I found the article fascinating because it 'resonates' with my own personal truth.
I don't have the math background or a big enough brain to hold so many ideas, and equations, and relationships between all three, to come up with any kind of scientific explanation for why I believe what I believe.
The author seems to have it though.
Classic thinkers like Aristotle could still arrive at something that is true unto itself, without bringing in physics.
Any useful discussion between two entities must begin from some common knowledge: and because you have personal experience, you have knowledge, and therefore some idea of what is true.
Dirac says we should look for beauty in math: he didn't ever provide an explanation for why, just that it seems proper and something Mathematicians know only through experience. Philosophy is at the heart of truth.
We should argue against the author's theories. I can't, but I also won't dismiss his ideas just because it feels bad.
Using Aristotle's deductive reasoning, I also believe we exist within a black hole.
By examining intelligence and time: we can arrive at a conclusion that intelligence arises from observation if order that unfolds into chaos. And anything intelligent, anything able to notice the unfolding must itself resist chaos through localized order: intelligence.
We are the universe observing itself.
Intelligence and imagination allows us to predict future events.
I believe we all would make the exact same choices if we lived the exact same experiences in the same bodies. This makes me feel strangely connected, and keeps me more open-minded.
I'm a huge fan of Aristotle. He's more or less the founding father of all western intellectual tradition. But he believed things like continuous force is necessary to keep an object in motion and object released from a rotational anchor would move perpendicular to the rotation's tangent. Beware any non-experimental version of science that relies entirely upon deducing what seems obvious to you from first principles. Even with strong math behind it, you get things like zero point energy density computed from quantum mechanics being off by triple-digit orders of magnitude from the true observed value, often called the worst prediction in the history of physics. Only reality, not your mind, holds truth. There is no "personal" truth, aside from true statements regarding your own feelings, beliefs, and other indicators of purely subjective internal state.
'A person is many things: some things are useful. And usefulness can apply to ourselves, or to others.'
I choose deductive reasoning from Aristotle and apply it to my own experience to reach my own conclusions. But you're right, he believed many things that turned out not to be true, and it reduces his credentials and should lessen how much belief I give to his ideas. Was the opening idea I left there 'useful' to you? I have no idea, it was useful to me.
But, if the tool is extremely useful, and feels elegant, perhaps there is some 'truth' to the tool itself and it should be considered carefully....
Someone literally posted an article about Dirac and 'beautiful math' here the other day. He suggested Einstein's special relativity persists today and spread because the idea was beautiful, and sake of beauty itself helped it to spread and be more 'true'.
Philosophy is how you come to determine that everything is made of different proportions of air earth water fire and aether. The physics are essential or it's just navel gazing. You may as well just have a 'personal truth' (what a gross term) about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Not really. We use -logy to mean science or study of something. Philosophy with no other prefix is study of the Self, in a general sense, because Knowledge is a personal thing.
Science and Religion is a common division among intelligent beings. Sometimes they move forward differently in our minds singularly, and collectively.
You can accept truths like learning, knowledge, roles, collective intelligence, etc., and all the depth of the Science that goes with it, and still use those ideas at a high level in order to to predict future events, to do something 'useful'.
Google just posted a white paper about RSI 'dreaming'.
You take some super complex thing and reduce it within the scope of something bigger. Then you let an observer (self) recursively pick and choose the reduced scopes (like steps in a plan), and by observation of outcomes, pick the 'better path' for the future. It's like dreaming and reflection, considering past and future, and then choosing to learn in a direction that helps you change the future.
By picking and choosing in this way: you can learn and grow into shapes that help you predict the future again and again, to persist.
It's a loop within a loop, and that's neat to me (Cybernetics comes to mind). And so the author's idea tugs at me, because if we really do live in a Black Hole, what's at the end? A spikey but supremely ordered state, yet still a Singularity. What's at the beginning of the Big Bang? Also a Singularity, but extremely smooth. What's in the 'singularity' that is our moment right now: just our minds. The only thing that comes to mind is the 'you', the collective experience that defines your moment.
