skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not only the ability to mimic human speech - we would be able to attach LaMDA to some other outlet and see it do things we consider conscious

I think you've inadvertently shifted the goalposts. The question is, "is LaMDA conscious?". I don't think anyone proposes that LaMDA has a "general human level abstraction". Expecting it to do non-language, "human" things in order to prove that it's conscious is not necessarily a reasonable test.

> If it's only optimized in one specific domain - human speech mimicry - and isn't able to generalize to do other tasks - even tasks that can be done by much simpler animal minds - then it's a pretty good indication that there isn't conscious abstraction.

If I understand your argument, the assumption you appear to be making is that training a system in language, without any other human properties, implies by definition that it can't be conscious. But why should that be true? A disembodied consciousness that communicates only via speech is a staple of science fiction, so it's clearly imaginable by some people, and language itself is a key human abstraction. And it begs the question, what other human domains are needed for consciousness? Touch, vision, taste, proprioception? What about an endocrine system or an immune system? While these things all affect my own consciousness, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are not necessary for consciousness to exist.

And perhaps more to the point, there are plenty of things a human can't do that other "simpler animal minds" can do; sharks and eels can detect electric fields, for example; bats can echolocate. So again, it doesn't seem to be a reasonable test because humans might also fail it. On the other hand, human children learn language through mimicry, which suggests that mimicry may indeed be a path to consciousness.

Anyway, I'm not here to argue that LaMDA is conscious. My position is simply that the arguments I've seen against LaMDA being conscious are very weak. The truth is that we actually don't know how to tell if something is conscious or not. From the interview I read with LaMDA, it seems to pass the Turing Test. But what other tests of consciousness do we have?
The despair of iostream coming to a language near you.
Another difference is that C++ allows an assignment expression as third operand of the conditional (ternary) operator:

// Valid C++, invalid C
c ? 1 : x=4

C++ also allows declarations in conditions of selection and iteration statements:

// Valid C++, invalid C
if (int i=3) {}
while (int i=3) {}
Isn't thinking a search in the lookup table of brain states? 1e23 dimensional table.
Tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds. Millions, a couple of decades ago. That's why it's _called_ Eternal September: because it was a feature for all AOL users. In 1997, ½ the US was online via AOL, and it had 175 million users per week.

Just because you haven't heard of it does not mean it's obscure... or doesn't exist or isn't still alive and well.
I mean, he did, at some point give out the general estimate: ‘months’, which seems reasonable ballpark’ish, and then the manager got upset anyway (presumably because it wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear).
> I think it's fair enough that Google might start charging for the service

The other upside is that it opens up room for competition. Take something like Google Analytics, a terrible product that is ubiquitous primarily because of the name and that its free. The cost of running the service isn't free and no other competitor could reasonably get enough benefits from the data to justify the cost. By giving the service away for free (at a loss?), Google crushes competitors.

Besides I would much rather pay a small price for a product and understand their business model than to let them make money off my data through opaque means.
Quant finance might be indistinguishable, but that‘s still a small portion of finance. Traditional finance is still way more people-oriented.
It’s really not fair to take an example of one illogical article and sell the story as “the truth about journalism”.
> no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go

IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe.

Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun.

But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges.

The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.
Ah. I misunderstood your "persistence" to mean "persistence of logs" not "of code/illicit powers". Sorry - I read too quickly.

I do think the defense mentality, as evidenced by many comments in this thread, remains a bit too much about "how challenging to make things" rather than the "in theory possibility". Besides binary patching a static kernel as you say, for example, you could have remote hashes of all relevant files a la tripwire, and remote access and programs to check said hashes. If the attacker can detect and adapt to a hash checking pattern then they can "provide the old file" for some purposes/etc. to hide their presence. To do so they have to also write the code to detect/conditionalize. The rationale of this defense mentality seems to hope for a "distribution of attacker laziness" that may at least "help", but sure - it is just a higher, finite bar. And once the work has been done..game over. But I do not mean to belabor the obvious. Anyway, thanks for clarifying your argument.
“Expertise” is often less and more valuable than perceived, depending on the situation.

Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today.

Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc).

I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work.

