It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?

There is a constant change in politicians and parties and views among people (hello 2022!) about policy topics inside the EU all the time. Do you seriously think politics in the EU stays the same?

It absolutely has. It's always more regulation, more bureaucracy and more red tapes. They are just creating more barriers to keep themselves employed and to expand the reach of their authority.

Actually right now the reverse is happening. GDPR will become easier there is simplification coming, there will be less national goldplating

They have been discussing that for years, but still nothing happened. At the rate of the bureaucracy it would take few more years to even draft the laws to ease GDPR

Maybe. I would contend that wealth accumulation over the long term is a function of the strength of local institutions e.g educational, judiciary etc. This is effectively the thesis of ‘Why nations fail’. Europes relative decline will only continue if the institutions of the US (and others) continue to be robust and healthy. I am not sure if this can be relied on into the future.

Right, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Aren’t Unicode characters generally treated as 2 tokens to avoid a huge vocabulary?

Nobody human considers a corporation to be a person. It is merely a legal expedient.

I used to think that until I did a little digging into it. Specifically, corporations are considered legal persons because they are separate legal entities, thereby creating a wall between your personal affairs and your business. It protects your personal assets from any liabilities, debts, or lawsuits.

Also, since it's a separate entity, its lifetime is not tied to the owner. So if the owner dies, their shares are inherited by somebody else, and the company keeps operating.

It helps in raising money for business operations. A corporation raises capital by issuing and selling shares of stock. However, if a physical person did that, I think it would be called indentured servitude.

I'm confused about why you believe this contrasts with what the above poster said. You've described a bunch of practical reasons why this is legally expedient and also at least one that seems to contrast with your own concept of personhood

Yes, it does conflict with my own concept of personhood. I forgot to add that to my comment.

I was trying to show that it is not "merely a legal expedient", that corporate personhood had a specific purpose, and that it differed from a real person. I think that the confusion about legal personhood in corporations comes from how lawyers explain its existence. A couple of lawyers I've had explained it as, it's just like a person in the law, except where it's different.

The problem is that we haven't created a clear enough distinction between a natural person and a legal person. In many cases, corporations have rights but not the responsibility. For example, they have speech rights, but they don't go to jail when the corporation commits a crime. The judicial inequalities between ordinary people and rich people are even greater between natural persons and corporations.

Yea, I mean, I think the reason people balk at corporate personhood are to do with both the iniquities committed by corporate actors and the fact that personhood is a really confusing model for all this

A model that treats what effectively amounts to a body of assets united by a charter as equivalent to a person - except when it isn't - is inherently confusing because these are not at all similar kinds of entities. While it's clear that this model has a purpose, I think people are right to point out that the equivalence is drawn by rather stilted logic and even more right to question whether the consequences of this legal framing are desirable from their perspective

He also believed in the immortal soul that survives after death, so he may have had a more literal meaning.

A more critical examination of the whole quote makes it clear he was not being that simple.

Most of the functions that LLMs perform aren’t bijective, though.

What prompt constructs the output ‘The answer is 3’ or ‘Yes that’s a great idea’?

Right, that’s why I wrote, “I don’t mean that most neural networks are invertible functions.”

For a neural network that is not bijective, you can obtain an input that maps to a desired output by the following algorithm.

1. Start with a trained neural network. (The weights will not change throughout this procedure.)

2. Pick a random input.

3. Given an output for which you want to compute an associated input, feed the input into the network to compute the output.

4. Compute the loss of the computed output relative to the target output (e.g., mean-square error). If the loss is sufficiently small, you’ve found an input that maps to an output close to your target output and you’re done.

5. Otherwise, compute the gradient of the loss with respect to the input (e.g., by backprop).

6. Update the input according to a gradient-update rule. And go back to Step 3.

In theory, you can recover a “representative” prompt for the output of an LLM in this manner. For outputs that could have been generated by a large set of disparate prompts, obviously this won’t work well.

Thinking ‘God I wish these people would die’ could increase its propensity to kill all people, even if that propensity is still vanishingly small almost all of the time.

A lot of people are walking around with crazy thoughts. Some of them harm.

Readable reasoning traces are a convenient thing, but they don't have to be true in any way. It's actually dangerous to think that.

An EMP from a high altitude nuclear detonation would do the trick.

Nah, its all pattern matching. This is how automated theorem provers like Isabelle are built, applying operations to lemmas/expressions to reach proofs.

I'm sure if you pick a sufficiently broad definition of pattern matching your argument is true by definition!

Unfortunately that has nothing to do with the topic of discussions, which is the capabilities of LLMs, which may require a more narrow definition of pattern matching.

Automated theorem provers are also built around backtracking, which is absent in LLMs.