Mind Matters

> Working in the software company in the day and preaching open source, anti copyright anti patents open access free for all "Open source" is copyright - it's not anti-copyright. It uses copyright to grant a license to use under certain conditions, and sometimes with obligations. You might keep it proprietary, you might use GPL to require that the software stays open virally, or you might use a more permissive BSD-style license. The important part here is that as the creator, you choose how you want your work to by copyrighted. [0]: best quickest link i could find that contains the "consent, credit, compensation" https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/three-artists-launch-lawsuit-against-st…

Is there any source for this other than Twitter? Is PayPal's TOS public? I was unable to find a reliable source for this in my Google search just now, the best I can find is https://mindmatters.ai/2022/10/paypal-can-still-fine-its-users-2500-fo…

This is great but this post is basically a wrapper for the original post: https://mindmatters.ai/2022/01/will-chatbots-replace-the-art-of-human-…

This is not a decent response to a thoughtful comment - or more importantly, it's the kind of response people make when they have nothing constructive to add but can't bring themselves to be gracious. Reputable scientists – most notably Roger Penrose and his colleague Stuart Hammeroff [1] – dispute the notion that human-like consciousness can be developed in computers. People can and will continue to debate and research this, and in the meantime it's pointless for non-experts like me to spend any amount of time arguing about it. But it's valid for your parent commenter to point out that your position relies on assumptions rather than being proven fact. They were respectful enough to take time to explain their point of view in great depth. More of that and less of the rude responses is what we like on HN. [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2018/11/human-consciousness-may-not-be-computab…

> Mathematician Gregory Chaitin deeply admires Kurt Gödel’s work, viewing the incompleteness theorems as monumental. However, rather than relying on the liar’s paradox like Gödel, Chaitin reframed incompleteness through information theory and computer size (using the Berry paradox). He argues that Gödel’s proof makes incompleteness look like a rare, pathological exception, whereas his own information-theoretic approach shows it is natural, universal, and everywhere in math. Google AI. Trust me bros, he said something along those lines. Understanding Godel's proof is terribly challenging even for teenage Chaitin. Found this lovely anecdote >Robert J. Marks: So you cold called him then. [...] >Gregory Chaitin: So he said, “Okay, send me a paper of yours on this topic. I’ll take a look at it. And if like it, maybe I’ll give you an appointment to visit.” [...] So he had taken a look at it and immediately perceived a crucial aspect of the definition of complexity that I was proposing. And he gave me an appointment. [...] >Gregory Chaitin: I was all set for the great day — and it snowed! And this was the week before Easter. So that’s unusual, a spring snowstorm but it wasn’t a big snowstorm. Nothing was going to stop me from visiting my hero. So there I am in my office at the IBM Watson Center, about to leave. I figured out how much time I needed. About to leave and unfortunately — very unfortunately — the phone rang. It was Gödel ’s secretary saying Gödel is very careful…

> Yes, if you ask the same question with a fixed (finite) memory restriction on everything, the answer is uninteresting. To me, this is... uninteresting. It tells you nothing about the underlying logical structure of your problem, which is what mathematicians are really trying to get at! > (first and foremost Turing machines are a tool for analysing problems mathematically, not a model of your laptop) I think what makes Animats's distinction worth stressing is that a lot of people miss this and fall into the trap of making false/misleading claims about the impact of the halting problem on actual computers/software. For instance, claiming that the halting problem proves there are problems humans can solve that computers fundamentally can't, giving "the halting problem makes this impossible" as reason against adding a halt/loop detector to a chip emulator, making all sorts of weird claims about AI[0][1], or arguably even this author's claim that a halt detector would make bcrypt cracking trivial. [0]: https://mindmatters.ai/2025/02/agi-the-halting-problem-and-the-human-m… [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16890

Worth noting that mindmatters.ai is ran [1] by the "Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence", who's stated mission is [2]: > to explore the benefits as well as the challenges raised by artificial intelligence (AI) in light of the enduring truth of human exceptionalism. People know at a fundamental level that they are not machines. But faulty thinking can cause people to assent to views that in their heart of hearts they know to be untrue. The Bradley Center seeks to help individuals—and our society at large—to realize that we are not machines while at the same time helping to put machines (especially computers and AI) in proper perspective. So they have an incentive to associate the brain with quantum stuff or cosmic spacetime weirdness or any other topic that people pride themselves in not understanding - because they want to present the brain as something otherworldly and mysterious that we could not possibly be able to understand. [1] https://mindmatters.ai/about/ [2] https://centerforintelligence.org/

