shawnz

> being braindead and in severe cases we do indeed say that they are not conscious or able to suffer

Sure, there are such cases. But in the general case, it seems to be that memory and ability to change specifically are not necessary and are not sufficient for consciousness, so we shouldn't judge machines on that basis

It's not a "trap", it's the real argument which makes me hesitant to dismiss consciousness of machines. Yes, it seems silly to dismiss a sick patient as having a lesser consciousness, which is exactly the point

So if a human loses their memory and their neutral plasticity (with age for example), then they are no longer capable of experiencing suffering?

I have this worded in my CLAUDE.md as "avoid counterfactuals". It still does it anyway, of course, but that language combined with a few rounds of review back-and-forth seems to work for me

I understand that ostensibly it is a statement of who is making the claim. But doesn't the media organization have an expectation to research and validate such claims? And so if they didn't, then that must mean that they weren't able to?

Is it really a different meaning? Isn't the implication that they tried, and failed, to independently verify the claim?

Yeah, I am just providing one contrived example. The cost benefit analysis won't always be so obvious as that in reality. My point was that if you're not using a blend of both comments and code semantics to explain your code, then you're leaving explanatory power on the table. It's unlikely that you're explaining the code in the most efficient manner if you're not using all the explanatory power you have available.

If you are only encoding intent through "self-documenting code", and not with comments, then you are purposefully not using all the tools at your disposal to encode meaning as efficiently as possible.

Imagine a complicated section of application logic. You could break it up into 5 separate functions that document their intent semantically, thus blowing up the LOC by 5x, or you could write a short comment explaining the intent in natural language. What's more effective? I'd argue it's always going to be using all the tools at your disposal when and where it makes sense to use them, whether that is comments or self-documenting code.

Designing a new on-disk format seems like a pretty far reaching architectural decision... I don't think that's an appropriate target for a drive-by fix from a new contributor

What's the incentive for third parties to contribute, knowing just one guy stands to benefit if the project gets monetized in such a manner?

If you printed teeth, you'd have to make sure the teeth in the top loop are precisely aligned in relation to the teeth in the bottom loop based on the length of the belt, right? That seems like it could be limiting

I confess I have instructions in my CLAUDE.md to avoid such cliches. But I think it's important to consider that we don't really know what subtext an LLM is associating with a given idiom/analogy/etc. It could be much different than the subtext a human would associate with that choice of words, conveying additional details which are only meaningful to the LLM itself. So impeding its ability to talk in the manner it prefers could subtly hinder its performance.