mannykannot

At the rate things are changing, retroactivity is moot.

What you see as evidence of a weak case I see as evidence of the judges being responsibly cautious, and affording the photographer every reasonable opportunity to make their case. I would need to see additional evidence before I took a statement beginning "at this time..." as stronger evidence than something subsequently stated by the same party.

As it happens, the final decision is not that the disqualified photographer was intentionally cheating, but that the video was ineligible for the competition.

Alloying copper with tin to make bronze produces a material which is stronger and more durable than either component, and this works because the tin disturbs the copper's crystal lattice, which restricts the mobility of dislocations, which in turn reduces the plasticity of the alloy.

I do not know if cellulose fibers have a similar effect in ice, but in general, if you can trade the feature that is causing a problem for one that will not, you are improving things.

If the temperature dependency is implemented via a deterministic pseudo-random algorithm, then they are deterministic. If, on the other hand, the output is at least partially causally dependent on a source of environmental randomness, then, even though everything 'inside the box' is deterministic, the process as a whole may or may not be, depending on whether the source of environmental randomness is, and that is ultimately a question about fundamental reality.

The upper layers of detectors are buried over a kilometer below the surface in order to shield the array from most cosmic rays.

In practice, this would still leave the RPi Foundation with the warranty and support burden generated by the "reseller's" activity.

A point of view best appreciated from a semi-reclining position.

Thank you for this interesting information.

I also wondered why trains were supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not. My spur-of-the-moment, totally uninformed guess was that, in the case of shipwrecks, the sea (or, more generally, the marine environment) was regarded as the killer. The scenarios that Richard Posner is writing about seem somewhat different, however, at least in that after a shipwreck more serious than a calm-water grounding, there's often nothing much to seize.

You are not wrong, but I think atleastoptimal's suggestion was that descriptions like "next-token predictor" are often used to imply that there's not much to see here, perhaps with an implied "obviously" in there. "Stochastic parrot" seems to be a case in point: no-one expects intelligent, informed conversation or working software from a parrot - not even the eternally-resting Alex.

Yes, but I think the same construction could also be used to characterize the first system; it determines the next move based on a prediction of its reward signal, where its reward signal is a measure of how likely it is that a grand master would make that move.

Like stanleykm, I found this analogy somewhat puzzling. On reflection, I think the author's point is this: the statistics of actual usage do not seem sufficient to produce a fluent LLM; it also takes reinforcement learning.

I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.

Just to be clear, my objection to the "simulated rain won't get you wet" argument is not predicated on any assumptions about brains, minds, or the relationship between the two, and in my presentation of that objection in the chronologically first of my posts yesterday, I did not mention either and did not make any assumptions about their relationship.

In reply to your statement that you don't see a reason why a brain absent a mind could not be simulated, let's consider whether we could have a simulation of an Enigma machine that does not encrypt and decrypt messages.

It is possible in a trivial sense, of course: you could have a sort of cargo-cult simulation where the plug-board can be connected in various ways, the rotors turn when a key is pressed and one of the lights come on, but it lacks the causal relationships to produce output it could decrypt. This, however, is just an incomplete simulation, and the one that matters is this: could you completely digitally simulate the physics of an Enigma machine in a way that is incapable of being used to perform encrypted communication? If not, then there is something very wrong with what seems to be well-established physics.

Now let's suppose that we could do a complete-physics simulation of a person's brain. It will be missing many of the features of a brain (it will not consume material nutrients and produce waste products, for example), but how would you go about testing for whether it has a mind? How would an absence of a mind manifest itself? If you think the answer lies in the simulation not being part of a body, then let's suppose we simulate the person's whole body.

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With regard to your concluding question, "Are you claiming that the specific bit formations here indicate the presence of a mind?", the short answer is no. I feel that with this question you are reverting to an earlier issue that we have already gone over: a digital simulation of anything is not just a pattern of bits, it is a physical process (i.e. a sequence of events.)

This is a follow-up to my previous reply, which may appear below this one. In that one, I forgot to say something about this: ‘…a bit pattern in computer memory [only] means “pain” because of how a program and its users interpret or employ it.’

This is somewhat begging the question, in that it tacitly presupposes that the system itself is incapable of interpreting it, but if the formation of this bit-pattern has certain consequences, such as the system saying it is in pain, redirecting its attention to finding any means to eliminate it while avoiding anything tending to exacerbate it, and forming memories which will have the consequence that the system will, from now on, try to avoid circumstances likely to cause its recurrence, then on what basis would you reject its own claims of being in pain?