bjt2n3904

My (near decade long) comment history speaks for itself. I do not primarily use HN for a culture war, but I do engage it. Despite how I try to avoid the culture war, it beat a path to my door, and threatens my livelihood. Something something, "and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak".

I maintain that I'm being banned -- not for engaging in the already present ideological battle on HN, but merely for engaging on the wrong side of it.

The fact that Daghlian and Slotin died in the same hospital bed has always been a sobering thought. "Well, that does it" are harrowing words.

There are famous engineering incidents that are good to study -- the Challenger disaster, the Minnesota Bridge collapse, the Therac 25... But compared with the LANL Criticality incident, there's something different. The former are all technical failure analysis.

This incident is almost existential in it's implications, like Shelly's Frankenstein. A discussion on the nature of humanity.

The asides with the dog are great. I've seen a few blogs use this technique -- I'm not big on Greek, but I think Plato used this technique too.

It instills the idea that you should be asking a question at this point. Some information has been provided that should generate more questions in your head, if you're keeping pace.

Psychiatry, having failed to measurably solve any "mental health" problem is so desperate to find a solution that it's sampling the recreational drug cabinet. This isn't science. This isn't medicine. This is rolling back the clock to witch doctors and medicine men.

Can't be depressed if your mind has been chemically lobotomized.

What you say here will be deeply unpopular.

I have found that people treat depression and anxiety like a medical condition -- diabetes, or high cholesterol.

Yet I can measure those numbers, compare them with other people similar to me, determine what ranges are outside the norm, and observe changes as I try different strategies to manage them.

Depression, like physical pain, can neither be measured nor compared. And if this analogy holds, then there are those who would rather dull their pain with medication and claim victimhood, rather than find the source of it.

Who cares whether it's "spying" or "surveillance"?

Here's the real issue, which this semantics argument is derailing. Several times, a shooting spree has occurred, and all the government agencies say, "Oh, yeah... We knew about them! Anyways, the mass shooter's community is very much under attack..."

Pretty hard to swallow when the federal agencies are spending time and resources holding a magnifying glass over political opponents (with a long, LONG track record of nonviolence).

People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate.

How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?

I mean, it's all public information, right?

How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?

I do believe this is the plot of Portal. Wheatley was created to stop Glados from going on a murderous rampage.

Certainly with generative AI, we've demonstrated that an evolutionary model can produce (as an example) a method for a bipedal robot to learn to balance and walk like a human.

But all this to me is a cheat. We've already built the robot, and the control systems, and feedback mechanisms, and placed a goal on the end result for it to work towards.

I think the external constraints we put on the system mean that the creation will never surpass the creator. Oh, the mechanical muscles will be stronger and faster to the point we can get robot ballet. But it will still be bounded by the limits of our imagination and capabilities.

When it comes to LLMs, I'm sure it will create fascinating stories that are loved more than Tolkien. But the stories will still be limited to the bounds of our own thought.

If you ever feel like discussing religion, my Twitter DMs are open!

You have correctly identified the underlying assumption of this discussion.

From someone who has the opposite view, that human consciousness did not arise from an evolutionary process, but was created by God -- I believe we will never fully create an artificial consciousness.

I think a further assumption is that the human mind is a deterministic machine. If we could freeze whatever entropy is involved with human behavior, just like the seed of a Minecraft world, we could get the same result, and perhaps even control human behavior.

I don't think consciousness is deterministic like that. I have some things I can point to for justification, but much more largely, there are some strange implications that arise from "we're all dancing to our DNA".

Anyways.