ChairmanMeow

I have no issues connecting to my server when using my local DNS and self-signed certificates with the normal app either, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

Ah, but here we have to get pedantic a little bit: producing an AGI through current known methods is intractable.

The human brain is extremely complex and we still don't fully know how it works. We don't know if the way we learn is really analogous to how these AIs learn. We don't really know if the way we think is analogous to how computers "think".

There's also another argument to be made, that an AGI that matches the currently agreed upon definition is impossible. And I mean that in the broadest sense, e.g. humans don't fit the definition either. If that's true, then an AI could perhaps be trained in a tractable amount of time, but this would upend our understanding of human consciousness (perhaps justifyingly so). Maybe we're overestimating how special we are.

And then there's the argument that you already mentioned: it is intractable, but 60 million years, spread over trillions of creatures is long enough. That also suggests that AGI is really hard, and that creating one really isn't "around the corner" as some enthusiasts claim. For any practical AGI we'd have to finish training in maybe a couple years, not millions of years.

And maybe we develop some quantum computing breakthrough that gets us where we need to be. Who knows?

This is a gross misrepresentation of the study.

That's as shortsighted as the "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" quote, or the worry that NYC would be buried under mountains of horse poop before cars were invented.

That's not their argument. They're saying that they can prove that machine learning cannot lead to AGI in the foreseeable future.

Maybe transformers aren't the path to AGI, but there's no reason to think we can't achieve it in general unless you're religious.

They're not talking about achieving it in general, they only claim that no known techniques can bring it about in the near future, as the AI-hype people claim. Again, they prove this.

That's a silly argument. It sets up a strawman and knocks it down. Just because you create a model and prove something in it, doesn't mean it has any relationship to the real world.

That's not what they did. They provided an extremely optimistic scenario in which someone creates an AGI through known methods (e.g. they have a computer with limitless memory, they have infinite and perfect training data, they can sample without any bias, current techniques can eventually create AGI, an AGI would only have to be slightly better than random chance but not perfect, etc...), and then present a computational proof that shows that this is in contradiction with other logical proofs.

Basically, if you can train an AGI through currently known methods, then you have an algorithm that can solve the Perfect-vs-Chance problem in polynomial time. There's a technical explanation in the paper that I'm not going to try and rehash since it's been too long since I worked on computational proofs, but it seems to check out. But this is a contradiction, as we have proof, hard mathematical proof, that such an algorithm cannot exist and must be non-polynomial or NP-Hard. Therefore, AI-learning for an AGI must also be NP-Hard. And because every known AI learning method is tractable, it cannor possibly lead to AGI. It's not a strawman, it's a hard proof of why it's impossible, like proving that pi has infinite decimals or something.

Ergo, anyone who claims that AGI is around the corner either means "a good AI that can demonstrate some but not all human behaviour" or is bullshitting. We literally could burn up the entire planet for fuel to train an AI and we'd still not end up with an AGI. We need some other breakthrough, e.g. significant advancements in quantum computing perhaps, to even hope at beginning work on an AGI. And again, the authors don't offer a thought experiment, they provide a computational proof for this.

OceanGategate

This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.

IIRC Musk didn't switch it off, it wasn't turned on in the first place and Musk refused to turn it on when the Ukrainian military reqeusted it.

Musk is a shithead but not for this reason.

I mean, unless you believe life is like a fairytale where one side must necessarily be good and the other must necessarily be evil one can oppose and condemn two opposing parties in a conflict at the same time.

Ever considered neither Hezbollah nor Israel seem to care about civilian lives? Are they, perhaps, both fucking terrible?

https://github.com/cheeaun/phanpy?tab=readme-ov-file#easy-way

It's fairly literally just a download-and-run kind of deal it seems. Does seem pretty trivial.

Nice finds!

Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.

Silly Americans, submarines are supposed to sink! This was clearly a successful test.

I see some contradictory statements here, perhaps you could clarify those for me.

You believe the Democrats to be unwilling to improve on social matters, be it both domestic and foreign, correct? They may state that they hold these beliefs, but you don't expect them to make a meaningful change, which is why you don't see a path to improvement under Harris. I hope I understood you correctly here.

At the same time however, you seem to believe that electing Trump will lead to a civil war. Who exactly do you expect to start said civil war here? It won't be Trump as he's already in power, and it won't be the Democrats either because they don't genuinely believe in liberty/democracy. If they won't even vote for it, how can you expect them to fight for it? I'd argue electing Trump reduces the chance of a civil war, even according to your own logic. And even if a group other than the Democrats were to take up arms, that group would certainly be smaller than a Trump-led government backed by the US army. Trump would win in that case, and any hopes of progress would be dashed completely.

Any side with a shot at winning a civil war would have to be either the Democrats or the Republicans. Since the Democrats wouldn't start a civil war (too spineless), the Republicans have to. And I'd posit to you that the only way they would do so is if Trump loses the election and contests it, riling up his base. We know that his base is radical enough for it (see Jan 6), and Trump is too much of a narcissist to refuse the chance. In this scenario, Biden/Harris would have to use the army to put down the insurrection, and the political momentum from that might give people a shot at improving things in the way you want. Arguably there's historical precedent for this, with Lincoln having the momentum to ban slavery during the civil war.

You also seem to, and I quote "believe in the American people". But that same people makes up the US army, makes up and and supports both political parties and also seems entirely complacent to keep voting for the same two sets of douchebags and not push for electoral reform in any meaningful way. In fact, you don't even seem to think that the Democrats could be pressured into change, not even on the matter of Palestine. Either the Democrats are unwilling to change a position in exchange for power, or said pressure isn't as big as you seem to think it is, and most Americans just don't care enough (which would also put a pretty big dent in the whole "civil war"-plan.

Frankly, it seems to me that the accelerationist civil war strategy makes more sense when you elect Harris. But I'm not sure if it's worth pursuing at all, since I can't think of any historical precedent where this has worked out.