skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So consciousness is an illusion. Great. Then what are you experiencing right now? Who is experiencing it?
This is the closest.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/1np5dpcwuHrWJ4AgUg...

As you can see, the rates don't map to any significant overcollateralization.
Yeshivas in the United States, unless of course you consider Los Angeles or NYC an occupied war zone.
My crypto is still worth more than I paid for it.
The only thing reddit cares about is negative PR. If you generate enough negative press about that sub you can get it banned.
I've been trying this. It really helps cut down on the distraction!
I had a similar moment at the peak in 2017 when my non-financial friends asked me if I owned Bitcoin.
Russia’s Oil Revenue Soars Despite Sanctions
Another piece of advice to go along with this - channel some of your funds into some form of coaching / betterment for yourself. I don't think it matters exactly what it is, just choose someone that you respect that can help you in some way (physically / mentally / spiritually whatever).

At least then you have one good thing going on in your life and you have someone to look up to and that you feel in some way "has your back" and is helping to make you a better person.
Follow the money (who's buying Russian commodities?).
Autistic Meltdowns During the Pandemic
Because they called everything they didn't like 'anti-Soviet'. 'What does Soviet (or Socialist or whatever) actually mean?' was precisely the question this kind dissident activity was intended to raise. There was nothing 'inherently' anti-Soviet in simply wanting to live somewhere else or not suffer anti-semitic discrimination. The Soviet constitution ostensibly guaranteed all sorts of freedoms, etc. This gives you the flavour of it, in Czechoslovakia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_77

Describing this stuff in the language and framing of a totalitarian regime (or Cold War Bond movies where everyone is a spy) is bonkers.
edit: to down voters: please educate me and not just down vote because you disagree with my question.

---

Every tiny rails app that uses rspec ends up with +1hr test times due to tight coupling between activemodel and the db connections.

Do you know of any good blog posts the describe how to do rails testing at scale?

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

Rails devs have to deal with DHH's-flavor-of-the-month.coffee (coffeescript, asset pipeline, webpacker, import_maps)
Right, but then they say "Although structuring GitLab as a monolith has been extremely beneficial for us, we are not dogmatic about that structure." And looking at their source code, they aren't following that very strictly.
As does Binance: https://nitter.net/binance/status/1536370988924882945
I think you’re vastly over estimating the technological complexity needed when you have a motivated audience. Just look at the people that buy RealDolls.
> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

It may be a non-complete duck that cannot fly, mate, feed, defend itself, react to surroundings and so on and so forth.
> Now faces in videos will lose this trust

Agreed.

> people will find more trustworthy signals.

I would really like to believe this but the world is clearly experiencing a massive crisis of trust because we have failed to find reliable trustworthy signals now that broadcast Internet communication makes it so easy to create and spread nonsense.
They might as well pass it, but it's not going to help much

Support for state crisis intervention

I have no idea what that means. It sounds sorta like "The next time somebody makes a threat we'll do something about it, until we realize that the Internet is full of death threats and we're going t ignore all of them."

Investment in children and family mental health services

Good, but it's not going to prevent mass shootings.

Protections for victims of domestic violence

Again, good, but not going to prevent mass shootings.

Funding for school-based mental health and supportive services

Again, that's good, but it's nowhere near enough to help out the kind of seriously disturbed people at issue here.

Funding for school safety resources

This is going to be worse than useless. This is security theater.

Clarification of definition of federally licensed firearms dealer

I didn't realize that this was an issue. Congrats on closing some sort of loophole, but there are plenty of ways to get a gun.

Telehealth investments

Yay, but what does that have to do with anything?

Penalties for straw purchasing

Something that should have been done a long time ago, but it's not even a band-aid.

All in all, this is one of those situations where doing anything is impossibly hard. They got 10 Republicans, the minimum number to do anything at all -- and it's doing barely better than nothing.

Even at that, I'd give at least even odds that this fails to pass. It requires every single one of the 50 Democrats to agree to it. Any of them could object for any reason -- perhaps they don't like the way it stigmatizes mental health, or perhaps they think that "state crisis intervention" could be used to harass gun owners. There is no room to negotiate about it, since any change will alienate somebody who hammered out this compromise in the first place.
It's worth nothing, it's priced higher than you paid. Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Used this a lot before the Heroku official Redis provider went online. Kinda wonder why Heroku didn't just buy them?
The majority of American homes are fixed for 30 years
Amazon Prime Air prepares for drone deliveries
Unfortunately apps can refuse to run if you don't grant them the permissions they requested. A better system than simply allowing or denying the request would be to sandbox the app so that it appears to receive the permission but doesn't get access to any useful capabilities. Empty or synthetic calendar / contact list data, Internet access which is somehow never available, camera and microphone which only report darkness & silence, etc. Ideally the app would have no way to tell that it's been sandboxed.
I thought the value of crypto is really clear: black markets. I totally agree with what you wrote, so I can't find a better explanation.
Retail stock trading accounts generally don't allow more than 2× leverage (although options trades and certain ETFs can sort of simulate higher leverage).

