AIkonoklazt

It's been a complaint of mine that some people (or a lot of 'em, I don't know) just have no idea what algorithms is and how they work, and that article is a perfect example. Points I've previously made regarding algorithms: Bishop pointed at one of his papers in his LinkedIn, I haven't had a chance to read it yet https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225794615_Why_Computers_Can't_Feel_Pain

Te me the problem is "simple," in that it's simply intractable. One group of people (Hamas) just wants the other (people of Israel) gone. No compromise, no peace, no deal, nada.

What is the solution to Hamas wanting Israel to disappear along with all of its people I'm all ears

Thanks for reminding me to check the depressing polls https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/

At least mathematical infinity is abstract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actual_infinity Okay, wait. It's abstract, period. https://bigthink.com/articles/infinity-is-not-real/

Based on that analogy you made, evidently you didn't. Chomsky referred to looking at the wrong thing as barking up the wrong tree. To me, that wrong tree is really the entire reverse-engineering paradigm. The mind isn't a tool to be reverse engineered, because it isn't a designed artifact in the first place. To make progress, performance in any form should be persued, and not "reverse engineering" perceived anthropomorphisms. I've said to other people that the "optimizations" of the evolved mind isn't of the same kind possessed by engineered tools. In fact, these mental optimizations are even looked at as deficiencies, so are those going to be all "reverse engineered"? See this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases As for personalities, I like following Marcus's blog for the drama between him and the other AI experts, it's actually pretty hilarious.

Land is indeed the key, but in a whole different way than described. Let's look at things from POV of Hamas. the "occupation" covers a whole lot more than just stuff that other people decided upon in 1988. It's the entire map of Mandatory Palestine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine See the shape of it? What do we notice here? The "destruction of Israel" is "the end of this state that we didn't sponsor, that sprouted up right under our noses, inside of our land." Of course they wouldn't want a "two state solution." That's just making the occupation (their sense, not the Gaza+enclave sense that all the post 1988 people tried to set up) permanent. So when some Arab countries announced that will do a new upcoming round of peace deals (to make this "Israel" permanent to those countries too), they wanted to STOP THAT and that's what October 7th was about. That, is the actual occupation and liberation- Get rid of this thing called "Israel."

This was the debate that I saw the video recording of: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-debate-3-everything-you-need-to-know-about-artificial-general-intelligence/ Gary Marcus moderated it (he's on the same level as LeCun but a much more likeable guy), Chomsky was one of the participants. Marcus did a vid for Wired recently, geared towards the layman: https://www.wired.com/video/watch/tech-support-ai-expert-answers-ai-questions-from-twitter Awesome! I'm again up to 30 red, now I have my badge of honor back!

There has been one correction to my article published on Towards Data Science as a result of my activity on this board (I tried getting Mindmatters to make the change to their republication but they didn't): Original sentence: Corrected sentence: As I have previously stated, that doesn't change the point because models never reflect the actual. This has been a common observation, as seen through various related aphorisms: Correlation does not imply causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation All models are wrong, some are useful https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/57407/what-is-the-meaning-of-all-models-are-wrong-but-some-are-useful The map is not the territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski Also, as I have previously stated in the thread, at least 50% of my article came from discussions on public forums, namely the entire section "Responses to counterarguments" This contrasts to utterly useless quips from certain users like iNow and StringJunky above. They are evidently only interested in the "meta." (e.g. "You are wasting your time," "He has chip on his shoulder," "He is overconfident," and other junk remarks) Please remind them to focus on the points, not on some pseudopsychoanalytic prods on perceived modus operandi. Sure, people on Reddit did that quite a bit, but at least even they coughed up useful items to add (re: exhaustive modeling, answering to accusations of intuition pumping from Dennett fanboys, etc), in this sense, iNow/StringJunky are being less than useless, worse than Reddit. Heck, even the idiot moderator on Ars(e) Technica gave me the lone "gift" of special pleading accusation before he banned me without allowing me to even reply once (because he thought that was the last word or something) Did I mention that he even deleted my post (yes, the article I wrote) after banning me? p.s. if they even bothered reading the thread, they'd already SEEN what exactly the "agenda" is. I've already mentioned the 2021 UN agency ban on AI legal personhood multiple times Bad analogy when it comes to machine consciousness since anyone who has digested the points of the argument would see that intentionality has nothing to do with any kind of machine performance. Well, iNow sure didn't read it- Doubt anyone else besides us would read it. Believe me, loads of people on my LinkedIn are also saying that the LLM approach to AI is a dead end. Chomsky mentioned GOFAI and guess what? There are talks of going back to it. Not entirely, but incorporation. That's one way to get any semblance of grounding. I saw a recording of a debate/discussion that occurred at the start of this year, and Chomsky said similar things as far as I could remember. Let me see if I can go find a link to it. It's chock full of today's authorities on AI.