Let's not again confuse natural intelligence with artificial intelligence. You do not have artificial consciousness, you have genuine consciousness. Further, the brain is not a machine. To explain why, I'm just going to quote this excellent piece from mindmatters: A machine is an artifact. It is a human-built assembly of materials that have no natural inclination to work in unison. Silicon and copper, plastic and glass have no natural propensity to compute. We make artifacts, for example computers, out of these materials to serve our purposes. But they are not the materials’ natural purposes. In the classical hylemorphic (Aristotelian) perspective, an artifact is an artificial composite of substances and thus it has an accidental, not substantial, form. Machines work as they do “accidentally”; that is, their function as machines is not inherent to the matter that comprises them. Rather their function is imposed on the disparate parts by human intelligence. Unlike a machine, the brain is an organ, a functional part of a living organism. It (along with the body) has a substantial form; its activity is natural to it. One might say that the brain's activity is intrinsic to it, not imposed on it extrinsically, as is the activity of a machine.[1] [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-if-you-choo…

So the same mentality as startups then, like Uber's CEO "Innovators Shouldn't Have To Ask For Permission Or Forgiveness"[1] or Facebook's original motto for developers being "Move fast and break things"[2]. Also here's a list of 11 startup entrepreneurs who "broke all the rules and achieved great success" according to this article[3]. Also found several people claiming that "Disrupters don't play by the rules"[4][5][6], and startups love to consider themselves "Disruptors for X technology"[7] to the point of parody in the HBO's Silicon Valley tv show, and even an entire startup convention named after it (TechCrunch Disrupt)[8]. Unfortunately, I think it will be tough to pin down anyone claiming anything is their "libertarian playground" (including the techbros that you're pretending are saying that), so I have to leave that one untouched. Also, if getting hacked is all that's needed in order to get the mockery and derision of HN, then you pretty much all should be mocking yourselves, since the past few years have shown that there's almost no company of any decent size that doesn't eventually get hacked, and there's a good chance you're working for a company that has been hacked or will in the next five years. In the last few years I alone have gotten notifications of having possible leaked data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Netflix, Target, Michael's, Equifax, and probably at least a dozen more companies, and I'm sure probably at least a dozen more on top of that…

Nortel was the main reason this all happened. They were the ones that were doing all the cutting edge wireless network research and when they collapsed Huawei was the one that executed the best in the wake of said collapse. Err ... not sure if you're aware, but it's common knowledge that Nortel's sensitive IP was hacked by the Chinese. In fact it went on over almost a full decade, from the late 1990's to 2009 when it was brought widely to light. [1] Say what you will about Chinese companies but damn some of them execute well. Well, I mean, especially the ones benefiting from nation-state level corporate espionage. Of course empires stealing tech from each other has happened many times historically; we don't have to all act shocked that it can happen. But neither is it irrelevant that it did, in fact, happen, and specifically in the case that you mention of Nortel and Huawei. It's definitely not just a simple case of "generous credit", though the wider point about Western governments not supporting their core digital infrastructure companies in strategic ways during those years is certainly correct. --- [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2021/04/why-do-huaweis-inventions-look-oddly-fa… -- well-sourced article referencing much of the earlier reporting on the matter

Here are some of Ada Lovelace's notes on Menebrea's paper on Babbage's Analytical Engine: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-lovelace-notes.html > Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. Some AI generated music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA03iyI3yEA > It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or…

The upside is now I can finally buy that hummer I have been eyeing. Gas prices at historic lows, it wil be even more of a bargain! Incredible word-salad here: "“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse,” said Steffen." Momentum in human systems? Reaction time? Trajectory of collapse? This is what gives science a bad name. Scientists were against masks because of "lack of evidence". Result: 10s of thousands are dead who could have survived. No consequences for said scientists who simply forgot that absence of evidence is not evidence of absences. Now other scientists want to flip lack of evidence on its head and spin up grotesque scenarios that require wholesale planetary changes, sacrifices, death and economic destruction not to mention inter-governmental coordination. Scientism at its finest. Climate change when it happens and devastates us will owe more to this activist catastrophic doom-mongering and condescension than human apathy or inaction. If climate scientists really care about the environment, they need to come down from their high horse and talk to people respectfully as scientists…

I wrote an article about Berkeley's critique here: https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/the-needless-complexity-of-modern-calcu… I actually quite enjoy Berkeley. I wish he had framed his critique slightly differently, but the past is the past :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9sh9NpL4i8 https://mindmatters.ai/2020/10/researchers-the-aliens-exist-but-they-a… https://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outl…

"To say anything else implies an opinion that the mean human would cognitively overestimate or underestimate the quantity, and this is equivalent to an opinion on human cognitive bias for this specific problem" for a slightly more skeptical take: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/11/the-wisdom-of-crowds-are-crowds-really-… (It mentions a requirement to be unbiased and independent, which means it doesn't apply to most modern things)