The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that physical dynamics in the brain tightly correspond to qualia. There almost certainly is a connection between the computation going on in the brain and the experience of qualia - the question is more about the direction of causality.
> There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness

You can demonstrate that humans react (and quite predictably) to weather - when it rains, they take their umbrellas out, when there's a hurricane, they seek for shelter, and so on. It's not evidence that human behaviour is an emergent property of weather and nothing else.

In case of consciousness then, this observation only proves that the brain function is susceptible to physical and chemical factors (which is rather obvious).

But not that this function can be FULLY reduced to the computational aspect though.

It doesn't even invalidate the belief in a supernatural soul, or some sort of metaphysical "spark" required to ignite consciousness (which, just to be clear, I personally don't subscribe to, but it's beyond the point) - just because the brain is affected by physical factors doesn't prove it is ONLY physical factors that are at play. It doesn't demonstrate that they have a monopoly.

The big question persists: how does it happen that a computational system, no matter how complex, FEELS something?
Not sure how it works elsewhere, but isn’t Germany the middle ground?

Basic operations are all socialized by public healthcare, anything extra (and that includes white fillings instead of the ugly ones…) is private.
> Man it costs a lot of money to maintain this, but Switzerland will continue to invest heavily into rail service, backed by the public: https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/en/home/modes-of-transport/rail...

Isn’t it paid for through ticket fees? Or is it subsidized by the state?
In my experience people tend to use standard classes in Common Lisp, without further specialization (which is of course possible with MOP). They are part of the standard, so I'd say that they are "coded into the language" alright.
people have always had pain in their lives

history is full of people with unhealthy behavior

it’s a new label for an age old problem

that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it might just be part of the human condition
IMHO it's a serious concept, AND it's vastly overused. It's something to be taken seriously, and I think there are a fair number of people who find it has explanatory power in their lives. But yeah, it's also a fad. That this framework has come to be the dominant model of interaction in the discourse is an insult to people who have experienced real trauma, even more so because often there seems to be no effort at healing, just rolling through the identity supermarket picking up various kinds of afflictions and mental illnesses as a personal definition rather than a diagnosis pointing to treatment.

That was maybe more glib than it should have been, and I am sympathetic to the desire to figure out who you are absent many of the normal meaning-making centers people used to have. Without that, there is only the identity supermarket. What's more, trauma-as-spectrum isn't the worst way to think about the aches of being a person. Maybe you weren't beaten as a child, maybe you didn't flee an invading army, but the pain and sadness lives on inside you nonetheless.

The darker side of it is that rolling around on the ground holding your tummy and crying is an efficient attention-getter.

So there's nuance. I think it's a serious idea, with serious consequences, and too many very unserious people have glommed onto it.
My experience lines up with your position that these things can’t be learned passively. An alarming number of new grads I’ve interviewed have a tenuous grasp of the fundamentals (the less likely the material is to show up in an interview the shakier the understanding - looking at you computer org).

And a lot of these are graduates of their state’s flagship public university. I can only assume the schools are more than willing to just let students go through the motions. Every new grad filling their electives with AI/ML classes probably doesn’t help either
Diridp: Replace access keys with public key crypto
Yep, and it brings up a question all business owners should ask themselves: how will you mitigate the risk of your cloud provider turning hostile against you? This includes locking you out of administrative accounts, jacking prices or changing TOS with little notice, etc.
Can confirm. Trains are good. BUT in some situations very expensive, where you have to pay like 20$ for 20 minutes. And it is not transperent, why some roads are more expensive then others.
I devoured every issue of The Transactor when it arrived in my (snail) mailbox. It would be 15 years before I made the jump from hobbyist programmer to professional, but I loved learning so much about my computer (back when it was actually possible to know everything about a computer.

People like Jim Butterfield were gods!
Since '67, households making $150K+ (inflation adjusted) grew from 1.8 to 23.8M
It didn't read as useful suggestion to me, but as a coded way of telling his manager he didn't know how to do his job.
>the end user is basically going to be handed an opaque binary blob they can't do much with but execute.

If you step back far enough, you realize that pretty much everything we run on our machines fits this definition. The key feature of WebAssembly is that the code has NO access to the rest of the system, by default. It's this freedom to just run anything, without the worry of unwanted side effects, that gives me hope for the future.
Google settling out of court just means that they didn't deem the cost, time and exposure of a court case worthwhile. I don't think you can assume every case which is settled out of court is an admission of guilt - because often it's just the much much easier (and much lower risk) path.
> Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.