Let's talk quantum computing, since that's been in the news recently https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-12-04-IBM-Debuts-Next-Generation-Quantum-Processor-IBM-Quantum-System-Two,-Extends-Roadmap-to-Advance-Era-of-Quantum-Utility We'll start by being LUDICROUSLY generous and optimistic with the ability for quantum computers to straight up bypass computability issues, meaning if I even see one instance of quantum computers being able to solve something classical computers can't, regardless of how long it takes any computer to solve anything, then I'll just assume that it applies to ALL POSSIBLE CASES. Here's one case so okay! https://www.quantamagazine.org/finally-a-problem-that-only-quantum-computers-will-ever-be-able-to-solve-20180621/ Case closed, right? Quantum computer computes consciousness, consciousness computable according to this (ludicrous) interpretation, end of story. ........Not so fast. Quantum computers don't make algorithms go away. They're just doing different operations instead of NOT doing them. You'd still need a computational model. This sends everything back to functionalism, and how it falls flat on its face. This means even if you change Asimov's random-buzzword-inspired "Positronic brain" (yes, I did "read Asimov," more than 30 years ago.......) to a more realistic "Quantum mechanical brain," it isn't going to make a dent in anything.

It's kill or be killed- Kill Hamas, or Hamas comes back to kill more. I was responding to the use of the term "justification" in the thread. I don't think it's a matter that's subject to justification (i.e. not even a question of it being justified or not), because it's not a matter of fairness; It's not an administration of justice that's going on here. By the same token, the term "collective punishment" wouldn't apply either, so the accusation of the administration of "collective punishment" upon the Palestinian population leveled against IDF and the Israeli government are moot. It isn't a matter of justice, or punishment.

I'm not going to focus on what others said, but I am going to talk about the term "justification." Namely, as far as the Israeli authorities are concerned (and no doubt a good portion of the Israeli residents as well) justification isn't in the picture in the face of survival. I don't think the mission is to punish or administer justice; It is to eliminate Hamas.

I still can't get over the fact that Congress basically took military aid money away from Ukraine and directed at the IDF instead. Could someone explain to me how it somehow isn't simple political pettiness driving such a move? As in how it's practical. IDF needs that aid more than Ukraine? Ukraine doing better on the battlefield than IDF? The approaching winter is more urgent for IDF than Ukraine??

Saw this paper referenced in a CS professor's LinkedIn post: Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.15004.pdf It is listed as one of the 13 Biggest AI Stories of 2023 reported by Stanford HAI https://hai.stanford.edu/news/13-biggest-ai-stories-2023 NeurIPS selected that paper as one of the two Best Papers https://blog.neurips.cc/2023/12/11/announcing-the-neurips-2023-paper-awards/ The point made is pretty straightforward: it is the metrics used in experiments that make LLM behaviors that aren't really emergent seem emergent: Then again, as I've said before, emergence as forward-looking statements are vacuous and content free; You can't make any predictions with those "something will happen and we have no idea how" statements: https://ykulbashian.medium.com/emergence-isnt-an-explanation-it-s-a-prayer-ef239d3687bf

Been saying this same in various banter with friends and colleagues through the decades: "Extremists get all the airtime." The loudest and the most attention-grubbing are almost uniformly the worst examples that the entire collective baskets could serve up. See it all the time on the news- After all, which is going to sell more, an outrageous headline or some boring one about some people with modicum of common decency and sense? How many examples of "quiet activism" gets into the public eye? Think someone said somethin' about that somewhere about the Pharisees, which then sorta kinda eventually got him mobbed https://famous-trials.com/jesustrial/1042-home (not the biggest offense but surely didn't help)

...that's still not "Fourth Reich," which is anti-semitic. All it takes is a lack of empathy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171017022708/http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/evil/evilP12.html

You mean he's anti-semitic? https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/13/its-important-take-those-calling-fourth-reich-seriously/

I'm not exactly "pro-X" or "support X" but I kinda wonder what the heck else the world is supposed to do about all the people who are single-mindedly "working" towards rolling back the world to the age of Caliphates and eliminating anything and everything that could stand in the way? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate

Hi, new hard determinism convert again. I'm in a bit of a pickle. I couldn't really say "I did [this and that]" anymore, since it's not really me, right? It's everything that went in and through my body. How can I keep saying "I did [anything]" at all without being a complete bozo? Help me out here.

One thing is abundantly clear to me. Neither side is fighting "for Palestinians." Godwin's law.

Nothing beats good ole fashioned enforcement. When there weren't enough cops in SF, large groups of hoodlums just smash and grab all over the city. They still do, just a whole lot less. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-retail-theft-store-18523023.php

As a brand-spanking new convert to hard determinism (as of this thread), I feel awesome. I'm not responsible for a darned thing. I couldn't be. I have no qualms in joining the meat robot army because well, I have no choice.

Not sure if any group of people would "support" those who directly lords over them through a sort of "terror governance..." https://theconversation.com/gaza-war-how-representative-is-hamas-of-ordinary-palestinians-218080

Observing without the observer effect. Certain interpretations of the observer effects would be shown correct, while others debunked. (probably already done both through other means, but could add this on top. I'm not well-informed on this subject.) I don't know. Let's take something in my field. If you use an oscilloscope to measure a signal waveform, the scope necessarily becomes part of the circuit it's measuring. I don't know the quantum physical interaction is between the measured and the measuring apparatus, but it may have something to do with how the act of measurement is fusing observer+observed into one system.