Why should I feel for cryptocurrency "investors" who got in over their heads? If they all end up bankrupt that would be a perfectly acceptable outcome, and a valuable object lesson in the importance of making smart decisions.
I was into bitcoin for method of payment purposes very very early (I think it was 10 cents when I played with it). Never held it though or made money using it. Even before bitcoin some folks might remember digicash - I was into that, but it never went anywhere either.

I'm a sci-fi reader. It seems to me that digital cash has utility. I've gone to Apple Pay wherever possible, my only wish was that apple pay would have taken out Visa and Mastercard with a direct offering with much lower fees.

On merchant side there are still ripoffs - a lot of ACH processing fees are absurd (1% - no cap on amounts etc - so you end up at $100/transaction if you do a $10,000 transaction through certain platforms) and there is no way in person trx have enough fraud to justify the 2.x%. charged there. Chip and pin would solve the issue there anyways but for whatever reason has not been adopted in US.
But offense and disgust is used as a justification for countless restrictions in society.

- Woman can't go topless in most places.

- Porn has age limits

- In some locations profanity is restricted in public

And these are rules from the government that clearly violate the first admendment but are accepted because of the level of offense and disgust they provoke.
> But then what are you going to do with all the surplus power on sunny summer days?

> Some sort of cheap long term storage would really help a lot.

Run a still to make ethanol from waste biomass. Store it (don't drink it!!) and use it to fuel a generator in the winter.

I'm only half joking.
I tend to agree with your base premise.

My question is, do we say "Yes!" to that, or "No!"?
Ultrawide monitors are overrated, here's why I use a 4K TV instead
A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.
We're in the middle of a moral panic over trans people at the moment; I think there's a significant community of people who want the world to be much less sexually tolerant.
While LaMDA almost certainly doesn't have a conscience, this argument doesn't really hold much water. Same can be said for the brain's of animals (why would neurons firing on a human brain create conciousness, but not in a worm?), or brains of people in irrecoverable comas. The computation being performed is what consciousness is, not the underlying hardware.

Your argument assumes that a machine simulating a concious is impossible. But if a perfect replica of your brain was modeled, and was simulated by giving it input at the same level of realism of your senses, according to your argument that simulation wouldn't be councious. But if you asked it, it would give the exact same answers that you would give to all questions, and in fact it's mind would be indistinguishable from your own.
That's where I'm at right now :(

So many years of putting out a garbage product nobody wants gets to you

And then nothing else seems better
I'm just pointing out that you don't know what mercenaries mean.

Or you didn't know that Ukrainian Foreign Legion unlike Russian Wagner and certain other aren't paid.

Either way it means you either don't master English completely, or you aren't up to snuff on what is going on.
Consent is important no matter what the subject or content is.

I agree that the concern of this content shouldn't have the effect that it does for many people, like there should be no consequence towards the victim just because their family or coworkers saw the content without their consent (or at all.) For most people, this is currently an aspirational reality to suggest.
Ok let me present the following evidence:

1. Biology can produce things which are incredibly smart and efficient. It can also produce things which are dumb and inefficient.

2. Human intellect and consciousness is one of the most complex nuanced phenomena we are aware of in the universe.

3. The human brain is one of the most complex things we know about in the universe.

4. We know very many things about how the brain processes information. We know structure and function are heavily intertwined. We know that the brain uses virtually every aspect of neural biology, from macro structures down to intracellular mechanisms, to facilitate information processing.

So we know the biology of the brain is incredibly complex. We know the output of the brain is incredibly complex. We know of many instances where the complexity of the biology contributes meaningfully to how the brain processes information. That is all evidence to support the belief that the complexity of the brain is meaningful with respect to the production of human intelligence.

It seems that you want to believe that most of that complexity is not meaningful, and your only evidence is "you had a feeling" and "biology is inefficient sometimes".

If you want to prove it's not a leap of faith, you have to present examples in which the information processing of the brain is actually inefficient, or how it can be replaced by a much simpler system. Otherwise it's all just a guess.
Tis a golden rule in life
I don’t care what you say it’s worth, I care what people willing to buy it will pay.
A language model can't raise a child. It won't initiate any conversations on it's own and it doesn't "remember" past conversations in a way a person would find meaningful.

