Get a room 😂

Yeah, familiar with that experience 😅 Could be I end up disliking Sailfish for that exact reason, but if there’s a handful of good native apps that might mitigate quite a lot. Could also be I end up using it as a second phone, one with fewer distractions on it…

Presumably, it’s just that I can’t stand the Android UX personally, which is the main reason I’m on iOS. But if a good, open alternative comes along I’m willing to try…

True, but aren’t there decent Android emulation layers for Linux available nowadays? Not sure how well-integrated into SailfishOS that is, but giving it a shot…

I can respect that. Appreciate your thoughtful responses!

That’s fair too. I mean, feelings are real, but they are part of a subjective reality that’s not measurable from an objective perspective. But that alone is sufficient to say that science cannot answer all questions, because scientific measurements are inherently limited to objective reality.

Of course there are those that say there must be a single objective reality from which all subjective experiences can be explained, but that’s a huge assumption.

Personally, I think it’s also a dimensional thing. Reality extends beyond the dimensions of time and space, this much has already been scientifically proven. Unless you somehow believe there is a finite limit on the number of dimensions, there will always be dimensions beyond our grasp that we cannot measure or understand (yet).

And bringing it back to the discussion of LLMs, they are inherently limited to a 4-dimensional reality. If those dimensions are sufficient to create consciousness, my position would be that it’s a very limited form of consciousness.

Yeah, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s a fair point, and we need to be very careful not to loose sight of reality indeed.

The idea of the Universal God is very tolerant towards “fantasy” so far as it exists in the minds of people, yet it also prescribes to align such belief with a scientific understanding. So the thing I’m trying to say is: believe what you want to believe, and so long as it’s a rational and tolerant belief, it’s fine. But it does explicitly recognise there are limits to what science can do for us, so it provides the idea of Universal God as kind of a North Star for those in search, but then it doesn’t really prescribe what this Universal God must look like. I don’t see it as a religious god, but more a path towards a belief in something beyond ourselves.

In the book I also take effort to describe how this relates to Buddhism, Taoism, and Abrahamic religions, and attempt to show how they are all efforts to describe similar concepts, and whether we call this Nature, Tao, or God, doesn’t really matter in the end. So long as we don’t fall into nihilism and believe in something, I believe we can find common ground as a people.

This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don’t.

It does, yes. Fwiw, I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to humans though, animals and nature may play a role too.

It’s unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.

Sure, but I have an entire philosophy set up to answer the other questions further down the road too 😂 That may still sound unsatisfying, but feel free to follow along: https://philosophyofbalance.com/

It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it.

I believe that to be true, yes.

That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?

In my view, machines and AI can never create consciousness, although it’s not ruled out they can become vessels for it. But the consciousness comes from outside the perspective of the machines.

:)

https://philosophyofbalance.com/blog/free-will-you-better-believe-it/

I think the reason we can’t define consciousness beyond intuitive or vague descriptions is because it exists outside the realm of physics and science altogether. This in itself makes some people very uncomfortable, because they don’t like thinking about or believing in things they cannot measure or control, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

But yeah, given that an LLM is very much measurable and exists within the physical realm, it’s relatively easy to argue that such technology cannot achieve conscious capability.

Don’t be so gloomy! You’re an individual number too! 😜

5% at the end of the decade is quite a pessimistic take 😉

Looking at the graph 1% was crossed mid/late 2021, while 2% was crossed mid 2024, so almost 3 years later. Now 3% is crossed a little more than a year later. Next year we would be likely to have crossed 4% and 5% should be no later than 2027, even if it doesn’t speed up much further.

I’m not sure I agree with the “no one claimed” part, because I think the proof is specifically targeting the claim that it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation due to the “ease of scaling” if simulated realities are a thing. Which I think is one of the core premises of simulation theory.

In any case, I don’t think the reasoning only applied to “full scale” simulations. After all, let’s follow the thought experiment indeed and presume that quantum mechanics is indeed the result of some kind of “lazy evaluation” optimisation within a simulation. Unless you want to argue solipsism in addition to simulation theory, the simulation is still generating perceptions for every single conscious actor within the simulation, and the simulation therefore still needs to implement some kind of “theory of everything” to ensure all perceptions across actors are being generated consistently.

And ultimately, we still end up with the requirement that there is some kind of “higher order” universe whose existence is fundamentally unknowable and beyond our understanding. Presuming that such a universe exists and manages our universe seems to me to be a masked belief in creationism and therefore God, while trying very hard to avoid such words.

The irony is that the thought experiment started with “pesky weird behaviours” that we can’t explain. Making the assumption that our “parent universe” is somehow easier to explain is really just wishful thinking that’s as rational as wishing a God to be responsible for it all.

I’ll be straight here: I’m a deist, I do think that given sufficient thought on these matters, we must ultimately admit there is a deity, a higher power that we cannot understand. We may as well call it God, because even though it’s not a religious idea of God, it is fundamentally beyond our capacity to understand. I just think simulation theory is a bit of a roundabout way to get there as there are easier ways to reach the same conclusion :)

It’s possible yes, but the nice thing is that we know we are not merely talking about “advanced people with vastly superior technology” here. The proof implies that technology within our own universe would never be able to simulate our own universe, no matter how advanced or superior.

So if our universe is a “simulation” at least it wouldn’t be an algorithmic one that fits our understanding. Indeed we still cannot rule out that our universe exists within another, but such a universe would need a higher order reality with truths that are fundamentally beyond our understanding. Sure, you could call it a “simulation” still, but if it doesn’t fit our understanding of a simulation it might as well be called “God” or “spirituality”, because the truth is, we wouldn’t understand a thing of it, and we might as well acknowledge that.

I dunno, I have a Framework laptop and had a keyboard issue with it. It still worked, but one of the keys didn’t register well. So they sent me a new keyboard and I sent them back the old one after I’d swapped it. Not a single day was I without my laptop, which sounds quite unlikely compared to other laptop brands and the support you get (or not) with those. No buyer’s remorse here.

Captchas are getting out of hand.

Don’t tell that to the kids in Finland 😉

https://santaclausvillage.info/activities/santa-claus-main-post-office/

I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. While I don’t share your conviction, I do admit it’s certainly a possibility.

The advantage of doing things that way is that code becomes much more portable. We may finally reach the goal of “write once, run anywhere”, because the AI may write all the platform specific code.

It does make a big assumption that the AI output is reliable enough though. At times people will want to tweak the output, so how are they gonna go about that? Maybe if the language is based on Markdown, you can inject snippets of code where necessary. But if you have to do that too often, such a language will lose its appeal.

There’s a lot of unknowns, but I see why it’s a tempting idea.

You know, as a full-time Linux user, I think I rather have game developers continue to create Windows executables.

Unlike most software, games have a tendency to be released, then supported for one or two years, and then abandoned. But meanwhile, operating systems and libraries move on.

If you have a native Linux build of a game from 10 years ago, good luck trying to run it on your modern system. With Windows builds, using Wine or Proton, you actually have better chances running games from 10 or even 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, thanks to Valve’s efforts, Windows builds have incentive to target Vulkan, they’re getting tested on Linux. That’s what we should focus on IMO, because those things make games better supported on Linux. Which platform the binary is compiled for is an implementation detail… and Win32 is actually the more stable target.

tsc is (very) slow and there are also no convenient ways to interact with it from Rust.

So it saves a lot development and CI time to roll our own. The downside is that our inference still isn’t as good as tsc of course, but we’re hopeful the community can help us get very close at least.