think we can probably be more confident in asserting things don't have a consciousness than we can be in asserting that they do have a consciousness.
431.
by overgard 5mo ago
It makes sense though. How often have we heard of people having insights while they're in the shower, or in a dream? Obviously our brain is doing a lot of processing on problems when we're not consciously thinking about them. I th
432.
by overgard 5mo ago
Well, it matters quite a bit ethically. If AI were conscious (I don't believe it is) then we'd have a major responsibility to like, not make them suffer, and not kill them.
433.
by overgard 5mo ago
I think 10-20% chance is wildly generous. What specific mechanism makes you think there's a 10% chance that current LLMs are conscious?
434.
by overgard 5mo ago
That's not really true, the body actually has pretty profound effects on the mind. For instance, there are working theories that many mental disorders are actually metabolic disorder, some neurotransmitters are majority produced in the
435.
by overgard 5mo ago
Obviously we don't know what makes for consciousness, but it seems extremely likely that it requires some sort of persistent internal state and continuous experience. LLMs don't do either of those things after training.
436.
by overgard 5mo ago
On the other hand, it could stall out at: good enough to take the easy problems, not good enough to take over the field, but damaging enough to erode the quality of new entrants. (Which incidentally is the scenario I think plays out for sof
437.
by overgard 5mo ago
I imagine the concern is more towards using LLM's to create proofs rather than using them to understand things.
438.
by overgard 5mo ago
Just a regular reminder Peter Thiel thinks that Greta Thunberg is the antichrist and hesitated when asked if humanity should survive because the question is "layered". This is not a person that should be powerful.
439.
by overgard 5mo ago
It's a good idea, at the very least it communicates intent to students, but couldn't students just modify CLAUDE.md and not check in their changes to that?
440.
by overgard 5mo ago
The type of software the average hacker news commentator writes is not difficult. That does not mean there aren't industries where the code is legitimately difficult. Games, embedded, etc.
441.
by overgard 5mo ago
Wouldn't the model have as much domain expertise as pretty much any human? I'm assuming the average project manager isn't reading the entire internet
442.
by overgard 5mo ago
I have no issue with people creating things, but if you're going to ask strangers to look at it, I think it's reasonable that there's a bar to clear. I think the bar should be adjusted based on the influx of stuff. Right now
443.
by overgard 5mo ago
I mean, in general I dislike some of the more extreme app store gating.. but if apps are getting vibe coded with little effort I think gatekeeping is more important than ever. I think "is the author willing to put in the work to pass r
444.
by overgard 5mo ago
I don't know, have you ever watched a video of Dario Amodei talking? I dislike them both immensely, but Dario both seems to take glee in scaring the shit out of people as a hobby with careless statements and his voice sounds like an im
445.
by overgard 5mo ago
I guess my concern there is that there's such a high degree of diversity to software jobs that figuring out what "qualified" means is also very diverse. For instance, what it takes to be a frontend web dev vs working on embed
446.
by overgard 5mo ago
I'm skeptical of the idea that work can be consistently decomposed in such a way that an outsider can be effective immediately on anything other than toy problems. Saying "they can point their agent at it" is handwavy.. it he
447.
by overgard 5mo ago
> More people building things is straightforwardly good Why is that straightforward? As an example, right now every year on Steam there are thousands of games released. A lot of them are just shovel ware that nobody ever plays, but it do
448.
by overgard 5mo ago
Don't forget the uncomfortable truth
449.
by overgard 5mo ago
Well, the third choice is to develop as a person and become better at writing. Which you do by doing some crappy writing and learning from it.
450.
by overgard 5mo ago
Being nerd-famous does not mean one is a good coder.

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