It's so funny, we're talking of AGI or consciousness like if we knew what they were but we don't. At best, we have some intuitions. And so this idea that we could reproduce something that we don't fully understand is pretty funny.

We're like the old sorcerers who wanted to turn lead into gold without having any clue about the periodic table of elements. And them too thought they were close...

So the idea is, we don't have any conception of where we are heading with AGI or consciousness, no idea of what the goal end state should look like, so we can't get there?

I disagree. We do have ideas. I don't know what AGI is or what it will look like, I can just guess, but it's low confidence, it could be totally alien. But I do know what consciousness is, I have that and I can investigate that. I get if you don't feel you have that, or that ability to investigate that.

Or is the idea we don't have any conception of the engineering of how to get there, the pathways or 'constituent parts' if there are even such things, so we can't possibly hope to get there?

Again I disagree. We can figure it out. As long as we know where we're going, we'll work it out.

So I disagree on both interpretations (did you have another one?), but I think there's also a truth to what you're saying that's no so clear.

I agree with you about the humor of it, I think it's all funny. All frontier science and discovery is inherently ridiculous.

Humans are groping around in the dark. The default state is failure. It's fucking hilarious. Hahahaha! :) All the time, all we're doing is failing, and then maybe we succeed randomly somehow, and we call it genius. And we tell ourselves -- we back propagate -- our justifications for how we got there and we call ourselves insightful. Hahaha! :)

Sometimes we do have an insight, or an intuition, or an understanding, that is faithful to reality, and we understand and we use that to get there. But in another sense I think a lot of that is just models and models are wrong, but useful. So the default state is lack of understanding, that's like the default state of human experience. Hahaha! :)

So it's possible to see our striving as ridiculous human arrogance or cope. We have no fucking idea what we're doing, but we're trying. And I like that. Personally, I do. I get if you don't. But I do.

But I agree that's funny. It's hilarious. But I don't think it's unique to AGI or consciousness.

Like you say, it's similar to the alchemists. But that analogy is transitively equivalent with a helluva lot of human situations.

Even when we create it, we're not going to understand all of it, but it'll work. And that's the point. It may seem a paradox, but that's not so surprising. I think it's the nature of reality: understanding is optional. We give birth to new humans, we are literally creating new life and new consciousness with nothing more than ourselves and some grass and water. We don't understand how any of that works, really, but it works and we do it anyway.

So, fucking checkmate, any problem that we face. I think we can fuckin' do it. Hahaha! :)

But...maybe I missed your point. Maybe there was another joke in there somewhere. If so, let me know what it is! I think it's important to focus on the funny and have a great laugh about it. Hahahahaha! :)

Simple, solid and cheap to run. A great example of how to do cloud the right way!

Which comment from Bryan Rasmussen are you referring to?

You can use ansible to deploy to multiple servers with a single command.

If someone is interested, I just created a discord server for older devs, no agenda other than a place to chat. https://discord.gg/evhUwmYd

Thanks, this was fun. You could invite dang, WalterBright, etc. as special guests. And it was better than my idea of turning the HN post here into a "flash mob" chatroom for two weeks.

selfishness + nihilism, what a program...