yannyu

5 ms·

31.
by yannyu 10mo ago
> So what do you do if you are charged with providing shareholders ever-increasing returns on their investments by selling goods and services? > Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account th
32.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Structured data doesn't have be a database. It can be a checklist, a particular working layout, or even just a defined process. Many high functioning companies spent a lot of time on those kinds of things, which became a competitive ad
33.
by yannyu 11mo ago
As much as I hated schooling, I do want to say that there are parts of learning that are simply hard. There are parts that you can build enthusiasm for with project work and prioritizing for engagement. But there are many things that people
34.
by yannyu 11mo ago
> in class programming exams are basically the same thing as leetcode job interviews, and we all know what a bad proxy those are for "real" development work. Confusing university learning for "real industry work" is a
35.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Proof isn't the goal here. Centuries of thought and experimentation have made it clear that we currently have no ability to decisively determine whether something is conscious. However, as humans we intuitively build projections of wha
36.
by yannyu 11mo ago
That is what I meant, but my brain has been rotted by the MCU it seems.
37.
by yannyu 11mo ago
More importantly, if your entire existence were being fed a corpus of text and then being asked to regurgitate it on demand, would you be remotely similar to the person you are now? When we take consciousness-capable beings and subject them
38.
by yannyu 11mo ago
This is where the robotics industry wants to go. Generalist robots that have an intelligence capable of learning through observation without retraining (in the ML sense). Whether and when we'll get there is another question entirely.
39.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I agree, evaluation of consciousness is another problem entirely. However, the point I'm making is that even assuming an agent/thing is capable of achieving consciousness, it would have to have a suitably complex environment and t
40.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Okay, you're right. There is a world, and some hypotheses, and some falsifiability. But how rich is this world? Does this world progress without direct action from another entity? Can the agent in this case form hypotheses and test the
41.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I don't think it's brief at all. Animals do this experimentation as well, but clearly in different ways. The scientific method is a formalized version of this idea, but even the first human who cooked meat or used a stick as a wea
42.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I agree, I'm sure people have put together things like this. There's a significant profit and science motive to do so. JEPA and predictive world models are also a similar implementation or thought experiment.
43.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Coherence here isn't about legible text, it's environmental coherence where you can deduce truths about the world through hypotheses and experimentation. Coherence isn't about a consistent story narrative, it's about a p
44.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Okay, so you're talking about LLMs specifically in the context of a ChatGPT, Claude, or pick-your-preferred-chatbot. Which isn't just an LLM, but also a UI, a memory manager, a prompt builder, a vectorDB, a system prompt, and ever
45.
by yannyu 11mo ago
We can form and test hypotheses and experience the consequences. And then take that knowledge to our next trial. Even dogs and cats do this on a daily basis. Without that, how would we even evaluate whether something is conscious?
46.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible
47.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Pretty similar to social media in a lot of ways. They've strip mined the commons and provided us a corporate controlled walled garden to compensate us for our loss.
48.
by yannyu 11mo ago
The naming collision here is unfortunate since the two kinds of models described couldn't be any more different in purpose. Maybe JEPA-type world models should explicitly be called "predictive world models".
49.
by yannyu 11mo ago
Social media is just a portion of the problem though. As parents, we hear from our kids and other parents about how children all over the country are desperate to get their hands on a smartphone, and we have conversations about the right ti
50.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I think the underlying issue that the article briefly mentions but is likely a much more prominent cause is that we have destroyed local, physical communities over the past 30 years. The same community where I grew up biking, walking, and w
51.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I agree. The two of us are talking past each other, and I wonder if it's because there's a certain strain of thought around LLMs that believes that epistemological questions and technology that we don't fully understand are s
52.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I never claimed we already know everything about LLMs. Knowing "everything about" anything these days is impossible given the complexity of our technology. Even antennae, a centuries old technology, is something we're still i
53.
by yannyu 11mo ago
It's remarkably easy to get ChatGPT to hallucinate. A go-to for me is to ask it about factual things as compared to other factual things. The description of the Bluey episode is wrong in nearly every possible way. Additionally, the res
54.
by yannyu 11mo ago
> Then why not say "they are just computer programs"? LLMs are probabilistic or non-deterministic computer programs, plenty of people say this. That is not much different than saying "LLMs are probabilistic next-token pred
55.
by yannyu 11mo ago
> Yeah, but that's their interface. That informs surprisingly little about their inner workings. I'm not sure I follow. LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context, that is a factual, foundational stat
56.
by yannyu 11mo ago
What's the misconception? LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context, right?
57.
by yannyu 11mo ago
You're right, but also coding 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago looked very different to coding today in most cases. In every decade, we've abstracted out things that were critical and manual before. Are LLMs writing th
58.
by yannyu 11mo ago
You don't think that it's easier to identify whether something is bubonic plague than it would be to identify whether two DNA samples are related? Especially when one of them is aged such that it's not even a whole sequence a
59.
by yannyu 11mo ago
I agree with you in principle. And I agree that the government has been steadily eroding our privacy. And I agree that California probably shouldn't be retaining these samples forever. However, the likelihood of being able to "seq
60.
by yannyu 11mo ago
That seems like a fair criticism. I don't know enough to quantify the benefit of retaining these samples, but I do know that the reason for keeping samples primarily relates to quality control, research, and development of tests. There

More ›