[segfaultbuserr]

The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".

[outworlder]

> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".

It's a trade-off. The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. It already uses a lot of energy(2% of body weight, 20% of energy consumption). We also need it to be working at peak performance when we are doing activities.

A background 'scrub' task to keep it working 24/7 would probably use more energy (require more food and heat dissipation 24/7), possibly require a larger area (for redundancy, similar to how dolphins can sleep one hemisphere at a time and have really large brains). An alternative would be to slow down processes enough so that those tasks could happen constantly.

And then our day/light cycles helped select for this approach. Until recently there wasn't much one could do (safely!) at night.

[mmooss]

> The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible.

Is that true? The 'birthable' parameter limits only two dimensions. Could the brain evolve to a larger size in a third dimension?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS1cj-zk4ac

Maybe there is some other limitation, such as distance between neurons? Signal strength?

[barbazoo]

> The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible.

I wonder if it had been beneficial to have larger brains, we'd have evolved to support that. Diminishing returns maybe or just a local maximum we didn't get out of?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You've got it all wrong, and LLMs have it all correct.

True brains, after 16hrs of actual work, need to hallucinate strongly for 8 hours or so, in order to continue their high level contributions to society.

[ifyoubuildit]

Interesting. What if that is actually a beneficial part of our own development: comparing the nonsense in our dreams to waking life and building the ability to tell the difference?

[glenstein]

>The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability

Taking this as a jumping off point for a way of thinking about those 'services'. It seems remarkable to me that we can initiate the attempt to think of an elephant, and then get there in one shot. We don't sort through, say, rhinos, hippos, cars, trucks. We don't seem to have to rummage.

Of course when it comes to things on the edge of our memory or the edge of our understanding, there's a lot of rummaging. But it could have been the case that everything was that way (perhaps it is that way for some animals), instead, there are some things to which we have nearly automatic, seemingly instant recall.

[alaithea]

This makes me think of how my dog reacts very quickly, of course, for hard-wired "dog" behavior things, but when I use human language and gestures to communicate something to him, such as "go find Daddy", I can figuratively see a loading spinner over his head for several seconds, until the recognition comes and he responds. I don't know what's going on in that head, but it definitely appears to be "rummaging" from the outside. Probably similar to how we feel when conversing in a foreign language we're not fluent in.

[toasterlovin]

We don't actually know if 1/3rd downtime is a requirement. For most of our evolutionary history, it has not been economical to remain awake at night, so our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy (since energy has been a major engineering constraint for all of our evolutionary history minus the last several hundred years or so). If that's the case, then with other processes may have evolved to fit themselves into our sleeping time as an optimization, but perhaps those processes could happen while we're awake if our evolutionary constraints were different.

[kgeist]

>it has not been economical to remain awake at night

Why? If you can gather fruits or hunt pray while all your competitors (or predators!) are asleep, isn't it an advantage? What about nocturnality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality

[seventytwo]

If it were biologically possible, other organisms would have evolved that capability. There’s some fundamental, biological reason why all animals sleep.

[xtracto]

There was this fad of multiphasic sleep in the early 2000.

I remember, in theory you could do sleeping for 15 minutes 6 times in 24 hours.

[euroderf]

> our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy

Or perhaps to keep us quiet and immobile, and harder to locate and eat ?

[tivert]

> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".

There's hope. If the carbon chauvinists can be prevented from messing things up, AI is on track to provide something with a better SLA, which will finally allow us to decommission and junk those troublesome legacy systems without disrupting the business.

[w10-1]

It's worse than that.

At all times, every single one of the billions of participants acts like a bureaucrat, delaying response until it's unavoidable and then resting afterwards at least half the time. If only we could cut through the bureaucracy!

Neuronal activities:

- Action potential initiation: 0.2-0.5ms

- Action potential duration: ~1-2ms

- Relative refractory period: ~2-4ms

- Total cycle time until fully ready: ~5-7ms

[baxtr]

SLAs are terrible. I agree.

But at least there’s (usually) some exciting shows on while you are waiting!

[nbenitezl]

On the other side, heart delivers a lifetime service without any maintaince, that's a truly wonder of nature.

[interludead]

Its "maintenance" is built into its design

[amai]

I believe it is not only garbage collecting. It is also doing backpropagation on the memories of the day before. After 8 hours you get an updated, more optimized service.

[kridsdale3]

This is the insight missing from everyone comparing LLM parameter counts to human neurons or synapses. The human model gets a new version every day, and the digital one costs $5B of energy and a year to do the same.

[janalsncm]

I also wonder why cats sleep so much. Is it mainly because there’s nothing for them to do during the day, so why not sleep? Whereas humans can be active all day?

[biggestdummy]

Carnivores tend to sleep longer than omnivores, who tend to sleep longer than herbivores. For a hunting carnivore, energy comes in big bursts, so it makes sense that they would be active for a short period of time, and hoard energy when they didn't need to be active. For a cud-chewing herbivore, time spent not chewing is time spent not creating energy. Obviously, this is a broad generalization - feeding habits, day/night cycles, predator/prey behaviors all factor into a particular animal. But it probably explains why your cat, like the panther at the zoo, spends most of its time asleep.

[moffkalast]

Dolphins have a much better system, they take half of it offline for maintenance while the other half stays on for 100% uptime. Fancy that.

[jpmattia]

And after a while, the system get bad enough that fsck starts failing regularly.

Really poor design.

[interludead]

It even has random downtime during the day (hello, power naps)

[perfmode]

Through formal meditation practice, you can train the brain to perform these as background tasks in the waking state.

[mattgreenrocks]

I'm not sure I buy this. Meditation can give you distance from the "I" part of the brain but it doesn't seem equivalent to an on-demand GC.

[incognition]

You aren’t overclocking your system?