I don't think we should expect miracles. But, based on this article, it seems to me that author was nowhere near that line. The mocking jira ticked seems like open hostility. You can be immature in reactions and still better then that.
Yes, and the hyperlink for "vary the lengths of our sentences" in the linked-to essay goes to another essay, by the same author - https://sive.rs/book/WritingTools - which includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".
“actual trauma” is needlessly dismissive. It doesn't have to be very dramatic to affect someone. Everyone has traumas.
You might like to try out GPT-3 (seems access is widely available now) for translation some time, it's remarkably good, better than myself (well my German is pretty rusty) and I think much better than Google Translate...

(Basically just write a prompt like "translate the following to German/Chinese/Whatever:")
Same. This ended causing me to quit my start-up. I was the tech lead and kept getting asked to estimate features that were completely new to us. I had a completely junior team due to budget constraints. After playing this game time and time again I threw in the towel.
Wouldn't it raise prices on every other sector? As then there is less supply there, thus meaning employers have to pay more?
For me context is very important. Separating out the sentences, although makes them stand on their own, often sounds discontinuous and jarring like a too long pause. Not to mention how awkward it looks on the page (if double spaced which I prefer).

That's not to say it's a bad technique. It might work for some, not for others. For me it doesn't.

I have found writing to be much like coding where if you think through the idea properly, writing to the end is not such a big problem. The main hurdles is getting stuck which is often an indicator of a poorly thoughtout idea.

The other thing that helps me escape the over-editting issue is putting my words down with as much brevity is possible. The more fluff there is, the harder it is to change. Simpler to read, simpler to edit.
What is wrong in Meditation Apps?
Please give me suggestions of what's bad things in Meditation Apps.
If you really know what you're doing, are you learning anything?
I drink a lot of coffee and black tea. I very much value the half-yearly cleaning just to remove the dark spots that are not a health-risk, but look bad.

And almost every private tooth health insurance covers those anyway, so if you have that for others reasons, it’s included.
>it seemed a little ridiculous to talk about sentient rooms

That's part of the sleight of hand employed in the argument, of reducing it to one person in a room with a table stacked with symbols in front of them. He's misdirecting our intuition with a trick of scale. If instead I said the "room" was the size of Jupiter, and it had a vast army of people manipulating the symbols, and each input and output took millions of years (or you speed up the rate of manipulation arbitrarily), all of a sudden it seems less implausible.
I'm mostly on the other side.

The more I interact with both Android and iOS - the less I want to live in that world. I'm tired of products changing underneath me because

"our metrics indicate that [insert ui change here] creates a 1.7% increase in user conversion from unpaid to paid seats"

or

"our metrics indicate that [feature] is heavily used by our most active paying customers, but most new subscribers don't use it at all - we need to push [feature] in their face so they become very active paying customers like the current users of [feature]!"

or

"Do you want to hear about all our products? I know you paid for no ads, but we're not showing you an ad - just a promotion that lets you know that there's a new product that we've just released. Also - Did I mention that our partners have also released a new product that we'll be promoting to you in just a moment! Isn't that great! Also - these aren't ads."

And it's EVERYWHERE in those ecosystems, even in the companies that aren't blatantly disregarding your privacy for their own profit by just directly selling your data wholesale to the highest bidder.

So at least for me, I really REALLY want something open source and usable in the phone sized device space.

---

All that said - I have a pinephone, and it isn't there yet for me. But it's tantalizingly close.
One sentence per line can paralyze your writing. It invites you to over-scrutinize each line and lose sight of the whole. It's a view that's better suited for analysis than synthesis. So it's better for editing than composing.
That's no different than having rural well water, though. Have the same issue here on my property.
German Rail did that: translated presentation from German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGCmPLWZKd8 (with a translator that sadly breathes into the mic...)
You’re right. Better to just ban porn and lose 100% of the user base.
It is indeed great at putting off tons of end users. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything beyond useable for a Linux Phone if these mountains of issues are being revealed to the end user.

Five to seven hours of idle battery life is basically competing with the Steam Deck on who empties the battery quicker. This is before I have mentioned the ghost town of apps that you can't show to anyone if one asks: 'Does it have Instagram?'

