rollin @ rollin @piefed.social

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2 wk. ago

Intelligence and consciousness are not related in the way you seem to think.

We've always known that you can have consciousness without a high level of intelligence (think of children, people with certain types of brain damage), and now for the first time, LLMs show us that you can have intelligence without consciousness.

It's naive to think that as we continue to develop intelligent machines, suddenly one of them will become conscious once it reaches a particular level of intelligence. Did you suddenly become conscious once you hit the age of 14 or whatever and had finally developed a deep enough understanding of trigonometry or a solid enough grasp of the works of Mark Twain? No of course not, you became conscious at a very early age, when even a basic computer program could outsmart you, and you developed intelligence quite independently.

I'm going to repeat myself as your last paragraph seems to indicate you missed it: I'm not of the view that LLMs are capable of AGI, and I think it's clear to every objective observer with an interest that no LLM has yet reached AGI. All I said is that like cats and rabbits and lizards and birds, LLMs do exhibit some degree of intelligence.

I have been enjoying talking with you,, as it's actually quite refreshing to discuss this with someone who doesn't confuse consciousness and intelligence, as they are clearly not related. One of the things that LLMs do give us, for the first time, is a system which has intelligence - it has some kind of model of the universe, however primitive, to which it can apply logical rules, yet clearly it has zero consciousness.

You are making some big assumptions though - in particular, when you said an AGI would "have a subjective sense of self" as soon as it can "move, learn, predict, and update". That's a huge leap, and it feels a bit to me like you are close to making that schoolboy error of mixing up intelligence and consciousness.

"A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government's motion for their unsealing was aimed not at 'transparency' but at diversion - aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such," the judge wrote. Another federal judge in Manhattan, Richard Berman, is weighing the Justice Department's bid to unseal the grand jury records from Epstein's case. Berman has not yet ruled.

I think current LLMs are already intelligent. I'd also say cats, mice, fish, birds are intelligent - to varying degrees of course.

I'd like to see examples of LLMs paired with sensorimotor systems, if you know of any

If you're referring to my comment about hobbyist projects, I was just thinking of the sorts of things you'll find on a search of sites like YouTube, perhaps this one is a good example (but I haven't watched it as I'm avoiding YouTube). I don't know if anyone has tried to incorporate a "learning to walk" type of stage into LLM training, but my point is that it would be perfectly possible, if there were reason to think it would give the LLM an edge.

The matter of how intelligent humans are is another question, and relevant because AFAIK when people talk about AGI now, they're talking about an AI that can do better on average than a typical human at any arbitrary task. It's not a particularly high bar, we're not talking about super-intelligence I don't think.

thanks for this very yummy response. I'm having to read up about the technicalities you're touching on so bear with me!

According to wiki, the neocortex is only present in mammals but as I'm sure you're aware mammals are not the only creatures to exhibit intelligence. Are you arguing that only mammals are capable of "general intelligence"? I can get on board with what you're saying as one way to develop AGI - work out how brains do it and then copy that - but I don't think it's a given that that is the only way to AGI, even if we were to agree that only animals with a neocortex can have "general intelligence". Hence the fact that a given class of machine architecture does not replicate a neocortex would not in my mind make that architecture incapable of ever achieving AGI.

As for your point about the importance of sensorimotor integration, I don't see that being problematic for any kind of modern computer software - we can easily hook up any number of sensors to a computer, and likewise we can hook the computer up to electric motors, servos and so on. We could easily "install" an LLM inside a robot and allow it to control the robot's movement based on the sensor data. Hobbyists have done this already, many times, and it would not be hard to add a sensorimotor stage to an LLM's training.

I do like what you're saying and find it interesting and thought-provoking. It's just that what you've said hasn't convinced me that LLMs are incapable of ever achieving AGI for those reasons. I'm not of the view that LLMs are capable of AGI though, it's more like something that I don't personally feel well enough informed upon to have a firm view. It does seem unlikely to me that we've currently reached the limits of what LLMs are capable of, but who knows.

because they are non-sensing, stationary, and fundamentally not thinking

I don't follow, why would a machine need to be able to move or have its own sensors in order to be AGI? And can you define what you mean by "thinking"?

Ah got ya, it's a site to show each EU government's position on this. Only three EU governments are opposing right now! Gotta get them numbers up!

You can choose any font you have locally available by setting the "reader.font_type" to the font name in about:config

You can also set "reader.content_width" to values beyond the 9 allowed by the UI to have the text take up even more of your screen width. Setting it to 12 is just about perfect for me.

These values will be lost if you update the font style or the width via the Reader "Text and Layout" menu though. For fonts, you might be able to avoid that by putting fonts you want to be able to select from in the "reader.font_type.values" list but I haven't tried that.

Firefox reader mode is great. I started using it just to avoid having to tell sites to piss off with their cookies, and to dodge some paywalls, but now I use it on a lot of sites even when there aren't any dialogs to dodge.

I actually prefer having articles take up my screen width rather than be all squashed into a skinny little column in the centre. It's also nice when trying to read someone's blog with questionable text colour.

