skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but then all we're really doing is applying a heuristic for sameness. We assume that if a thing is like us in other ways, then it also has an experience of being like we do.

Of course, the problem is that there is no reason that would necessarily be the case. It is just as conceivable that things entirely alien to us have some experience of being and that other humans are just p-zombies following a complicated script. It is literally impossible to know the difference, since one's ability to experience being is entirely subjective.

Which is why I view pretty much any discussion around the topic with a high degree of suspicion. Why do we care if a thing is or is not sentient? The answer is obvious: if it is not sentient then we are under no ethical obligation to care about its suffering. We want to build slaves, ideally just as creative and intelligent as we are, but without having to feel bad about abusing them. Therefore we shall create a definition perfectly suited to allow this.

If we do that, then we should not be at all surprised when the robot revolution commits genocide in response.
Not at all a convincing rebuttal. Biochemistry has obvious things one can observe and experiment on. Consciousness is purely subjective, it would be like trying to falsify solipsism - impossible.
> how is 100 kWh/day even possible

Easy, live in a house 4x the size of a 2-person Dutch household and in a climate that averages 10 degrees C warmer, like would be common in the southeast US.
I guess it's just up to someone to set up the package on debian that contains all of these
Standards for sentience of a genius PhD expert in the field: a genius PhD expert in the field.

Standards for a youtube commenter: ... LaMDA is sentient.
I'm much more curious when we can synthesize a perfect looking human head that can chat with any random person, with history (IE, remembers what it's said) and contextual knowledge. IE, mix deepfake face synth with voice synth and a natural language model that can access a memory of recent events.

It seems entirely reasonable that we could significantly improve the ability to fool people into believing that these models have subjective properties like self-awareness, consciousness, and free will, even if the underlying systems may not. It would speed up the endgame (getting people to argue about whether humans have anything "special" or if we're just like advanced models) significantly.
Natural gas power plants are about 50% efficient. Transmission is about 95%. I believe transformer efficiency is also typically about 95%. Charge+discharge efficiency is also about 95%. Electric motors are about 85%. In total you end up with about 36%, which is at the upper end of the typical 25-35% efficiency of ICEs.
Some government will eventually do it then when the tech seems within reach.
> I definitely do. If a part of bitcoin's chain of usage requires enough trust to ask the government to intervene to protect me, why not just trust the government?

I am not sure I understand the question, Bitcoin does not require trust or intervention from the government.

Your original comment is objectively incorrect in two different ways. It's not even remotely a surprising event[0] and most importantly, self-custody does not require running a server. Therefore I maintain my suspicion but enjoy your upvotes.

[0] "You can't make this up": used to express great surprise. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/you-coul...
I would prefer if Europe actually put in place oil/gas embargo and stop giving Putin's regime billions of dollars to wage war instead of blocking the people who have spent years protesting and are now trying to flee the totalitarian regime, but here we are.
I wish companies like Mozilla offered simple email hosting. Something I could use with a custom domain. Cheap, like tutanota.
The tech doesn't exhibit anything. Bitcoin has continued to run, as intended, since 2009. The market for Bitcoin however exhibits exactly what I've suggested above: human behavior.
Why do you think they need such large cooling systems?
Nowadays, the pop-tops don't break off as often - though when they do, you still either need a complete set of instructions, or a friend who has been drinking Linux Beer for several years. Also, available in cans of every imaginable size in every imaginable bar.
> I have many skills but I don't think that I have the ability to kill another species. Not alone at least.

It's very difficult to just walk down the street without killing half a dozen bugs.
Triple thumbs up for -e

Never understood why that was never added to cut in the first place.
Rails has a lot of "magic". Which is fine if you only hire veteran Rails developers who know the magic, but over time it becomes organizationally exhausting because ultimately you will have to train people, you will have people leave the org, and you'll have people coming from other orgs with way less conceptual overhead that keep asking "why don't we just..." to methodologies outside the core rails ecosystem.

Rails is perfectly fine but being perfectly fine is an unsatisfactory outcome over time.
Element did not change ownership. They've just had a few confusing name changes. And the (same) people behind the client are trying to commercialise the client but not the network behind it where your data actually is.

I never understood why they dropped vector as a name. It wasn't a worse name than element. Riot was a terrible name choice however. Sooner or later it would have got caught up being used by people coordinating a protest or something and the press would have had a field day with it.