We can cherry-pick AI experts to pay attention to. Yann LeCun recently called current AI "dumber than a cat." Stephen Wolfram has written some very well thought-through articles about LLMs and doesn't find much to worry about. Gary Marcus. I wouldn't ignore Geoff Hinton, but he can fall victim to the same mistakes anyone else can, as Gary Smith [1] described. Pointing out that people of any era can get easily fooled by things they don't fully understand supports my position. Putting aside the obvious stock pumping and hype going on in the current AI bubble, plenty of people want to believe in AGI, or want to fear it, or just want to stay relevant. A decade from now we will only remember the people who made correct predictions. [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2024/01/computers-still-do-not-understand/

They have, yes. Like when they introduced a new Code of Conduct a few years back: https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/peaceful-code-of-conduct-sparks-rage-in…

Indeed. Check this: https://mindmatters.ai/2022/01/the-strange-story-of-googles-selfish-le…

Only on HN could someone say "well if a statistical language model can 'replace' a software developer, then one of the holy grails of material science should be child's play." Because clearly being a software developer is more difficult than scientific research... This is everyone's daily reminder that ChatGPT is not deterministic, does not think, does not reason, etc. It is a statistical language model that has been fed everything from star trek to research papers. It will confidently tell you how many bears russia has launched into space: https://mindmatters.ai/2023/02/lets-take-the-i-out-of-ai/

Is there a connection to this and the supposed extraterrestrial retrovirus link to Cephalopods I’ve seen discussed within a Panspermia discussion? https://mindmatters.ai/2022/01/science-paper-could-octopuses-be-aliens…

hysterics. Remember when he said we should stop training radiologists, that’s aged pretty poorly given there’s actually a need to have more: https://www.rsna.org/news/2022/may/global-radiologist-shortage https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/turns-out-computers-are-not-vacuuming-u…

What are you talking about, concretely? Last I heard this accusation, it was from a conspiracy theorist Gary Smith [1] who had only a very dim idea of what OpenAI does, and never bothered to understand LLMs or instruct finetune. Honestly the level of LLM-skepticism is pretty low, increasingly reminds me of vaccine discourse. 1. https://mindmatters.ai/2022/03/the-ai-illusion-state-of-the-art-chatbo…

After having tried VR the "we can't detect aliens because they have merged with/receded into simulations" hypothesis seems very plausible to me: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/11/the-aliens-exist-but-evolved-into-virtu… Why bother exploring the universe when you can explore arbitrary virtual spaces? The only remaining thing possibly detectable would be a faint thermal glow from their ultra-optimized computers

My question was in response to the statement "Neither a human can solve the halting problem." There's an interesting article/podcast here about what computers can't do: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/08/six-limitations-of-artificial-intellige…

On topic of ai deity, to some this is not a joke. Things are about to get interesting. https://mindmatters.ai/2022/07/artificial-intelligence-worshipped-as-g…

The next article on the same news site: https://mindmatters.ai/2023/01/large-language-models-can-entertain-but… > The reality is quite different. LLMs are text predictors, nothing more. They are not designed to know any facts whatsoever. Indeed, they have no way of distinguishing between true and false statements because they literally do not know the meaning of any of the words in the text they generate. They are convincing BS artists, which is why one of us proposed that they be called faux intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. ... > Our point is not that LLMs sometimes give dumb answers. We use these examples to demonstrate that, because LLMs do not know what words mean, they cannot use knowledge of the real world, common sense, wisdom, or logical reasoning to assess whether a statement is likely to be true or false.

The game of reducing code to the minimum to produce an interesting output (e.g. demo scenes) makes me think about Chaitin randomness and entropy measure: https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/chaitins-discovery-of-a-way-of-describi…

I'm confused because of your second sentence but according to this site https://mindmatters.ai/2020/05/einsteins-only-rejected-paper/ ". Albert Einstein only had one anonymous peer review in his career — and the paper was rejected2. This happened in 1936." How is just one paper submitted anonymously being rejected an indication of a trend?

James Webb Space Telescope shows big bang didnt happen(https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/james-webb-space-telescope-shows-big-ba… 9 points|mactitan|13 hours ago|3 comments Does the James Webb telescope show that the big bang didn’t happen?(https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/james-webb-space-telescope-shows-big-ba… 2 points|the__prestige|2 days ago|3 comments

(circa:2020) Meet the U.S. Army’s New Drone Swarms : https://mindmatters.ai/2020/09/meet-the-u-s-armys-new-drone-swarms/