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> but the point is that someone cares

Is it true, though? Or has everyone just been psyched into asking for that certification out of a vague fear of "consequences" or of being left behind?


It's not either-or. Companies care about security because of the consequences. If you're a big company contracting a small one, you don't want to get owned through that vendor because you know you'll be the one holding the bag (data loss, reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits).

Small vendors will tell you what you want to hear because they're desperate for your business. Independent auditing is, in theory, a way to get closer to the ground truth. Well, in theory.


Note that Christianity is a religion that was grafted onto a previous one that is entirely different by intended recipients and worldview. Christianity is a universalistic religion centered on mercy and forgiveness, ancient Judaism is a transactional pact between God and one People: God gives the land and protection, the People worships God and follows the rules. I was in a church a few days ago and it was almost funny how the priest read from the Old Testament and turned a quite literal passage about the People of Israel, protection from regional enemies and the promise of a kingdom into a metaphor about all humanity and the fatherly care of God towards all. Unfortunately Christianity decided to incorporate the Old Testament and read it as a metaphor and a prophecy, and this allows some Christians to revert to a language of violent conquer and triumph against the enemies whenever it suits them.

The strain(s) of Christianity we have today are in large part the result of chance and power plays, it's a fascinating history.

More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.

A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).

A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.


Do you have any recommended reading on the history of Christianity? I find it challenging to find unbiased / purely historical explanations of how we got to this point.

> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.

It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.


>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.

Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.


No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.

>>Imagine 50 years from now.

That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.


Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.

"infinitely more knowledgeable" AI knows shit, stop shilling your crap

We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.

I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?


It reminds me of this, which talks about this exact scenario:

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.


It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.

Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.


It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).

As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.

Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.


> Iran's missiles are used as a terror weapon against civilian population

Classic. An advanced tech US missile hits a school and kills 200 schoolgirls? "A tragic mistake, it happens in war". A much less advanced Iranian rocket hits a building? "Terrorists! They point their weapons at civilians!"

Since Iran was attacked and it has a right to defend itself, we should give it more precise weapons so it can hit directly the military headquarters in central Tel Aviv.


Did you protest when they killed 40,000 unarmed civilians in early January?

No need to downplay the IRGC's brutal murder of 60000 civilians.

Temptation... but no, let's keep HN clean.

Them killing 100 000 protestors will not be forgotten.

Intent is literally the difference in terrorism though. The US hitting 500 targets in Iran and one of them being a school is the exact opposite of a strategy of terrorism. With terrorism you explicitly target civilians to drive fear.

Trying to hit the Burj Khalifa without targeting any military or high political office is terrorism.

When Iran launched at military bases or tried to shoot at planes, it was not called terrorism.


>Trying to hit the Burj Khalifa without targeting any military or high political office is terrorism.

It's really not credible to claim that Iran has made any serious efforts to hit the Burj Khalifa, they would have succeeded if they wanted to do this.


Its a mystery how "the terrorists" have launched 1000's of missiles & drones, in 70+ (and counting) waves, across 3 weeks, spanning across the region, and yet they have ABJECTLY FAILED to:

* hit any hospital

* blow up any school

* nor murder any journalists.

Yet, despite this stunning lack of accuracy from ... "the terrorists", they have somehow managed to hit EVERYTHING ELSE they were aiming at.

On the other hand, the "West", who are absolutely NOT terrorists, have managed to blow up schools, slaughter hundreds and hundreds of school children, smash multiple hospitals, take out as many health workers & first responders as possible with double tap strikes ...

and let's not even mention the number of journalists deliberately targeted & killed, nor the families of journalists, deliberately targeted & killed

And to answer the "but they killed 25 million of their own civilians just weeks ago", it would be almost churlish to point out that the MASSIVE pro-Iran public sentiments expressed by ALL sectors of Iranian society would, to a logically thinking person, lead one to conclude that perhaps, just perhaps, the media campaign behind those riots was just pushing a complete LIE. Because those reports don't fit in a reality where, under direct bombardment and personal risk, those same civilians are supporting their state, their government & their leadership.

As always, the simplest explanations which fit observable facts are usually closest to the actual truth. And the simplest explanation is that the "definitely NOT terroristic" West has been lying about Iran, consistantly, for decades.

Either that, or the Mango Mussolini is the new Oracle of Delphi.

Go pick the hill you want to stand on ...


Actually Iran has hit the Soroka hospital in Israel in the previous war and the Weizmann Institute, a research university

Iran literally hit a preschool in Israel today, with an MRV which is solely designed to terrorize the population (and is a war crime btw). Plus a 12 year old is in critical condition alongside 40 civilians from a single Iranian missile hitting a residential building later today. And in June Iran hit a hospital in Israel with a ballistic missile.

> Its a mystery...

Not a mystery, though, is it? Israel has excellent air defense which is why the damage isn't x10 worse. But Iran is definitely making a huge effort to hit the civilian population for maximum damage.

Unlike Iran which is literally aiming statistical weapons at population centers, the US has high accuracy weapons - the school was hit because intelligence wasn't up to date (it used be an IRGC building).

Your comment is absolutely misinformed, or worse, spreading disinformation on purpose.


No, everything I said was true. The entire world knows who deliberately targets and murders children, by the tens of thousands. "Disinformation" is one of the Zionist colony's biggest exports, but its effect (like all drugs) has waned over time.