Ah but that's true ONLY IF the table doesn't itself contain duplicates. Quick example:

    
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE animal (species VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, colour VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL);
INSERT INTO animal VALUES ('monkey', 'green'), ('rabbit', 'orange'), ('elephant', 'pink'),('monkey','blue'),('rabbit','orange'),('monkey','green'),('monkey','green');

SELECT * FROM animal WHERE species = 'monkey' OR colour = 'green';
+---------+--------+
| species | colour |
+---------+--------+
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | blue   |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
+---------+--------+
SELECT * FROM animal WHERE species = 'monkey' UNION SELECT * FROM animal WHERE colour = 'green';
+---------+--------+
| species | colour |
+---------+--------+
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | blue   |
+---------+--------+


  

So we could change the query to use UNION ALL, which does include duplicates. In that case, the returned rows are the same ONLY IF the rows returned by the left side of the UNION do not overlap those returned by the right side, otherwise it will return more rows.

    
SELECT * FROM animal WHERE species = 'monkey' UNION ALL SELECT * FROM animal WHERE colour = 'green';
+---------+--------+
| species | colour |
+---------+--------+
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | blue   |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
+---------+--------+


  

For completeness, here's an example where the two queries in the UNION do not return any of the same rows:

    
SELECT * FROM animal WHERE species = 'monkey' OR colour = 'orange';
+---------+--------+
| species | colour |
+---------+--------+
| monkey  | green  |
| rabbit  | orange |
| monkey  | blue   |
| rabbit  | orange |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
+---------+--------+
SELECT * FROM animal WHERE species = 'monkey' UNION ALL SELECT * FROM animal WHERE colour = 'orange';
+---------+--------+
| species | colour |
+---------+--------+
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | blue   |
| monkey  | green  |
| monkey  | green  |
| rabbit  | orange |
| rabbit  | orange |
+---------+--------+

  

I don't think they're technically the same because UNION implicitly removes duplicates.

In the case of your specific data, the queries are probably functionality the same as you probably wouldn't have duplicates in the first query because each row most likely has a unique ID column. Even if it didn't, last-updated and created-at are probably timestamps which would in practice make them unique, not to mention other fields such as headline and article body - unless there had been a glitch causing a row to be inserted twice.

If you were to use UNION ALL in place of UNION, duplicates would no longer be removed from the second query. In that case, even if you had duplicate rows in the first query, the second query would return the same rows unless any rows with ID 1, 2 or 3 also had been updated in the given timespan (as those will now be duplicated by the second query)

Pretty sure that's how UNION works, so in practice, I think you'd get the same rows 99.9% of the time.

That's good, thanks for that info. It does say it's a "good will" gesture from the various train companies, but it seems to be a firm offer - would be good to have it enshrined in law nevertheless.

From what I read, you need to get a Delay/Cancellation Confirmation somehow. You then would need to book a seat on one of the following trains - on some routes, most trains are full by the time of travel, and in the event of a delay like this, you're probably not the only one needing to reschedule. You may well need to get a hotel overnight and travel the next day. All possible, but potentially stressful.

I will still avoid getting long distance trains with connections - but saying that, none of the several international train journeys I've made so far have been delayed more than 15 minutes.

Missing a connecting flight is no less stressful - and I also always avoid those as much as possible, although because long-distance flights are shorter, the knock-on effects of missing a connection tend to be less (more likely to be able to find a seat on a replacement flight on the same day for instance).

off-topic but wow, it's great to see so many lemmy instances up and running 🥰

it really looks like we're well on the way to hitting critical mass

You must thank the Lord every day that you weren't wiped up with a Kleenex and flushed down the toilet with your other brethren who didn't manage to make it inside! The Lord's grace is truly magnificent!

Ah yeah sorry I wasn't saying that Orban shouldn't be criticised for supporting this, but those other governments that claim to be better than Orban are showing their true colours by supporting it.

Governments like Denmark, Italy, Spain and France are all dead keen on universal surveillance of the plebs for the exact same reasons Orban is - control and authoritarianism. They'll use whatever arguments they think are most likely to allow them to get their way - be it children, terrorism, or whatever else.

You only have to look at the UK, where they're using anti-terror legislation to arrest people just for peacefully protesting.

lolol did somebody actually say that?? Pretty funny either way...

from what I recall though, the zoo prefers small animals (think rats, hamsters, rabbits) because they better resembles the prey the zoo animals would normally eat. And yes they do euthanise them first!

err you seem to have forgotten to mention the other countries that are not widely regarded as being run by fascists...

bit more mentally resilient than that

I think when we get down to it, none of us can actually separate reality from imagination accurately - after all, our perceptions of reality all exist inside our minds and are informed by our imaginations. People who are outwardly crazy seem to be placing the line between reality and fantasy at a very different place to anyone else, but we all put the line in a slightly different place.

Compare people who believe in conspiracy theories, or horoscopes, or conflicting religions for instance. What I'm trying to say is that "crazy people" are not really so different from the rest of us.

Archive link - https://archive.ph/6rgTS

Definitely good news to hear. Over the last couple of years, I've made several long journeys by train that normally would have been by plane.

One rule of thumb I've been using is to only get direct trains. I find travel a bit stressful in any case and I don't want to be worrying about any delay with the first train causing me to miss the second. If the two trains are the same operator, you would at least be able to reschedule onto a later train - as long as there is one with free space which isn't guaranteed at zero notice. If the trains are run by different operators then it's presumably down to whatever agreements exist between them. So I skip all that uncertainty by only doing it when there's a single direct train available. Hopefully the EU will come up with a good solution for this as well.

Reports also have emerged of attempts to stop the spread of chikungunya with even larger mosquitoes to eat the insects carrying the virus.

And if those larger mosquitos get out of control, there's a simple and obvious fix...