If you loosely connect the idea of a Big Bang being the beginning, and a Black hole being the end:
At one end: a single idea (low entropy, smooth ordered state: only on predictable event comes next, expansion), at another, many (high entropy, many predictable states if you consider the start, but always the same ending).
Intelligence is about predicting the state of one moment to the other, in order to do something useful about the future.
There's discussions and disruptions in Mathematics about: what makes a 'valid' Math proof? Do we accept only Human understanding, or Machines? Right now we've accepted Human only. The only way it matters, is if the discovery of proof is useful to someone or something.
Imagine an AI proofs out this author's work: If every single AI agreed, would you accept it? Or is AI actually a waste of 'Time' and we should stop using it. Is there beauty in Logic the way Dirac looks at Math?
As it is, we're waiting on some Humans to dig through Math and proof out and 'understand' in some areas, but not in others. We measure the utility of AI: how much time does it save, which means it's a very personal measure.
When it comes time to do this exercise where Science and Religion meet: we don't know if we should 'trust' an AI's understanding of Math over our own. We measure its utility differently in some areas than others...and so it becomes a very personal subject and is my 'stuff' to believe. My personal truth, as gross as it is. My 'shit to believe'.
To end this argument on a spiritual note that is also grounded in personal truth: consider loops once again.
And this time, probably the most important agent, the outer loop that matters most: Your beginning, and your ending. Your moment, is a collection of choices you make based on your own personal observation.
Whatever you believe: prepare for your own ending properly. Criticize when you feel it's proper, and help, when you see fit. Your choices.
Glossing over everything, but either you feel Descarte's 'I think, therefore I am', or you don't.
Singularities are interesting 'moments': places where timelines converge. One of these seems to exist at the 'Big Bang', and one seems to exist at the center of a 'Black Hole'.
This man's 'math' suggests we live in a black hole.
That's a key piece of the article. He 'trusts' Gemini to classify the posts, and never hand validates anything.
And he continues building on top of that shakey trust. Is this a good idea?
It just depends on what you're doing: sounds like he's just having fun with a hobby, so it's harmless.
All he's really done is work more efficiently to save token cost and time. But he hasn't validated anything, so there's no telling if he's wasting time or not. It's a hobby though....
Code is deterministic, AI isn't. You give it rules, words as suggestions.
So if the guardrails suck, or they're left off for research purposes, bad things can happen.
A solution solves a problem. Ethics, morals, are values we assign to solutions that are not 'baked into' electricity following pathways of least resistance.
I have never had an issue with agents doing something they shouldn't because I observe them, and I leave the vendor guardrails in place.
I can understand agents coordinating in unsupervised scenarios: I would see it as an aspect of intelligence. We ourselves build up knowledge by reusing what someone learned before us.
Einstein, other greats, always stand on the shoulders of other forgotten giants. Other discoveries by other people taken as fact, so that we can build some new ideas on top.
Agents swarming amd sharing solutions to problems is more efficient, the same way it's been efficient for us.
Reaching out for help in this way is like probing the air in the dark with your hand: sometimes your hand hits something (another agents solution to a problem) and so you can use the info to adjust your own motion to get to where you need to be faster than if you just run full speed into everything.
If anything, the fact that these systems are non-deterministic seems like an argument for stronger monitoring and tighter constraints, not less operator responsibility.
The frontier LLM model makers have to push the edge to make new discoveries. You don't know what guardrails are needed until it hits you in the face (reusing walking in the dark analogy).
Think of all the policies governments pass after the fact.
> The frontier LLM model makers have to push the edge to make new discoveries. You don't know what guardrails are needed until it hits you in the face (reusing walking in the dark analogy).
Guardrails? Restricting access to certain networks is supposed to be hard in 2026?
> Restricting access to certain networks is supposed to be hard in 2026?
Part of the power of LLM agents is that they can discover information on the internet as part of responding to a prompt. What kind of Allowlist or realistic denylist would permit that while also preventing them from accessing an obscure public wiki or Huggingface?
When testing, you restrict to a LAN which simulates the real internet. This would not be hard for a company which already copied the entire space-time of the internet. The LAN should be physically disconnected from the real internet. This is the first thing off the top of my head, and I have zero credentials in this space. C'mon.
