PokerPirate
5mo ago
This is an overall reasonable response.
In other words, you're conflating exact representation with sufficient representation, which is what I care about, and which is significantly more tractable.
What I originally started trying to write (and admittedly got sidetracked because it was taking too long) is that I think this computational complexity framework can provide a way to understand the disagreements you have with other people. My idea is that you are willing to settle for a "large epsilon", while other people all require a "small" (or possibly zero) epsilon.
I don't think any amount of word smithing can get around this disagreement or make people change their minds about the level of epsilon that seems reasonable to them. In principle, though, I can imagine some hypothetical experiments where we actually copy people with different levels of epsilons, observe the resulting behavior, and that this might actually be able to convince people that a certain epsilon is appropriate.
But we do not demand formal proofs for identity anywhere else.
You're right that we never do formal proofs of identity when there is physical continuity, but we always do formal proofs of identity whenever we have an avatar representing us. For example, whenever you connect to themotte your web browser does a TLS handshake to for themotte/browser to prove their identities to each other.
I seems the earring is closer in spirit to the avatar than physical continuity.
Post-training quantization is often enough to get 8-bit models close to floating-point accuracy.
This is just doesn't even parse.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I am a puny shape rotator. I will therefore respond to your post with some math that rationalists-cum-philosophers are not nearly as familiar with as I would like.
In particular, when you say:
I think that such a high-fidelity model can, in the limit, pass as myself, and is me in most/all of the ways I care about.
I believe that your "in the limit" here is doing more work than I think you intend. (And this makes everything else in your post moot.)
Let's imagine that your consciousness can be fully represented by a set of real numbers $S$. (This, I think, is a premise you would accept.) Now let's imagine we have a physical device that could instantiate another version of $S$ in a different physical system. (In your post, the earring is instantiating your "youness" in the earing itself, effectively copying $S$ from inside you biological body to inside the earring.) The fact that these are real numbers stored in $S$ implies a lot of counter-intuitive results. In particular, in a universe where such a device exists, we can prove that P = NP (and even the stronger but less famous P=PSPACE) and depending on your exact definitions, even uncomputable problems like the halting problem can be solved.
For this reason, philosophically minded mathematicians/computer scientists/physicists basically all reject the idea that that arbitrary copies of physical objects can be created. (Note that this idea is distinct from the no cloning theorem in quantum physics, and everything I said above holds in a purely Newtonian universe. Things obviously get even wonkier when you add quantum effects or relativity to the mix.)
So that this means any possibly real earring (or super-claude-code in earring form) can only ever approximate your $S$ set. And now that we are talking approximations, we need to define a measure of "goodness" of an approximation. But this opens up the can of worms that increasing the "goodness of approximation linearly" generally requires "exponentially more compute" in most physical systems [1]. But where is that exponential compute coming from?!
It also opens up the even deeper problem of verification: If someone (i.e. the earring) claims to be an $\epsilon$-approximate version of yourself, and you are happy that $\epsilon$ is sufficiently small, how can they prove that claim? This claim also, in general, requires exponential compute to verify. So in some sense it is computationally impossible to know whether the earring is actually "evil" or not.
So I reject your premise here. It's not because I am not a functionalist (I am), but because I care about computational complexity.
A decent but highly technical starting point for this style of reasoning is Scott Aaronson's 53-page essay on Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity or his paper NP complete problems and physical reality.
[1] Here's a giant list of claude-generated examples:
Numerical/Computational:
- N-body simulations: Doubling precision in gravitational simulations requires
4x more particles and16x more compute (O(n²) or O(n log n) with approximations) - Monte Carlo integration: Halving the error requires 4x more samples (error scales as 1/√n)
- Floating point precision: Each additional decimal digit roughly doubles memory and compute cost
Machine Learning:
- Neural scaling laws: GPT-style models show loss decreasing as
C^(-0.05), meaning 10x compute gives12% loss reduction - Training convergence: SGD error decreases as O(1/√t), so halving error needs 4x iterations
Physics Simulations:
- Quantum systems: Exact simulation of n qubits needs 2^n amplitudes - each additional qubit doubles cost
- Fluid dynamics (CFD): Halving mesh spacing in 3D requires 8x more cells and ~16x more compute (due to CFL condition on timesteps)
Signal Processing:
- Shannon-Hartley: Doubling channel capacity requires exponentially more SNR
Cryptography (inverse example):
- Brute force key search: each additional bit of key doubles search space
The pattern: entropy, dimensionality, and error propagation conspire against linear improvement.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The text also doesn't literally ever call Adam the "first" man. It has to be inferred from context that there were no men mentioned before him. To call it merely "tradition" that Adam was the first man and not something the Bible says, however, would be absolutely ridiculous. It is similarly ridiculous to say the Bible does not call Tubal-Cain the first metal worker.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Technically, the tale that Tubal-Cain was the first smith comes from tradition, the Biblical text does not say it.