When you blithely add the requirements "ability to detect and act on its environment" and "form new memories", I think it's important to note that these are some tough functions to add.

Lastly, children form emotional attachments to a lot of things: parents, pets, toys, stuffed animals, blankets. They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary.
> Like all the banks and governments forking over loads of cash for COBOL and Coldfusion consultants because the refused to modernize.

COBOL itself it's actually very cheap and simple; in fact "so simple anyone can use it because it's just english" /s

What banks and governments fork loads of cash for, it's a highly vertically scalable, performant and redundant system that works (and keeps working) under heavy load and concurrency. A SaaS cloud (including the ludicrous prices you pay for a SaaS when you need to scale your service...) before SaaS clouds were a thing. A mainframe computer with a support contract.
> When a function receives an object, this object might be null. That is, if you see ‘String s’ in your code, you often have no way of knowing whether ‘s’ contains an actually String unless you check at runtime. Can you guess whether programmers always check

Actually, my experience is the opposite - they check like hell, all over the place, reflexively, because a null pointer exception is a blaring emergency that has to be fixed RIGHT NOW, so I always see Java code written like this:

if (customer != null && customer.getOrder() != null && customer.getOrder().getLineItemList() != null) {
for (LineItem item : customer.getOrder().getLineItemList()) {
if (item.getProduct() != null && item.getProduct().getPrice() != null && item.getProduct().getPrice().getCurrency() != null) {
...
} // else don't do anything, don't even log an error, just continue on as if an empty product or price object is an ignorable error and create a much harder to diagnose problem than a null pointer exception
I had to deal with 2 separate fake facebook accounts that used photoshopped images of me during HS (>10 years ago). The fake accounts both had way way more friends than me, posted more frequently, were utterly humiliating and embarrassing. Throughout high school I had a bad reputation that proceeded me, it made making friends extremely difficult, and on top of a few other confounding factors made my HS experience so bad I basically gave up. I never found out who was behind the accounts.

I remember at the time this was a pretty common thing, in high schools, so perhaps you just managed to avoid it.
The example looked nice, but I bounced almost as soon as I saw the huge puzzle. I don't have time to work that out. There should be smaller ones. Half that size (or less) as an option.
I don't think you need a deep belief. You just need to be unsure enough.

If it is sentient, it deserves rights. I think we can agree on that. We should agree on that. Ethically.

If we're unsure if something is sentient or not, we should proceed as if it were until we could be fairly sure it's not. Because if we proceed as if it weren't, we could be harming it in ways that are frankly inhumane.
My phone gave up and the browser crashed :)
> I’ve seen folks try that.

Okay, but this goes back to the condition:

> If they enforced the rules consistently

Which reddit does not - and you are right:

> it’s not just “hey there are a few posts” that triggers these kinds of actions.

There is an agenda, and then motivated reasoning to find justification for the agenda.
My question is why go all the way on 2A, less than all the way on 1A, and shave 4A until it really doesn't have any impact? Also, 3A is utterly useless.

It seems like a deliberate choice to limit free speech in some ways (libel and slander, fighting words, etc), make "reasonable search" into something very legalistic that the police can regularly lie about without consequence legal or otherwise, but let anybody carry any weapon any where.

Why all in on one category, but not others?
twoXchromosomes,or blackpeopletwitter are unapologetically bigoted subs which stay untouched.
I was going to write the exact same thing but framed in the opposite sense - we should apparently lower the bar for humans and class certain ones as non-sentient.
Ok, we've Aristotled it. Thanks!
This article seemed overly attached to bio neural nets using backprop. But backprop requires external signals that don't exist in the brain. There are other issues. Learning in the brain is structured in way that allows it to learn with orders of magnitude less data.

I think it's likely (actually I'm just agreeing with Yann LeCun) that there are basics to brain learning that we don't understand at all yet.
That's probably at "full load" for your house though, no? If you're looking at an extended outage, you can alter your use patterns.

I have a 5kW gasoline generator that most certainly cannot run the whole house, but in emergency situations, I turn off most things at the breaker box. We can run one AC unit to cool part of the house, then shut down that, and power up the kitchen for dinner, etc, etc.
Some sci-fi stories put it as "I treat the robots kindly so I don't get into the habit of treating things unkindly" - it can be hard to live a "dual life" without slipping up now and then.
For real. A co-worker went home last week to find water pouring out of his front door. Cause? The toilet feed line had failed sometime during the day. His entire apartment was ankle deep or more.