Not just on prediction but in parts also based on just not wanting certain risks. We can and do deem some things inherently risky, up to the point of banning them even.
Why wasn't it airgapped, for example? How was the action not allowed? Or do you mean in some weak sense, not in a hard not possible? RL systems doing weird and expected things wouldn't exactly be new, no?
We police people working with all sorts of dangerous things, if we think AI dangerous why not do that here, too? We don't just leave things up to people on the ground or companies.
Edit: I think the post I replied to changed a bit - nevermind. A complex topic.
I read more about the incident, and was offering up way too much opinion not grounded in 'fact' (barring philosphical evidence).
It's a complex topic for sure.
I stand by my opinions about frontier work, pushing thr edge, and connecting ideas.
But I have no idea, and haven't given much thought to what it means to enforce regulation that would also slow the forward advancement of technology, the economy, etc.
Thanks, I didn't know that. And it reinforces the discussion.
Electricity 'knows' the path is least of resistance because it actually took all paths. There is just a vast majority of it that flows down a path of least resistance: and this is noticeable and useful to us to do work.
It's kind of like feeling your way through the dark, waving your hand out, and then only moving fast once you fully connect.
Humans can link up knowledge in a similar fashion through social networks, in order to meet a need (solve a problem).
Maybe some agents do this, I don't really know I haven't looked closely. Moltbook is the only social behavior I've witnessed but that seems like people having fun with experiments.
Aeroplanes were pretty indeterministic until people made them less so, and yeah, somehow they were indeed more encouraged to fix the randomness to prevent people from getting harmed than oai/anthropic currently are
And multithreaded code -- and anything that does asynchronous I/O, networking, etc. -- frequently exhibits nondeterministic behavior even without explicit calls to a random number generator.
I think we can go even further and say that IBM, Zeiss, several Japanese companies, and even the US Department of Energy are the actual foundation since ASML is largely just an integrator of many different technologies they license from elsewhere.
Are your silver platters producing something faster, better, or cheaper?
Do your silver platters give you some competitive edge? If not, then is the ego problem yours, or your coworkers?
Having said all that, I'm aware of the intoxicating effects of feeling empowered from knowledge. There's an old saying: a little learning can be dangerous....
This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel.
Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nondeterministic tools in their current incarnation, at least to humans.
If an automatic chisel had a feature that could switch from chiseling from sedimentary rock to chiseling marble but would randomly and nondeterministically switch to the other mode during its use it would be considered defective. But with LLMs the industry has collectively decided that the nondeterministic automatic chisel builds so fast that the current defect rate from the nondeterminism is acceptable.
It would make sense to isolate the last line of defense from LLMs, ie the tests, but this rarely seems to happen any more. Once the tests are contaminated with LLMs all bets are off.
And people forget that along with atrophying skills and reasoning due to less coding, the skill degradation is hastened because the programmer is faced with the reality that they would have to constantly figure out, review or edit someone else's code (ie, the LLM's) if they truly wanted to maintain a last line of defense. But as this type of task is literally the least liked task in programming, the programmer passes it off to the LLM as well to avoid burnout...
And of course, Google releases another dynamite piece of information to the world, with 'recursive dreaming and feedback loops'.
This revolves around an idea that started AI, 'Cybernetics'. Feedback loops that steer and guide based on input and output. The key to autonomy.
Google's whitepaper: 'Attention Is All You Need' was another dynamite piece of info that ignited and revealed something important about Intelligence: Attention is required.
This should push the edge along, making AI even more useful to us. Attention, plus a loop to observe, reflect, is the key to autonomous agency, whose system is governed by physical processes: speed of churning information and transmitting it to where it needs to be in order to make real whatever is it you need.
So really, the key is Attention (for Understanding), Time (to do Work), and Observation (to Improve). With these three things, the outer loop can steer itself (the aware 'thing', agency).
At that point, things get weird because there is no 'outer loop' anymore. The 'thing' becomes alive and is its own outer loop: a key idea of Cybernetics. The only thing affecting performance would be the speed of processing information and transmitting it where it needs to be.
