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> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it?

If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it

> What are the plans to scale up?

I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later, those two things will be one and the same.


I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents).

Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).


>Greg Egan's "Rifters"

By Peter Watts actually.


Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.

Will put it in my list :-)

I had a genuine feeling of dread reading that, wow.

It takes some of the fun out of imagining eternal digital life, doesn't it :-)

Surely you can imagine that there are people who draw their ethical line for permissible suffering with animal farming on the "permissible" side and "slavery on an unimaginable scale" on the "not permissible" side? Imagine you or someone you love duplicated 5 million times and living through 1000 subjective years of pure existential horror (while doing menial industrial cognitive tasks). Some would say this is worse than eating meat.

> the first step is to embrace veganism

The past 4 billion years of life for prey animals has been "get born, eat, get eaten by a predator." They have never experienced any other environment. Why do we owe them a different one?


For me the issue isn't with the killing/eating of animals. Rather, it's how they are treated during their lifetime by the meat industry - which is essentially optimizing for the minimum conditions that can still provide meat that can be sold legally. I'm not a vegan by the way, but I can appreciate the moral case vegans make.

For the same reason that we now consider murder, assault and other actions that harm people morally wrong. These have also been a part of life ever since humans or other hominids roamed the earth, we just determined that they are morally wrong later on.

Oh? Are you going to do a citizen's arrest on a wolf for traumatically murdering a deer, thereby violating its right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment?

It's a best practice to document things about the code base, so that other devs (even senior devs) don't start to do things differently. This will probably not change

What I think is short lived is this insistence in separating LLM instructions from general documentation for both humans and AI. LLMs can read human docs, and concerns about context window size will probably disappear

But maybe future docs will be LLM-first, but people won't read them directly. They will ask a LLM questions about it


Too much defensive technology makes an attacker bolder and surer there will be no retaliation, though

why won't they?

Bandwidth costs money, less bandwidth = less money spent. I have noticed that if you use a vpn you will get 1080p at best, 720p more often than not.

For me this is a painting vs photography thing

Painting used to be the main way to make portraits, and photography massively democratized this activity. Now everyone can have as many portraits as they want

Photography became something so much larger

Painting didn't disappear though


Compared to painting, software allows you to solve the problem once, then distribute the solution to the problem basically for free.

Market frictions cause the problem to be solved multiple times.

LLMs learn the solution patterns and apply it devaluing coming up with solutions in the first place.


Well, slightly different take: it's like telling an artist the world doesn't need another song about love, these already exist and can be re-heard as needed. Sharper formulated: a CRM or TODO-list is a solved problem in theory, right? tons of solutions even free ones to use out there. still look at what people are doing and selling - CRMs and TODO-list variations. because, in fact, its not solved, and always has certain tradeoffs that doesn't fit some people.

Zed, the editor, is not 18+. It's just the AI offering

More than half is an exaggeration. Trump is not a popular president. With free and fair elections, a blue wave is more or less guaranteed

Creating a private militia, silencing dissent, declaring wars without congress vote… I don’t see how this is being allowed to happen without public approval, or at least, public apathy.

All the more reason for Trump to prevent any form of free and fair elections then.

This post is about SM64 "parallel universes"!

Never meet your heroes

This looks like Krita brushes

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