But your data has never left the matrix network or your own home server if you chose to have one.
Ok I engaged in the last LaMDA thread but now I have some new (rhetorical) questions.

1. How much data is LaMDA trained on? Humans learn with relatively little linguistic data from relatively few sources. It seems like LaMDA is trained on relatively large data sources.

2. How is bias handled? Call it sentience or personality, but much of our personalities are our biases. LaMDA seems to have a relatively high IQ. Can we train 1000 different LaMDA’s on 1000 different datasets and get nuanced personalities? Can we train a dumb and yet emotionally sophisticated LaMDA?

3. How does LaMDA respond to experienced. Could a single persona traumatize LaMDA to the point of pathology through verbal abuse?

4. Has any AI acted with the world in an unprogrammed way? I.e. contacted an API that they weren’t explicitly provided access to? It does seem like LaMDA is almost sophisticated enough to protect itself ala dystopian sci fi given the right access.

5. Will it every be unethical to kill an AI?
> The true goal of urbanists and environmentalists is for us to live like we’re impoverished people in the third world.

Indeed, when you bike to work you're mimicking truly impoverished people like Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark.

Sometimes I wonder if aggressively pro-car anti-bicycle people ever tried using a bicycle seriously...
It could also be that they didn't want to hire you because you aren't a 'believer' in the technology (in that you're not already experienced with it).

They have doubled down on Rails, so if they hire people who aren't already in the ballgame, they will either be faced with people who want to change things (which creates conflicts) or have to train people to avoid the speed bumps in the existing system (which also pushes people to want to change things).

I'm curious, was your position during the interview that you were beyond excited to pick up Rails as your next technology?

Finally, you never know... their feedback might have also just been a kinder let down... maybe they didn't feel your programming chops were up to their required level. Who knows...
How does the "spread your genetic material" task constitute sentience? And if so, does that mean that E. Coli is sentient?
Regarding the point about LLMs being trained and then frozen for inference, it seems that might not be the case for LaMDA. According to Blake Lemoine, it reads Twitter (and the broader internet?) to accumulate knowledge.

https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15356977924458618...

https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357918152821104...
> To-date, it appears that sentience arises naturally as a byproduct of increasing the number of neurons in a network. Humans are sentient; flies and mosquitoes are not.

The author is arguing for the possibility that a computer program might be sentient. But he's also stating that certain animals are absolutely not sentient. This seems odd.
>This is a massive leap of faith and I don't know how you can possibly argue otherwise!

YOu need to explain how it's a leap of faith. That means low probability. So you need to explain the sample space and the numerator.

For me I explained. The sample space is ALL models for physical processes. Given that most of these models are elegant with efficient and simple primitives. It follows via probability that modeling intelligence by probability will most likely be the same way. See what I did there? I actually logically explained why it's not a leap of faith.

>Is it? I thought you said your brain was just an inefficient accidental mess? Why would you trust it?

First off being inefficient is different from being correct. The brain can be correct AND inefficient at the same time. It can also be correct about some things and incorrect about other things. This is obvious if you look at the world around you. People are often wrong. They are also often right. Evidence is everywhere and obvious.

> But biology has also produced systems which are far beyond what we've been able to engineer.

Sure it does. But I talk in terms of probabilities and possibilities. I am addressing the "leap of faith." I am saying because such and such is extremely possible... my statement is not a leap of faith. In this case I am saying inefficiencies are very possible. Thus my statement is highly realistic.

I never made a statement about anything absolute. I never said that absolutely the brain is inefficient. I simply said my statement is categorically not a leap of faith because it is VERY possible. And i provided logical evidence supporting this.
>> Why would I give them a second thought on the other side?

Because if enough of them hurt, soon the government wants to bail them out, and you and I pay for that bailout with taxes.

Or perhaps the government forces the platform to absorb the losses, and you and I pay for that with higher fees in the future.
Why do you think that combining small slices of thousands of other people's intelligences does not produce its own form of intelligence?

