katabasis's comments

It's capitalism – the true "artificial intelligence" that has been organizing human life for the last ~200 years or so.

I think Vue.js has done a great job of avoiding a lot of the churn while staying competitive with other projects in terms of features and performance.

The core library of React seems well managed, but the accompanying ecosystem of 3rd-party tools for styling, routing, state management, etc seem to be constantly changing.

Meanwhile in Vue land, the critical packages have remained fairly stable and are all maintained by the core team. You get support for styling and transitions out of the box; for most other things (routing, state management, etc) there is one well-maintained library (as opposed to a bunch of options of varying quality that you need to sift through).

I've been using Vue.js for 10 years at this point, and have been using the composition API for the last 5. The older options API is still viable as well.

Yeah pretty much this. One can argue that it’s idiotic to treat chatbots like they are alive, but if a bit of misplaced empathy for machines helps to discourage antisocial behavior towards other humans (even as an unintentional side effect), that seems ok to me.

As an aside, I’m not the kind of person who gets worked up about violence in video games, because even AAA titles with excellent graphics are still obvious as games. New forms of technology are capable of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality to a greater degree. This is true of LLM chat bots to some degree, and I worry it will also become a problem as we get better VR. People who witness or participate in violent events often come away traumatized; at a certain point simulated experiences are going to be so convincing that we will need to worry about the impact on the user.

LLMs are not people, but I can imagine how extensive interactions with AI personas might alter the expectations that humans have when communicating with other humans.

Real people would not (and should not) allow themselves to be subjected to endless streams of abuse in a conversation. Giving AIs like Claude a way to end these kinds of interactions seems like a useful reminder to the human on the other side.

The modern internet is filled with content designed to track, mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think it is totally appropriate to want to give families (not the state, FWIW) the tools to take back some control.

Giving kids accessed to a curated experience online sounds much more feasible than keeping them offline all together, but most parents don't really have the technical know-how to do this themselves (and tech giants like Google, FB, etc. are not interested in providing these capabilities).

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that only allowed access to an allowed list of sites, defaulting to a list of educational projects).

If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.

Are you confusing Nussbaum with someone else? Her writing is way more straightforward than your typical fancy philosopher, and she is definitely a proponent of liberal/progressive views (I wouldn't call her a radical though). She's nothing like Ayn Rand.

Someone already posted a link to her excellent 1999 New Republic essay (https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody) where she criticizes Judith Butler – today this criticism seems more valid than ever and extremely prescient:

> Indeed, Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.

Your whole comment here is extremely uncharitable and it exhibits the very simple-mindedness that you criticize.

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd use the term "Platonic" here, because that tends to have implications of mathematical perfection / timelessness / etc. But I do think that the corpuses of human language that we've been feeding to these models contain within them a lot of real information about the objective world (in a statistical, context-dependent way as opposed to a mathematically precise one), and the AIs are surfacing this information.

To put this another way, I think that you can say that much of our own intelligence as humans is embedded in the sum total of the language that we have produced. So the intelligence of LLMs is really our own intelligence reflected back at us (with all the potential for mistakes and biases that we ourselves contain).

Edit: I fed Claude this paper, and "he" pointed out to me that there are several examples of humans developing accurate conceptions of things they could never experience based on language alone. Most readers here are likely familiar with Helen Keller, who became an accomplished thinker and writer in spite of being blind and deaf from infancy (Anne Sullivan taught her language despite great difficulty, and this Keller's main window to the world). You could also look at the story of Eşref Armağan, a Turkish painter who was blind from birth – he creates recognizable depictions of a world that he learned about through language and non-visual senses).

I am not a neuroscientist, but I think it's likely that LLMs (with 10s/100s of billions of parameters) and the human brain (with 1-2 orders of magnitude more neural connections[1]) process language in analogous ways. This process is predictive, stochastic, sensitive to constantly-shifting context, etc. IMO this accounts for the "unreasonable effectiveness" of LLMs in many language-related tasks. It's reasonable to call this a form of intelligence (you can measure it, solve problems with it, etc).

But language processing is just one subset of human cognition. There are other layers of human experience like sense-perception, emotion, instinct, etc. – maybe these things could be modeled by additional parameters, maybe not. Additionally, there is consciousness itself, which we still have a poor understanding of (but it's clearly different from intelligence).

So anyway, I think that it's reasonable to say that LLMs implement one sub-set of human cognition (the part that has to do with how we think in language), but there are many additional "layers" to human experience that they don't currently account for.

Maybe you could say that LLMs are a "model distillation" of human intelligence, at 1-2 orders of magnitude less complexity. Like a smaller model distilled from a larger one, they are good at a lot of things but less able to cover edge cases and accuracy/quality of thinking will suffer the more distilled you go.

We tend to equate "thinking" with intelligence/language/reason thanks to 2500 years of Western philosophy, and I believe that's where a lot of confusion originates in discussions of AI/AGI/etc.

[1]: https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/colon-ramos/overview/#:~:text=...

Many philosophical traditions which incorporate a meditation practice emphasize that your consciousness is distinct from the contents of your thoughts. Meditation (even practiced casually) can provide a direct experience of this.

