aklein

interesting. if you probe it for its assumptions you get more clarity. I think this is much like those tricky “who is buried in grants tomb” phrasings that are not good faith interactions

Comment · 9 months ago

This article highlights how experts disagree on the meaning of (non-human) intelligence, but it dismisses the core problem a bit too quickly imo -

“LLMs only predict what a human would say, rather than predicting the actual consequences of an action or engaging with the real world. This is the core deficiency: intelligence requires not just mimicking patterns, but acting, observing real outcomes, and adjusting behavior based on those outcomes — a cycle Sutton sees as central to reinforcement learning.” [1]

An LLM itself is a form of crystallized intelligence, but it does not learn and adapt without a human driver, and that to me is a key component of intelligent behavior.

[1] https://medium.com/@sulbha.jindal/richard-suttons-challenge-...

Comment · 1 year ago

Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.

Comment · 1 year ago

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is civilian casualties are not unlawful (according to international law) when the target is legitimate (on the theory that it is otherwise impossible to legally fight a war with an enemy that hides behind its citizens). To be clear this is not to say war crimes are not also happening.

Comment · 1 year ago

I noticed you interface with the native code via ctypes. I think cffi is generally preferred (eg, https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/overview.html#api-mode...). Although you'd have more flexibility if you build your own python extension module (eg using pybind), which will free you from a simple/strict ABI. Curious if this strict separation of C & Python was a deliberate design choice.

Comment · 1 year ago

Nowadays, with more and more economic output coming from knowledge work (IP), this depreciation and amortization approach feels hopelessly out of date. I don't know what a good replacement is, but I know software and IP more generally shouldn't be treated at all like a material good.

Comment · 1 year ago

What is MCP?