Yes it does. Genesis 4 lists the descendants of Adam, and then 4:22 states
Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The point is not to reject YEC. The point is to show that @Eetan's joke falls flat because he is not actually pointing our an inconsistency with YEC (even though as you note many exist). If Hegseth had made a joke about star distances, and @Eetan made a joke about star distances violating YEC, then the joke might have landed.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Your joke falls flat because the stone age is fully compatible with young earth creationism. The standard timeframe for the end of the stone age is 2000-4000BC depending on location/definition, and the "youngest" of YECs date the world at ~6500 years old, before the end of the stone age.
I just reread the opening of Genesis, and the first metal tools in the Bible actually appear much earlier than I had thought at only Gen 4:22 with the birth of Tubal-Cain: "Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron." There's 8 generations of stone-age then in genesis: Adam→ Cain → Enoch → Irad→ Mehujael→ Methushael→ Lamech→ Tubal-Cain.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I think gloating is poor form in these cases.
But telling these stories is still important as a warning to others not to repeat them.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I mostly agree. My point is just that elites of all belief systems read. And so saying "my civilizational enemies are all well-read" as @coffee_enjoyer did as a way to associate reading with his out group is nonsensical.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I find your comment nonsensical.
The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature
You don't consider the bible "literature"?
All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
The elite of both the red and blue tribe are well read, they just read different things and want to be known for reading different things. OP has good examples of blue-tribe reading, so here's some examples of red-tribe coded reading: the Bible, ancient greek plays, Shakepseare, John Locke, Federalist Papers, Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Little House on the Prairy.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Hahaha! You made my day :)
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Yes. I was a naval academy graduate, but am now a pacifist.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
A major purpose of the Iran War is formation of combat leaders. I haven't seen anyone else mention this elsewhere. But it is quite explicit within the military officer hierarchy that one of the main reasons we invade for "funsies" is to keep us in practice for when we actually "need" to invade someone for real.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I believe your link goes to a problem from the arc-agi-1 dataset, not the arc-agi-3. The former is basically "solved" at this point.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The callousness is the point, isn't it? No one self-labels as "I want to bomb brown people". It's an accusation against other people that they are callous because "They want to bomb brown people." Suggesting that someone else is callous doesn't strike me as callous.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
It's because they wrote a "good prompt" to get the models "thinking" in the "right way". No data leakage here.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The highest scoring AI couldn't complete more that 0.5% [on ARC-AGI-3]
It's worth pointing out that within a day, the AIs had gotten to 36%: https://www.symbolica.ai/blog/arc-agi-3.
In general, though, I agree. My take is that AIs are good at solving leetcode style problems but nothing bigger. The way to be productive with them is to know how to divide up your tasks into leetcode tasks for the AI and the non-leetcode tasks for people.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.
It's 100% the licensing agreements that cause this shortage, and not bandwidth.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Your write ups have reminded me of someone I think the motte would enjoy learning about: Ichizo Hayashi. He was a kamikaze pilot in the Japanese Navy and---oddly---a committed Christian. He has been particularly useful to historians because he kept a diary and wrote letters to his mother about his training regimen.
Just several days before his kamikaze mission, he wrote:
The enemy's actions are being blunted. There will be victory for us. It will be the last finishing blow by our crash dives. I am happy.
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. I truly can feel this keenly. I am grateful that I am living. However, it is a marvel that we are living now. Naturally we are persons who must die. I do not think to attach a reason to our dying. I only seek the enemy to make a crash dive.
I added the bold. It's a quote from the bible that is quite well known in American Christianity, and widely recited by American chaplains on the eve of deployments. It still boggles my mind that this young Japanese man found meaning in his kamikaze mission via Christianity. And that Christians today who would otherwise find Hayashi incredibly foreign and evil derive the same meaning for the same work but an "enemy" cause.