When it comes to the various kinds of thought-processes that humans engage in (linguistic thinking, logic, math, etc) I agree that you can describe things in terms of functions that have definite inputs and outputs. So human thinking is probably computable, and I think that LLMs can be said to be ”think” in ways that are analogous to what we do.

But human consciousness produces an experience (the experience of being conscious) as opposed to some definite output. I do not think it is computable in the same way.

I don’t necessarily think that you need to subscribe to dualism or religious beliefs to explain consciousness - it seems entirely possible (maybe even likely) that what we experience as consciousness is some kind of illusory side-effect of biological processes as opposed to something autonomous and “real”.

But I do think it’s still important to maintain a distinction between “thinking” (computable, we do it, AIs do it as well) and “consciousness” (we experience it, probably many animals experience it also, but it’s orthogonal to the linguistic or logical reasoning processes that AIs are currently capable of).

At some point this vague experience of awareness may be all that differentiates us from the machines, so we shouldn’t dismiss it.

I'm a fan of Carlo Rovelli's popular science books. "The Order of Time" in particular left a big impression on me. He is a philosopher as well as a scientist, and he has a gift for writing beautiful and accessible prose about some pretty heady topics.

If you are interested in RQM but find this article somewhat dry, check out his short book "Helgoland".

I find both RQM and Rovelli's notion of "thermal time" (i.e. the idea causality and entropy are emergent properties dependent on our perspective, as opposed to fundamental features of reality) to be very convincing.

Agreed – I enjoyed this article, but the conclusion (that philosophers or intellectuals may need to come to terms with self-censorship or obscurantism to avoid drawing the ire of the masses) strikes me as very pessimistic.

We've gained a lot of freedoms since Spinoza's era and we shouldn't be so quick to surrender them.

I live in Portland and I 100% agree with this. I say this as someone who voted for Measure 110 and now regrets that vote. At this point I would support a straight-up repeal. At least under the old system some people who were arrested were able to get clean in jail, or were able to enter court-mandated treatment programs.

The reality is that people in the throes of drug addiction have already lost their agency, so some kind of coercive intervention will often be necessary to break the cycle. By refusing to do this out of a (commendable) compassionate impulse, we are making the situation worse.

In general the last ~5 years of living here has been a lesson of how important order (i.e. the enforcement of rules and norms) is for a functioning society. You could say it is the foundation of all social goods.

Watching the city's decline up close has deeply altered my political beliefs on a number of topics – this is one of them.

I don’t know what your particular interests are, but my suggestion would be to try to find some in-person group activities that align with something you are interested in. Take an art class at a community college, join a group for hikes/bike rides/sports, etc. I think this can be a low pressure way to meet a lot of people who you might at least have one or two things in common with. Casual acquaintances like this may or may not become the starting point for more “real” friendships but it’s a start.

1. You are potentially giving a shield of deniability to people who create or distribute real CSAM because now they could claim that the images are just AI generated and therefore "harmless"

2. Efforts to stamp out real child abuse may be undermined by a flood of AI-generated false positive imagery

3. When people see something over and over again they start to think that it's normal. AI generation of this kind of material (something which can be done at a huge scale) risks normalizing the sexual abuse of children.

I'm sure there are many other arguments beyond these.

I also immediately thought of Nano Emacs when I saw this article.

There is a short talk (6min) from EmacsConf 2021 where the creator of Nano Emacs talks about his reasons for designing a simpler interface, I found it really interesting:

https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/design/

This is a great first-contact novel, probably my favorite example of this genre. The book concludes with some ideas about the nature of consciousness that I found to be legitimately frightening. I read the book years ago but it feels even more relevant now as we watch new forms of “intelligence” like ChatGPT beginning to emerge.

I run a small D&D group with a couple of friends. I don't know that I'd want to play in a campaign helmed by an AI dungeon master, but the idea of having some help generating plot, assets, etc. when I don't have a lot of time before a game session sounds amazing.

I tend to be an AI pessimist, but this seems like a good example of a way that AI could be used to supplement human creativity instead of just replacing it entirely.

Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughter via a shared album gives the same immediacy as posting to social media does (you even have likes, comments, etc) but it's way more private.

As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).

There is something very immediate about just picking up a notebook and jotting down your thoughts. Same goes for reading and annotating a printed document. It's a reflex, encoded into muscle memory.

The UX of the Remarkable is extremely simple, meaning that it doesn't get in the way when you are using it in this manner. Just pick it up, write something down, and set it aside again. But now you never have to worry about running out of paper.

I'm a photo nerd so I'll make an analogy from the world of cameras. The latest DSLR or mirrorless camera from Canon or Sony might have the best features and technical capabilities, but there are a zillion menus and settings to navigate. Meanwhile maybe you've missed the "decisive moment" for your shot already. Compare that to something like a Leica. A Leica is also very expensive for what it does, and it only has 3 settings: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO (sensor/film sensitivity). But to a trained photographer, this camera with its unchanging interface can become an extension of one's eye, used with a speed that is instinctual.

In comparison to the Remarkable (or to a Leica), I think a lot of the tech we use in our everyday lives is cognitively exhausting. Much of the processing power of the human brain is dedicated to muscle memory, haptic feedback, and the like. "Don't make me think" will always be the best user experience.