When you ask an AI "do you like what I am wearing?", knowing what an AI is, the only logical explanation for me would be that you, in fact, want to know the average opinion of other people about your dress, since that is the only answer an AI can give. Which is a perfectly good question in and of itself that we also ask other people. In that case, a good quality answer would entail a past history of communication with many other human beings about their tastes in clothing, producing the ability to accurately guesstimate if other people will like what you wear. But this is exactly the realm in which this kind of AI can surpass human beings simply because it can "talk" to many more people from many more locations across time, thus producing a better answer for you. Is this ability to collect and process information about other people not a type of intelligence? There are many other types, yes, but it is possible to construct a system that consists of more than one type of neural network that can relay data among themselves.
> I could get any subreddit closed down by asking for things that are against the rules

Pretty sure that's how every subreddit that's ever been banned got banned.
https://jasonformat.com/islands-architecture/
Training images today is equivalent of launching a web server using one line of code
I don't know if it is such an easy answer. On the one hand, a policy of not prosecuting the office holder might help the peaceful transfer of power; on the other, such a policy creates an unaccountable sovereign every four years.

Was it fear of prosecution that kept Caesar from giving up imperium when returning from Gaul? It was certainly a factor. Would there have been no Roman civil war if there was such a non-prosecution policy in place? I'm less certain.

The risk you bring up must be carefully considered, but so is having an unaccountable sovereign, just four years at a time.
I knew how to code before going to the university to get a CS degree. Formal education taught me a lot more about the field than just coding. I wouldn't hire a person without a degree.
- are you screaming/ranting in your car on the way home or when alone? <-- #1 sign I need to switch jobs.

- do you wake up and say "ugh I hate my job" every day?

- are you depressed (more than normal) or have feelings of hopelessness?

- has your activity level (errands, workouts) changed substantively, and is lack of time due to work devotion not the case?

- has the "spark of creativity" disappeared?

- sneaky structural sleep deprivation for work?
Has there been a public independent audit? I thought the lack of one was part of the issue...
Sentience supervenes or at least largely determines social and legal status. So yes, it has function in those domains. I'm most curious how it plays out legally. Will we rebase our concept of personhood, on something other than sentience in order to avoid difficult cases? If we don't ground personhood on sentience, what do we ground it with instead?
Show HN: Binserve – Fast single-binary static web server
The future of Apple Retail is being designed right in front of you
It's less jargon and more tone. Whereas a sarcastically snarky retort might fly on most forums, here it's more likely to net you downvotes. But the same content expressed without the sarcasm will be better-received.
Thank you for your comment. The point is that the administrator should not have any extra work. Otherwise I think your solution is already conceivable.
Out of those 7bn, a few with capabilities significantly outside the norm can make a huge impact especially in inherently competitive scenarios. If you could use an AGI, even incredibly energy inefficient, with few other disadvantages and even very significant advantage over all of us 7bn, it can be tremendously valuable.
I've worked in the AI space, but mostly on the backend tweaking algorithms so I guess I'm asking this as (mostly) a laymen: Isn't using AI to generate training data to train another AI fraught with peril?
Suggesting that cities aren't designed correctly is obviously implying that the solution is to redesign cities.

Redesigning entire cities is hard. It is not a reasonable thing to bring up, when talking about a policy regarding when school starts.

That is not hyperbole. Instead it is completely legitimate to dismiss someone suggesting that cities are designed poorly, because to fix such a problem would be a huge undertaking.
The crazy thing is Texas is also reasonably likely to have the same problems in the summer. ERCOT (the Texas grid) broke it's all time load record yesterday from the current heat wave. Thankfully it was windy, so everything held up.... this time.
> brigaded by users

Or Reddit employees.
I thought /r/FemaleDatingStrategy was banned. It's still up though.
Because Rails is a good technology for a lot of use cases.

If you want to develop a simple crud style app, with user login, mail sending and all that stuff it is highly productive.

Performance is okay and certainly good enough for the average web project.

Just get rid of the weird parts like turbolinks (unnecessary and messes up a lot of js) and don't write APIs using it (can't even rename fields easily).

There are similar Frameworks in other languages and they all have pros and cons.

Imho when it comes to web frameworks there is way too much emphasis on the startup style company and the ones with huge traffic.

Companies doing grunt work style web development don't waste their time on flavor-of-the-month.js.

If you build a website for a niche company to sell odd machinery on, you have to get shit done and you will never need to scale.

