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pinnochio commented on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive   old.reddit.com/r/google_a... · Posted by u/tamnd
ajross · 16 days ago
> Philosophy is a science

Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:

> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't

It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.

But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.

"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.

[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.

pinnochio · 16 days ago
Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
pinnochio commented on Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege   reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/pseudolus
jeffbee · 25 days ago
The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking.

The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.

https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480...

pinnochio · 25 days ago
This is a weird comment to make, given that they're citing "Meta documents obtained via discovery."

Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.

pinnochio commented on Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects   cnn.com/2025/11/12/scienc... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
bijant · a month ago
Why won’t you let „the ecosystem“ decide that on its own ? It’s much older than you and you are not its lega guardian. If the ecosystem (of which we are a part) decides it wants more honey bees than that’s what it shall get.
pinnochio · a month ago
If we're a part of the ecosystem, then deciding to be honey bees' legal guardian _is_ the ecosystem deciding that on its own, no?
pinnochio commented on Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board   cnbc.com/2025/11/19/larry... · Posted by u/koolba
piva00 · a month ago
Simply asking, at that point, a well known human trafficker for advice on how to leverage his power to sleep around.

You have no issue with that?

pinnochio · a month ago
This dude is an AI goon. There's a lot he doesn't have an issue with!
pinnochio commented on Solving a million-step LLM task with zero errors   arxiv.org/abs/2511.09030... · Posted by u/Anon84
ACCount37 · a month ago
FSD isn't, and never was, a sensor problem. It's an AI problem. Always was. Always will be.

Humans drive around with two mid-tier cameras on a pivot mount. Which means that any sufficiently advanced AI can do the same.

When a FSD car gets into an avoidable collision, you dump the blackbox data, and what do you see? You see that the cameras had it. All the information the car needed to avoid a collision was right there in the visual stream. The car had every bit of information it needed to make the right call, and didn't make the right call.

You can acknowledge that, and focus on building better AIs. Or you can neglect AI altogether, and have a car with 6 LIDARs drag a pedestrian, because it had all the sensor coverage but zero object permanence.

pinnochio · a month ago
> Or you can neglect AI altogether, and have a car with 6 LIDARs drag a pedestrian, because it had all the sensor coverage but zero object permanence.

False dichotomy, much?

Dead Comment

pinnochio commented on A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition   generativehistory.substac... · Posted by u/scrlk
Workaccount2 · a month ago
"Understanding" is just a trap to get wrapped up in. A word with no definition and no test to prove it.

Whether or not the model are "understanding" is ultimately immaterial, as their ability to do things is all that matters.

pinnochio · a month ago
If they can't do things that require understanding, it's material, bub.

And just because you have no understanding of what "understanding" means, doesn't mean nobody does.

pinnochio commented on Humanity's Endgame   noemamag.com/humanitys-en... · Posted by u/marojejian
sQL_inject · a month ago
Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."

- Google doesn't serve Huel - Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know. - Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain. - No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize. - People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.

If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.

pinnochio · a month ago
You're quoting two different people here.

  - Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
That's good, but doesn't change the fact that the supply chain for tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery".

  - No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
"Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley" is likely referring to the CEO/founder/VC class.

  - People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
That's patently untrue. A bunch of them post here.

pinnochio commented on Sam Altman's pants are on fire   garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
ants_everywhere · a month ago
Nope.

I would appreciate if you and the GP not personally insult me when you have a question though. You may feel that you know Marcus to be into one particular thing but some of us have been familiar with his work long before he pivoted to AI.

pinnochio · a month ago
There are two problems with your post.

The first is that your phrasing "that LLMs are not possible or at least that they're some kind of illusion" collapses the claim being made to the point where it looks as if you're saying Marcus believes people are just deluded that something called a "LLM" exists in the world. But even allowing for some inference as to what you actually meant, it remains ambiguous whether you are talking about language acquisition (which you are in your 2nd paragraph) or the genuine understanding and reasoning / robust world model induction necessary for AGI, which is the focus of Marcus' recent discussion on LLMs, and why we're even talking about Marcus here in the first place.

You seem more familiar with Marcus' thinking on language acquisition than I, so I can only assume that his thinking on language acquisition and LLMs is somewhat related to his thinking on understanding and reasoning / world model induction and LLMs. But it doesn't appear to me, based on what I've read of Marcus, that his claims about the latter really depend on Chomsky. Which brings me to the 2nd problem with your post, where you make the uncharitable claim that "he appears to me and others to be having a sort of internal crisis that's playing out publicly", as if it were simply impossible to believe that LLMs are not capable of genuine understanding / robust world model induction otherwise.

u/pinnochio

KarmaCake day51October 23, 2025View Original