twak

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Feb 20

twak.org

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Comment · 5 months ago

I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.

I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).

Comment · 9 months ago

you can build it and simply use it in your own office? There is no need to shout about it if the cost of writing software goes to zero (but the value remains non-zero!).

Comment · 1 year ago

i agree; but perhaps also it is the difference between managers and SWE? The former (SWE team leaders included) can see that engineers aren't perfect. The latter are often highly focused on determinism (this works/doesn't) and struggle with conflicting goals.

Through a career SWEs start rigid and overly focused on the immediate problem and become flexible/error-tolerant[1] as they become system (mechanical or meat) managers. this maps to an observation that managers like AI solutions - because they compare favourably to the new hire - and because they have the context to make this observation.

[1] https://grugbrain.dev/#:~:text=grug%20note%20humourous%20gra...

Comment · 1 year ago

i used to do lots of graphics, and love these bugs. They give an enjoyable insight to the development process and algorithms as the progress through a project!

i have my own archive of my own bugs/"artworks" - https://twak.org/glitches-in-the-worlds-geometry-engine/

Comment · 1 year ago

The Turing had an interesting approach to naming, not only stealing the Glasgow group's name, but also choosing the initials 'ATI' (in 2015...).

It's recently struggling for relevance.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bfea441-e16c-499a-a887-69f735c29... (https://archive.ph/ujfhb)

I hope they turn it around because the UK need for AI academic coordination/leadership is so high.

Comment · 3 years ago

My old supervisor wrote a book on computational socialism back in 93. I rather like some of the ideas (can a participatory centrally planned economy work now that we have internet/cybernetics?), but suspect it wouldn't work in practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism

Comment · 4 years ago

fantastic book. Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection.

I haven't found a definition of consciousness which is quantifiable or stands up to serious rigour. If it can't be measured and isn't necessary for intelligence, perhaps there is no magic cut-off between the likes of Dall-E and human intelligence. Perhaps the Chinese-room is as conscious as a human (and a brick)?

Comment · 4 years ago

Other causes include the pressure to publish quickly in ML (while your approach is en vogue), with small teams, before your funding runs out, while hitting conference deadlines.

In these situations, I have suggested releasing anonymous implementations after the paper is accepted just to get the code out there. I am not certain this is the right thing to do!

Comment · 4 years ago

Academics are judged by the publications not their implementations, so the system favours over-sold manuscripts and it-ran-once implementations. Until funding is conditional-on (and provided for) robust well maintained code it will remain challenging to get reproducibility.

Frequently the PIs (bosses) will not even glance at the repositories written by junior members, probably can't read code anyway, and certainly won't allocate time for their maintenance. Even worse, most academics who do publish code have never been exposed to real world software engineers, their techniques, or tools.

Comment · 6 years ago

> It’s not to say the developers and scientists at Adobe are lesser

adobe research scientists are crazy-strong in the area of deep/neural graphics[1]. Perhaps we should disentangle adobe research from photoshop?