People who have unyoked from Zionist mental-control have dozens, if not 100s of independent journalistic outlets, mostly online, where they can (and ARE) following to get some sense of what's really happening. Hence your frustration.

Its not for nothing that "every accusation is a confession" is now a phrase which has spread across the globe, in relation to the Zionist entity and its hasbara. So, your "spreading disinformation on purpose" accusation is really your confession.


> Zionist mental-control

Dropped your tinfoil hat.

I recommend visiting the middle east for yourself.


What's tinfoil hat about it? The antisemitism card has been overused, it's a common tactic by the Israeli government and its agents. People who have been able to pull themselves out of being affected by these false claims can think more clearly on the matter.

Not sure why you have been downvoted. While the LLM's introspection can't be trusted, that's indeed what happens: asked to generate a random number, the LLM picks one that feels random enough: not a round one, not too central or extreme, no patterns, not a known one. It ends up being always the same.

It doesn't "pick" anything. It produces the most likely number after this question based on the data it has been trained with! Reasoning models might pick in a sense that they will come up the the rules (like the grand parent post shows), but still it will produce the "most likely" number after the reasoning.

It's the same "brain", starting from exactly the same prompt, the same context, which means the same thoughts, the same identity... How do you expect it to produce different values?


LLMs aren't deterministic - they calculate a probability distribution of the potential next token and use sampling to pick the output.

Not really, the LLM is deterministic as far as I understand it, it's the sampling at the end that isn't. But the LLM can't prepare an even probability distribution to let the sampler decide randomly. It does reason deterministically and commits to a certain output.

> the LLM is deterministic as far as I understand it, it's the sampling at the end that isn't.

I guess it depends how you define the LLM: you could say it was the model/NN and the sampler is an extra added on, but a lot of people would name the model+sampler+system prompt+RLHF tuning (which would include the sampler) as the LLM.

The OP was talking about ChatGPT generating fixed output, not an internal model


In a pure LLM I agree. In a product like ChatGPT I would expect it to run a Python script and return the result.

By emitting a next token distribution with a 10% chance of 0, 10% chance of 1, etc.

Also it's an LLM, not a brain.


Interesting. So you expect it to "not think" and simply produce a value corresponding to "it's the same to me", knowing that it will be translated into an actual random value.

Instead, exactly as a person would do, it does think of a specific number that feels random in that particular moment.


If I care a little bit about that random number I might reach for my phone and look at the digits of the seconds of the current time. It's 31 now. Not appropriate for multiple lookups.

Yes, there is probably some variable context in every chat (like date and time). Could work as a good seed but I guess you should ask the LLM to really make an effort to produce a seriously random number. (Actually I've just tried, even if you ask it to make an effort, the number will be always the same).

If "a random number is" is followed by all digits equally in the training dataset, then emitting a uniform distribution should minimise cross-entropy, right?

Er, should it? Even of you trained an LLM exactly over this type of question, if the sequence to predict in the training data is really random, then any output is equally wrong. Even if the output is a fixed "1234" or "0000". There is no signal to train on, not even one that favours an equal distribution.

On the other hand, LLMs show they know very well what a random number is and the fact it just shouldn't look like anything in particular, so they strive to come up with a number that doesn't look like anything in particular. Which happens to be always the same number given the starting conditions.


No LLMs are calibrated?

What?

What's AI hype?

AI replacing software engineers

Don't know about that, but it did save me about two days of work this morning as I was sipping a coffee and barely looking at the screen.

And two days ago, it did solve a nasty network issue that we had been investigating in two for two hours with no results. I just described the issue and our findings, it read the code, pointed to a seemingly completely unrelated env var, and said: "I bet this is true on the other environment". And it was right.


Acceleration vs replacements.

Fatty teams will become lean. productivity will become 10x. Shipping feels fast.

These signals feels right at first for acceleration.

Once complexity factor starts to creep in every SAAS will need human intervention to scale it forward .


What’s AI?

The endgame is a wasteland of miserable neighbours that Israel can control, occupy and plunder without encountering any resistance. As for the US, they are not in control of their own actions, they're a puppet moved by Israel.

[flagged]


Well, Isreal has already destroyed several of their neighbors. Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, now Iran. Infact, Israel was born out of extreme and mass violence (1948). I would be fearful too... maybe its time for peace?

Keep in mind that the middle east tensions started way before Israel. Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) was a ham-fisted map re-draw, disregarded ethnic, religious, and tribal realities, contributing to long-standing conflicts.

I know it's fun the blame all the regional strife on the jews, but the facts don't support it.


insanity!

No doubt, imagine if it were true!

Occupying, expanding, and killing does tend to radicalize your surviving neighbors.

I mourn the innocents on both sides


Why does this only apply to Israel and not it's neighbors? Seems to me the current Israeli government is just as "jihadist" in their aggressive war efforts. Same could be said for some in the US government, Hegseth and Graham being two examples who talk about this conflict in apocalyptic religious terms.

But BB has achieved the opposite. Israel is now reviled the world over. He flushed any sympathy generated by the Holocaust down the toilet. Even Jews in USA now experiencing hate crime towards them like never before.

Military inaction would be enough. Let Israel face the consequences of its actions alone. Don't give them a single dollar or a single weapon.

I knew a better version:

"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, but American propaganda is so much more advanced..."

The CIA agent looks puzzled. "I don't understand, what propaganda?"

And the KGB guy, excitedly: "yes, yes, that's exactly what I mean!"


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