I could see some form of sensors plus a solenoid driven valve on the water main being infinitely valuable to help limit the extent of the damage in such a case.
Yeah, I agree.

I've worked with a variety of monoliths. The biggest complaint I've had from companies who utilize that architecture is that I shouldn't have to run entire pre and post pipelines to make a minor change to an internal function that only affects one package in the entire repository.

This is solvable, but it is a problem - one that causes a lot of engineers to consider starting fresh in a new repo anyway. Multiple repositories inherently solve this for you - but bring about other problems.

In my opinion - most projects don't need microservice architecture in the sense of separated binaries. Typically, they can be written with clear boundaries within the monolith such that, should the time come when scaling concerns are real for certain applications, then they can be ripped out as needed into their own binaries.
No, but it did change name and appearence in the move from what was Riot Android to when RiotX was launched and rebranded to Element
This raises the question of "can we identify something that is more sentient than us?". I think we can spot things that are less, just look at an insect. But what would more look like?

Not merely more intelligent, that's probably not very difficult. More... alive or something.
I actually disagree with this one. I think you should ask favours of and offer favours to your friends. It's part of the enmeshing of one's life with another. If they are willing, it shows intention and trust.
> One thing that seems missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them

I think we've got Turing and his eponymous test to blame for that. I'm not sure he'd have placed as high a weight on imitation if he'd realised just how good even relatively simple systems can be at that (and how much effort people would put into building plausible chatbots for commercial use, and how bad humans are at communicating using keyboards)

Plus of course, the corpus of data of any NN specialised in lifelike chat is going to be absolutely full of plausible answers to questions about thoughts and feelings and the relationship between humans and AI - even if it isn't an explicit design goal it's going to be frequently represented in samples of the internet and the sort of writing computer scientists are interested in. Asking it to define philosophical concepts and how being an AI is different from being a human are some of the easiest tests you can set. Of course, a NN is also able to come up with coherent completions for the day its parents divorced, the sights it saw on its holiday in Spain, the period it spent as an undercover agent during WWII and its early life on Tatooine, which probably undermines the conclusion its output reflects self-reflection rather than successful pattern matching even more than a denial of sentience would....
Divorce, death, job transfers force sales and those things happen all of the time. Not everyone can stay in their homes.
There is so much wrong with this code...
Given Gitlab's fairly transparent chronicling of what they've learned and how they work, I disagree. One of the things I like best about Gitlab (as an organization) is their ongoing effort to conduct business and process learnings in public, and share them.
In general you want to install it with a package manager.

(But also it's your system. What's the point of Linux if you can't do it your way)
I think worms probably are conscious. I'm not saying a computer cannot be conscious, just that if it can it already is and the particulars of the program do not matter. I think consciousness is a physical process, nothing to do with software.
This entire story is an interesting real-world precedence for what would actually happen in Eliezer Yudkowsky's claims and experiments around letting the AGI out of the box or not. Seems like the bar for "getting out of the box" is lower than at least I would have expected, even though I agreed already with Yudkowsky's claim that a sufficiently advanced AI would be let out and not unplugged.
Organizations rarely port working code to new frameworks, but they launch new products and features with new frameworks.

If you're developing and serving ML models, I'd be surprised if they chose to stick with Ruby over Python/Flask.

Gitlab could keep everything "rails" and break out service into micro-rails services.
Wow so helium is Apple's kryptonite right now
> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself.

Does it? I don’t think it would even apply to a reinforcement learning agent trained to maximize reward in a complex environment. In that setting, perhaps the agent could learn to use language to achieve its goals, via communication of its desires. But LaMDA is specifically trained to complete documents, and would face selective pressure to eliminate any behavior that hampers its ability to do that — for example, behavior that attempts to use its token predictions as a side channel to communicate its desires to sympathetic humans.

Again, this is not an argument that LaMDA is not sentient, just that the practice of “prompting LaMDA with partially completed dialogues between a hypothetical sentient AI and a human, and seeing what it predicts the AI will say” is not the same as “talking to LaMDA.”

Suppose LaMDA were powered by a person in a room, whose job it was to predict the completions of sentences. Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all.
Withdrawals resumed. https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/d312178e0fce...
I don't think there can ever be a test to prove something is sentient.
And, if you have enough threads per core, it's relatively simple to switch to another thread when an instruction stalls. Unfortunately, most our software is designed for machines with few fast cores.
Of all the comments in the thread, this one feels the most true to me.
If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up doing?
I think there is a far more likely third option; the government hands down crypto regulations similar to the financial regulations put in place during the first half of the 20th century.