This type of primary source history from the Japanese side is probably not what your actually interested in reading right now, but the book I read about this is Listen to the Voices from the Sea. It's got a lot more of Hayashi's diary entries and a handful of other authors as well.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
There's also US nuclear weapons in Germany. They're under a shared US-NATO command structure. German officers are nominally in charge of delivering these weapons in a time of war. Does that mean Germany "possesses" nuclear weapons? Only the test author knows :(
My impression is that there were lots of ambiguous questions like this where some answers could be reasonably argued either way.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
I fully endorse this take.
My minor add is that there is a nice website https://fal.ai that provides easy-to-use API access to all of these video models. It is profitable and so not going away. Openrouter (https://openrouter.ai) previously only specialized in serving text models, but they have made recent experimental API improvements to add multimedia output as well.
The media APIs aren't quite as interchangeable as the text APIs, and providers are making an effort to provide some sort of moat around weird features in their APIs to make no frontier model a drop-in replacement for another frontier model. But media generation obviously isn't going away.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
at common law
You use the preposition "at" here throughout your post when non-lawyer me would naively have said "in common law". Why?
PokerPirate
6mo ago
I work on the research-side of AI and infodumps like this are super helpful for me to get a handle on how people actually use AI. Thank you.
But I want to push back on this comment:
Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.
The fact that humans don't read this SEO is what makes it slop. You (and others like you) are what have made writing these "machine only SEO articles" necessary, and why google is increasingly shitty. It was slop before AI and is still slop today (just more efficiently produced slop). You have poisoned the internet commons with this slop and made the internet a measurably less useful place for me.
For this, I hate you and the millions of people like you who have ruined the internet. I understand that you are working within the constraints of "the algorithm", and each of your individual actions has not meaningfully impacted my life negatively, and that I have probably even benefited from some of the actions of people like you (I haven't bought clothing in >10 years, so I doubt I've benefited from you personally). But nevertheless I believe the overall effect you all (as a group) are having on society is net-negative. And for this I hate you. As I type this I realize that this hatred is probably bad for my soul, and so I also feel a need to ask your forgiveness for this hatred.
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Thanks for the clarification. I'd be curious if there is anything that I would consider a datacenter that is located in a business zone instead of an industrial zone. In my mind, a "server room" doesn't become a "data center" until you start measuring the size in acres.
I suspect this whole effort is basically just Europeans catching up to how Americans already do things in practice. (That's my general uncharitable impression of most standards organizations that start with "International".)
PokerPirate
6mo ago
Following your dream neighborhood link and a few other I found this post by @Southkraut from 1 year ago:
My wife... WORKED AS A KINDERGARDENER (emphasis hers) FOR LESS THAN HALF A YEAR
I just wanted to highlight that to the German brain "kindergardener" is literally someone who "gardens children" and is the teacher of the class, but to my American brain a "kindergardener" is someone who is enrolled in kindergarten and is the student.
I have 3 thoughts about this:
- I'm going to have kids in kindergarten for the next 3 years. They and their "gardeners" are going to suffer through so many dad jokes along these lines.
- I'm curious when this semantic shift happened. I assume it happened during the time of mandatory public schooling in the early 1900s, but don't know how to prove it. Google ngrams doesn't give me any meaningful insights here. (If anyone knows of any tools for studying this semantic shift, I would love to hear about them! I'm familiar with using word2vec to study semantic shifts, but I suspect this shift is too subtle for word2vec to pick up, and I don't know of any easy-to-use website for doing this analysis.)
- Somewhat relatedly, take a look at the google ngrams of "kindergarten teacher" vs "Kindergarten Teacher". There are two clear spikes when kindergarten teacher was almost always capitalized as Kindergarten Teacher:
- in the early 1900s (this is probably because it came from german and germans capitalize all nouns, not just proper nouns.
- in the year 2000; this is very curious to me. I hypothesize that this capitalization is due to wanting to emphasize the importance of the Kindergarten Teacher role, but it's not 100% clear to me why. I can create all sorts of just-so stories about the rise of feminism/helicopter parenting/credentialism/etc.
- Somewhat relatedly, take a look at the google ngrams of "kindergarten teacher" vs "Kindergarten Teacher". There are two clear spikes when kindergarten teacher was almost always capitalized as Kindergarten Teacher:
- It's curious to me that a German wrote the eggcorn "kindergarden" based on the American pronunciation of the word, when in both German and English the correct version is kindergarten (with a t instead of a d).
Everything I wrote is true for rationals as well.
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