We don't how
I guarantee that once we do know people will start appending the word “just” to the explanation. Complex behaviors emerge from simple components. Knowing that doesn’t make the emergence any more incredible.
Readit Newsdigbybk commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
I've been so happy to see Google wake up.
Many can point to a long history of killed products and soured opinions but you can't deny theyve been the great balancing force (often for good) in the industry.
- Gmail vs Outlook
- Drive vs Word
- Android vs iOS
- Worklife balance and high pay vs the low salary grind of before.
Theyve done heaps for the industry. Im glad to see signs of life. Particularly in their P/E which was unjustly low for awhile.
Ironically, OpenAI was conceived as a way to balance Google's dominance in AI.
digbybk commented on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality quantamagazine.org/carlo-... · Posted by u/vismit2000
Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this. Let's say you have a box of gas in a low entropy state: all the particles are on one side of the box. A moment later, the particles will have spread to the other side of the box, so the entropy is lower. But to say "a moment later", we're assuming a quantity called time. I'm confused how you can see this in reverse: "because the particles spread to the other side of the box, a moment passes".
digbybk commented on The new science of “emergent misalignment” quantamagazine.org/the-ai... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
FWIW, I agree with the parent comment's rebuttal. Simply saying "AI could be bad" is nothing Asimov or Roddenbury didn't figure out themselves.
For Elizer to really deign novelty here, he'd have predicted the reason why this happens at all: training data. Instead he played the Chomsky card and insisted on deeper patterns that don't exist (as well as solutions that don't work). Namedropping Elizer's research as a refutation is weak bordering on disingenuous.
What were the deeper patterns that don't exist?
digbybk commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
None of them are practicing Buddhist meditation though, same for the "personal growth" oriented meditation styles.
Buddhist meditation exists only in the context of the Four Noble Truths and the rest of the Buddha's Dhamma. Throwing them away means it stops being Buddhist.
I disagree, but we'd be arguing semantics. In any case, the point still stands: you can just as easily argue that these rationalist offshoots aren't really Rationalist.
digbybk commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
When I was looking for a group in my area to meditate with, it was tough finding one that didn't appear to be a cult. And yet I think Buddhist meditation is the best tool for personal growth humanity has ever devised. Maybe the proliferation of cults is a sign that Yudkowsky was on to something.
digbybk commented on "The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper hardcoresoftware.learning... · Posted by u/rbanffy
> just code and math either
this is literally what they are
I think it’s the “just” that they are taking issue with. We are “just” neurons. But we demonstrate interesting emergent behaviors that, in principle, can be reduced to firing neurons but in practice we don’t understand and shouldn’t diminish with the word “just”.
digbybk commented on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/Vinnl
The increased speeds are excellent for those who can afford the toll. This is a universal benefit of toll roads for those people.
Also excellent for those public transport riders who can't afford car ownership.
digbybk commented on Evolving OpenAI's Structure openai.com/index/evolving... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.
The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find.
At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.
This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to accidentally create Skynet. The only thing it's going to go nuclear on is the market for jobs that are going to get automated in an economy that may not be ready for it.
If anything, the "danger" here is that AGI is going to be a printing press. A cotton gin. A horseless carriage -- all at the same time and then some, into a world that may not be ready for it economically.
Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.
> I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.
Any of the signatories here match your criteria? https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#signatories
Or if you’re talking more about everyday engineers working in the field, I suspect the people soldering vacuum tubes to the ENIAC would not necessarily have been the same people with the clearest vision for the future of the computer.
digbybk commented on NYC home prices rise 10% in early 2025 qns.com/2025/04/home-pric... · Posted by u/geox
If we are going for a reductivism, I'm going to take it all the way to pride, greed, and envy for the housing supply problem.
(I could throw in lust, but that's last century's problem since various forms of birth control have negated its influence on housing demand)
Changing human pride, greed and envy is hard. We know how to build housing. Or we used to.