986aignan
Joined 3 years ago
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Member since
Dec 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 days ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Now I'm curious if it's possible to make a data track that has at least some resemblance to actual music. That could be an interesting challenge if it can't obviously be ruled out.
Comment · 2 months ago
It's been unevenly rolled out, but is mostly Google using attestation to tighten their grip.
Comment · 2 months ago
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.
It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
Comment · 3 months ago
> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
Comment · 3 months ago
I ran into the same problem with Firefox, except viewing it directly works.
It turns out the server is using referer checking and I've got referer disabled. Compare the following curl invocations:
curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp' \
-H 'Referer: https://fabiensanglard.net/'
curl 'https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/00_11_15_Apple_Powerbook_100.webp'
Comment · 3 months ago
There's an issue on the FluxEngine git repo that may be related to this: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75
At the end of the thread, David Given reports that some PC floppy drives drop pulses when trying to read 800k Mac disks: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75#issuecomm...
So the Cambridge page might be saying "use an Applesauce controller" as a sort of shorthand for "use a drive from an actual Apple computer".
Comment · 5 months ago
It's difficult to say anything about experiential/first-person consciousness as we don't know what it is. Some say it doesn't exist and everybody is a p-zombie. That aside...
As you mention, there's a problem where if you want to know yourself fully - including observability of your mind - you need to be aware of the thing that is aware, and aware of the thing that is aware of the thing that is aware, etc, down to infinite regress.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible. It would suggest that such a being works by moving along a set of fixed point. Suppose x is the state of the physical mind (whether that's a brain, a set of chips, or something else). Suppose f(x) returns the updated state after this mind takes into account what it knows (i.e. f(first-order aware) = first- and second-order aware). Then if the mind-state always changes so that x is a fixed point of f, then the mind already knows all there is to know about itself.
So the question, on the mind side, is whether there exists a sufficiently generally intelligent type of mind for which moving along fixed points is computationally easy. I don't know. It could be possible, it could be impossible. Finding fixed points is hard in general, though.
There's also the problem of sensors, which may seem simpler but hides a similar difficulty. What happens if whatever thing that measures blood sugar fails? Or if the immune system goes auto-immune due to an immune cell defect that makes it report benign cells as foreign? Then you need an integrity sensor for the sensors - then you need an integrity sensor for the integrity sensor... At least this fixed-point problem for sensors should be easier than the one for general minds.
The consciousness:complexity ratio would probably express itself in that a mind of a certain complexity with the fixed-point-of-f constraint would be less intelligent on average than a mind of the same complexity without such a constraint.
Comment · 5 months ago
There's a hard problem in either case, I think.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
Comment · 5 months ago
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
Comment · 5 months ago
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
Comment · 5 months ago
> They get blocked by Recaptcha, I think.
I think SV was asking what onion services, which can't really use recaptcha, do to prevent the DDoS storm.
And I would imagine the answer is obscurity, since the dark web isn't nearly as well-mapped as the public web. That and some Anubis or other PoW would probably go far.
RLHF has a way of squashing variance. If the different models are trained on each other or on the same human feedback, then the training would reduce the variety of answers while the similarity of feedback would lead the common answer to be similar.
The different models may prefer the same controversial takes for the same reason that they tend to prefer the same jokes and names. Maybe the authors of the article would have had better luck if they'd used verbalized sampling prompts or something like it.[1]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01171