As is the sample in this article. You will surely find as many physicists saying earth is flat, mathematicians who hold that Cantor was wrong, and medical doctors that tell you vaccination against measles is overall worse than not.
I have also a hard time understanding how AGI will magically appear.
LLMs have their name for a reason: they model human language (output given an input) from human text (and other artifacts).
And now the idea seems to be that when we do more of it, or make it even larger, it will stop to be a model of human language generation? Or that human language generation is all there is to AGI?
Because the first couple major iterations looked like exponential improvements, and, because VC/private money is stupid, they assumed the trend must continue on the same curve.
And because there's something in the human mind that has a very strong reaction to being talked to, and because LLMs are specifically good at mimicking plausible human speech patterns, chatGPT really, really hooked a lot of people (including said VC/private money people).
LLMs aren't language models, but are a general purpose computing paradigm. LLMs are circuit builders, the converged parameters define pathways through the architecture that pick out specific programs. Or as Karpathy puts it, LLMs are a differentiable computer[1]. Training LLMs discovers programs that well reproduce the input sequence. Roughly the same architecture can generate passable images, music, or even video.
It's not that language generation is all there is to AGI, but that to sufficiently model text that is about the wide range of human experiences, we need to model those experiences. LLMs model the world to varying degrees, and perhaps in the limit of unbounded training data, they can model the human's perspective in it as well.
After Wisconsin finds out how to reliably filter vpn, they can then teach Netflix and Akamai how to do it.
Last time I checked modestly reliable geoblocking existed, and completely unreliable vpn blocking.
A friend told me that when he comes across a site for which Nordvpn is blocked, he just changes IP. Latest the third one always works, even on YouTube (he is all about privacy).
You don't have to reliably block something to make a law against it. Murder is illegal despite the government not figuring out how to reliably stop people from murdering each other.
So many people miss this in such discussions. Like that Australian politician’s “the laws of physics are all very well, but the laws of Australia are the only ones we care about” which was widely ridiculed in technical circles that did not grasp its truth: that law is all about declaring physically-possible actions illicit.
However, to address your specific chosen example, one could argue a difference from murder, if they say “your site must block these traffic sources or you’re in trouble”: one could argue (it’s not at all cut and dried) that it’s like saying that venues are liable for the murders committed at them, rather than the murderer.
You misunderstand. When they "ban VPNs", it's not that the VPN police will be patrolling your neighborhood trying to catch you using Mulvad or whatever. Instead, the AG will send a letter to the VPN provider, threatening to prosecute them for selling an illegal service. And they will comply and shut down. Once the commercial services are gone, it won't matter that you could hide your own VPN usage in a practical sense, because 1 in 100 people have the resources, technical expertise, and time to set up their own VPN server offshore. Furthermore, it may be cost prohibitive... I'm spending $3/month or so. I can't spend $250/month on this. And if I could, it will just break more often, I won't get the 99% uptime I usually get either.
Something that's extraordinarily low effort will become exceedingly high effort, and this will achieve their goals.
The text we are discussing says:
"It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN."
That's what I was discussing. Not sure where AG and vpn providers come in.
It is a cat and mouse game, it is whether the service provider do or not. I remember AWS WAF can block VPN ages ago, according to this announcement, it is 2020.
It’s different if you have influence over the network, like a government might. I spend a lot of time in China, and they’ve done a good job of blocking VPNs in recent years, including my personal WireGuard connection to my home network. Not that any technical solution is impossible to bypass, but a motivated state government could make VPN use difficult if it wasn’t for the whole Constitution thing.
Lots of sites do in fact block VPNs successfully. How? Well they could just sign up for NordVPN and see which IPs they use directly. Its not rocket science.
I do have a bit of experience with managing WAFs for large online gaming providers and I can tell you it's not a solved problem. Netflix would also love to hear how I guess.
Even if you somehow manage to enumerate the Nordvpn IPs - a thing of which Nordvpn probably thought in their threat model - then you still have thousands of other providers.
We also have to remember that we have collectively decided to use Windows and AD, QA tested software etc (some examples) over correct software, hardened by default settings etc.
You don't need to, and certainly there is a rich history of interpreting Nietzsche in various ways to fit various philosophical programs.
But still, when the interpretation is so dumbed down and over-simplified, I think it becomes a bit insulting to the original writer. Even moreso when the interpretation quite clearly isn't familiar with the original context/meaning of the work, which is almost always the case when it comes to Nietzsche in pop culture.
The article is a prime example: the author clearly didn't read much more than the Wikipedia page. This is typical of popular writing/content (especially on YouTube) about Nietzsche.
I guess we could argue about its validity as "an interpretation of Nietzsche", but I mostly think it's just unremarkable, low effort writing. There is absolutely an article that could be written about Nietzsche's philosophy applied to the modern AI situation...but this isn't it.
That's philosophy just in general though. It's to a very large degree the study of excerpts, and commentaries excerpts, and commentaries on commentaries.
There are people with a degree in philosophy that think Plato's republic was an attempt at designing the ideal state, because they've only seen the middle of the dialogue, and were never shown the beginning and end where the republic is very explicitly introduced as a philosophical device to examine the virtue of justice in the soul.
> But why would we care what Nietzsche would think and for whom he wrote?
Because we're reading an article titled "Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence": the author ought then to know what he's talking about.
This is reasonably common with all pop writers about any philosopher, but it's nearly ubiquitous for Nietzsche. For a long time, I found this baffling. You can understand why someone might be confused about what Heidegger or Kant meant about something. Nietzsche writes very clearly and simply. This led me to realize that after a certain point, understanding has much less to do with cognitive capability and more to do with your emotional background and prejudices, something akin to what Nietzsche called the "intellectual conscience." I no longer actually read any article on any popular website about Nietzsche because you can be sure they don't have anything interesting to say; they don't understand the guy they're talking about.
Why put "Nietzsche" in the title of your article if you're going to do your own schtick? It's rather dishonest, IMO.
I personally disagree with a lot of Nietzsche's ideas, but if I'm ever to explain how, I would strive to present his ideas with the best interpretation of them I could muster, before disagreeing.
Philosophical figures of the past should not be used as names you throw randomly to support your positions. You have to talk about their ideas, why they believed in it and what they intended to do by sharing them.
We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system.
But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensation at all to begin with. What gives rise to that is a greater mystery to me personally.
There are examples of people who have no ability to feel pain yet are still able to think. Now I wonder if they ever experience mental anguish.
I'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience?
Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pressure, programming reflex circuits, since other creatures would show compassion, or back off due to a potential reaction by the cat."
Anyone who has had a pet like a cat or a dog knows they are sentient... if we consider ourselves sentient.
But asked for reasons I can only point to the social nature of their societies, where love and anger make sense, or of their hurt-behavior.
I also find it very hard to believe that everything else is slow evolution of components, and here all of a sudden something super complex comes into being out of nowhere.
But I still have no idea how it could work. What are the components and their interplay?
I still remember (semantically) that my parents laughed at me, when they told me to count sheep to fall asleep and I told them all I can see is darkness and white dots when I close my eyes. They probably thought I was joking.
It’s probably related but not directly connected. My mind’s eye is almost totally blind but I can have John Williams conducting a full orchestra in my head if I want.
(I can’t ‘hear’ lyrics though and have great difficulty remembering them)
would your friend be able to hum the star wars theme song from memory? it seems impossible for me to be able to recreate the star wars theme song without being able to hear it in my head.