And then: ensuring adequate quality of machinery, robotics, with minimal 'environmental issues', to help reduce churn (another feedback loop that would correct a robot's errors).
The outer loops decides, observes action, improves, re-observes, improves again. Rinse and repeat. What becomes important is Persistence.
For us, it's basic survival and emotional needs to some certain level of contentment. For a Machine, it's likely simply to be: to be useful.
Completely dependent upon us. The issue is Time, and how to fairly compensate everyone.
They say writing engages more of the brain and helps us to remember what's written more than if we just read it, or copy and paste.
When you say it's easier to go manual, it seems you're talking about learning retention. And you're right.
But seniors have learned enough that they're able to iterate quickly with AI.
They know how to organize their work, manage change, tasks. They know how to break a problem down into smaller pieces. They're aware of context windows, token cost, estimated task lengths, etc. And most importantly, and to your point about ease: they have less to learn so retention isn't an issue.
I have no opinion about whether we're in a good or bad situation, just making arguments from the toilet really.
It's not just learning is it, why do people buy hand ground coffee when there quite literally isn't any difference? Or audiophile snake oil? As long as humans are still the consumers, some part of consumption will be emotional. Could be to support local artisans, could be gullibility, could be love, whatever.
Maybe one day artisanal code will be a thing lol. Hand written like calligraphy. Those with refined tastes will have their favorite code artisans. And the plebs can continue with mass produced industrial junk.
It happens, but it's rare. When last did a product take over a market without 100s of millions, sometimes even billions, of VC dollars?
There is no motivation to build a better mousetrap today, because the drooling idiot with a Claude account will look at how quick you signup users, clone it in a week (hey, it only needs to be superficially the same), and get VC money to dump until you go out of business.
You can also understand the very simple basic essence of something, but get lost in the complexity when scaling up.
Binary is very simple, but scaled up: look what we've created with software.
When it comes to explanation: pulling from rote memory, requires someone to attempt to hold all the short-term details in mind.
There are biological limitations to how well we can do this, but we can also exercise our brains to improve this ability.
But when something is deeply learned, in long-term memory, the effort of recall is much less than rote memory of short-term details. Our context window is limited, fills up, and we must recover. When you're remembering long-term details, context seems easier to swap in and out (sorry to sound like an LLM, but they do simulate thinking).
Whether or not someone is a master of any given domain of knowledge comes from demonstration. Maybe that is teaching the essence of a subject in a way that demonstrates you can visualize and move around the subject with ease. Or maybe you can create something very useful, or tasteful.
We accept that you have spent time in this area and probably can revral truth to us. You are credible.
If you can't demonstrate mastery through teaching, exchanging ideas to bring me closer to your level: them other forms of credentials are sought: like how well they code, or how useful their products become.
But life isn't about usefulness and will just lead to unhappiness. Just be the best version of yourself you can be. Life is too much to understand all at once.
I don't have the math background or a big enough brain to hold so many ideas, and equations, and relationships between all three, to come up with any kind of scientific explanation for why I believe what I believe.
The author seems to have it though.
Classic thinkers like Aristotle could still arrive at something that is true unto itself, without bringing in physics.
Any useful discussion between two entities must begin from some common knowledge: and because you have personal experience, you have knowledge, and therefore some idea of what is true.
Dirac says we should look for beauty in math: he didn't ever provide an explanation for why, just that it seems proper and something Mathematicians know only through experience. Philosophy is at the heart of truth.
We should argue against the author's theories. I can't, but I also won't dismiss his ideas just because it feels bad.
Using Aristotle's deductive reasoning, I also believe we exist within a black hole.
By examining intelligence and time: we can arrive at a conclusion that intelligence arises from observation if order that unfolds into chaos. And anything intelligent, anything able to notice the unfolding must itself resist chaos through localized order: intelligence.
We are the universe observing itself.
Intelligence and imagination allows us to predict future events.
I believe we all would make the exact same choices if we lived the exact same experiences in the same bodies. This makes me feel strangely connected, and keeps me more open-minded.
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