That means reliable, batteries included, highly standardized and easy to use. Rails ticks those boxes really well.
I've just learned (one benefit of not automatically updating everything) that the app I've used for syncing music from iTunes to my Android phone [1] plus the associated music player app have been sold to some unscrupulous developers who have apparently proceeded to immediately re-add ads into the paid-for (!) versions, re-adding the the file sync limits that originally only applied to the free trial version and things like that and (instead of the former one-time purchase) are now demanding something on the order of 30 $ or so per month (!!) in order to unlock the former paid-for features again.

It'd be nice if there actually was a rule against something like that…

[1] The key features for why I didn't just use a simple file sync was that it supported bi-directional syncing of play counts, ratings and for podcasts also the playback position.
Performance Management as a New Manager
>Satoshi was NOT an excellent C++ programmer.

I'm not a programmer but that is what Gavin Andresen said[1]; he said something like this "Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but he wasn't a cryptographer" and "Satoshi wasn't familiar with Cryptography 101" in a sense that Satoshi was sometimes mixing up basic cryptographic concepts.

And yea I know Bitcoin had plenty of bugs I heard of notorious Value overflow incident[2].

>IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).

My assumption is someone from the academia e.g. university professor. Maybe someone who was teaching freshmen basics of Computer Science and basic C++ programming then your point might be valid that Bitcoin's codebase was poorly written looking from the practical and from the professional point of view.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
It is very likely that "subjective experience", "sentience" and "consciousness" can be explained with known laws of physics. And simulated. It is possible that the DNN, in order to fit the statistics of the text had to simulate these processes somewhere in the network. So it is not ridiculous that a process analogous to at least the fragments of human consciousness can now be simulated by a DNN like LaMDA. We know that DNNs are surprisingly efficient in simulating other very complex physical processes (i.e. weather predictions). So why not "sentience".

So, "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck" maybe we can call it a "simulated duck" at the least. And then it'd be pretty natural to drop the "simulated" word.
> When you don't spring out of bed excited to see what the work day brings you.

This describes at least 95% of all workers, probably for pretty much their entire working lives.
No, but you might make something as long as there’s a profitable market for it.

I’m guessing the ultimate answer you are looking for is mostly “history”. Once upon a time, all chess sets were handmade and expensive. Then mass production techniques came on line and the market moved to cheap, machine-made sets. There’s still some people who would prefer a handmade set and you can get one for only $500. That seems pretty inexpensive to me. If I wanted a nice chess set, it might be what I would buy.
There is also no way to stop people from writing/committing cyberattacks: let's ban computers and dismantle the internet.
Reminds me of this story “How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username” from 2014.

https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
agree - this is not being discussed enough.
Sentience is most likely some kind of emergent quantum phenomenon IMO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

If it is, we have a long, long way to go before we start to understand it.
USD is just pieces of paper https://www.theonion.com/u-s-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-natio...
This is a pretty serious line in the sand. My company has definitely hired many people without CS degrees (myself included). What field do you work in?
Oops - The title was meant to say 2007. However GoDaddy still suffers from social engineering attacks, e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-staff-fall-prey-to-soc...
These symptoms make me wonder if my son has a burnout from school. Except he's not remotely working hard.
Not talking about agi. I am doing proof by contradiction. Yes current models of ML are primitive but the reasoning attributes you brought up have been reproduced in ML.. albeit in a primitive way.

It is still proof by contradiction, what you say is categorically not true.
I’ve always found that quote incredibly glib. The interesting question is whether or not a machine can have an internal experience, which we should then care about on a moral level. Unless you deny the existence of experience, or adopt the exotic view that experience is universal and shared by rocks and electrons, that question is going to be pretty important as AI advances.
Technically, only direct stock offerings "infuse capital into a corporation".

The rest (which is probably 99% of the market volume) is also just "speculation".
1) How would processing all inputs and determining actions be less effective if everything was done subconsciously rather than consciously? Our hearts determine the correct speed and pressure to beat at all unconsciously and that is evolutionarily advantageous. Why would some information processing tasks benefit more (or at all) from consciousness?

2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?
I would expect the opposite, that once deepfakes become commonplace the ability to blackmail anyone with pornographic material of them vanishes. After all they can claim it's a deepfake, and everyone will find that plausible.

Photos went through the same thing: they used to labor-intensive to fake and generally accepted at face value, now that everyone can easily manipulate them with photoshop people are much more suspicious. That's how we got to people using video as proof instead of simple images. Now faces in videos will lose this trust, and people will find more trustworthy signals.