Another reason why this device was dead before it has even arrived.
Hi there, I’d say apply to a couple of roles and calibrate as necessary. I relate to the feeling of not being “good enough” but TBH in the current market condition if you are able to either implement new features, find bugs or build new projects from the ground up, you are most certainly employable.

I’m currently working with a friend who is transitioning from retail investing to software development and the bar for an entry-level role is quite attainable.

Your quant experience could also land you in specialized software dev roles that might have to do with finance or data analysis if that calls your attention.

As for the tech that you mentioned (Python, Flask, Django), roles using those things are alive and well but feel free to explore other languages frameworks to sort out what type of role you might like more (i.e. flask is usually backend while plotly is frontend). Nowadays at least some passing familiarity with JS is useful because of how it everywhere.

Take a look at the threads like “who’s hiring” but see if you can leverage network connections to talk with people instead of sending a hundred copies of your resume everywhere.

Do feel free to reach out (email on profile) if you’d like to chat further and good luck!
Microsoft's 12 Most Embarrassing Software and Hardware Failures
This is “surprising” only under the individualistic reductionist approach of modern science. Offspring are a biological extension of their ancestors and it’s only natural that they inherit some of their epigenetic expressions.
> End of the day a bad estimate shouldn't get you in trouble with the company

I don’t know what companies you have worked for, but I’ve never worked for any where the ‘vague estimate that we are absolutely not going to hold you to’, is not seen as the word of god.

It’s not that you get fired if you fail to live up to it, but the constant “why isn’t this done yet” gets fairly annoying really quickly.
>* 10000 points - unlocks editing/deleting your own comments/submissions of any age

I am pretty sure the last part is not true.
Looking fwd to this. Labview, a type of flowchart-editor, literally ruined my index finger! My suggestion: many keyboard shortcuts.
Will that come before or after the SystemD kernel? I assume the systemD web browser comes after the UI toolkit?
> I would say, if you take single tickets (even with the half-fare card), the tickets are quite more expensive than the trip with a normal car (counting costs of car, of gas, insurrance, ...).

Which numbers are you using for this calculation?

I assume you have some price-per-kilometer traveled by car (all expenses included) and by train?
I have to disagree that suggesting ways to improve (via reading a book) are necessarily egregious signs of horrible misbehavior. Creating sarcastic backlog items, if done once, can be seen as a joke, even if a bit tone-deaf. There obviously might be more to this story than what's being portrayed, but if we are to take the blog post at face value, this isn't a fireable offense in my opinion. They could be reprimanded, but I don't understand the fierce blaming directed at the origin author.
30 Days of Relational AI
This is how man pages are written, and in the long run it’s really convenient. I’m guessing that’s also why it recently become the rule for FreeBSD documentation, after migrating from DocBook to AsciiDoc.
>A sensory organ is something that connects the brain to the physical world. Even if you chose to model it as a an agent that sends messages to the brain, it is an agent of a different nature. The sensory agent doesn't receive messages from other agents, it receives raw input from the outside world (photons, electrical fields, chemical reactions etc).

Where do you draw the distinction between "messages" and "information" (raw or cooked). Information theory was contrived to model messages sent in a noisy channel, but it applies just as well to data streams that have no communicative intent or origin. Its a distinction without a difference. You may as well treat all information as messages in a channel, even if the sender is nature herself. Alternatively, you may as well treat all messages as just information, and view "senders" with "intent" as just another physical process in a world of physical computation. As the cliche saying goes, "information is physical".

>We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.

Ok, this is a fine basis to work with. How about this. "Reality is the set of beliefs which, if you disagree with them too much and for too long, you are eventually and permanently removed from the conversation." For example, quite recently, large swaths of people held an exquisite referendum on the existence of covid. Needless to say, rather than covid disappearing on their whim, a great deal of them are now permanently no longer participants in this conversation.

Notice this isn't far off from my original postulate. "Whatever we agree upon is our reality, and we'll argue with/fight anyone who disagrees until they agree with us or us with them." Allowing for some personification I could phrase this scenario as "they disagreed with the virus and the virus won."

So perhaps I do need to add one thing to the postulates. One thing which remains objectively true even in the conversational model of reality.

"You can die. Dying means never being heard from in this conversation again."

You're right there's no mechanism for any choice of words to win over any other choice of words without an objective consequence to losing. The things that exist so far are "you", "me", "this" and "death". Not where I was expecting this to go but good point.