Very exciting! And I like the fediverse integration too.

> $N independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.

This sounds a bit AI-generated (i.e. bland). I would just remove that line entirely from the UI.

> top / new / hot / my

this is a non-parallel construction[1], "my" sounds weird here to an english speaker. These can all be read as adjuncts if you change it to "mine".

[1] https://www.grammar.com/nonparallel-construction

I saw it and completed it as “top posts” “new posts” “hot posts” “my posts”.

my government is implementing a ZKP protocol to solve this problem. So is brazil. (bifold open wallet.)

device-side restrictions; improve the UX for parental restrictions and make them on-by-default for children.

When you buy a device, if you can't present ID (or the device is for a child), the vendor gives it to you in "child mode." Child mode has a whitelist/blacklist of all apps and websites that it can use. The list is set by the vendor, but modified by the federal government, state/provincial government, municipal government, school district, and parent/guardian (in that order, each overriding the previous.)

Perhaps in addition, devices in "child mode" always attach "do not show me adult content" to the HTTP headers they send to websites.

That's rather meaningless. The scientists in the Manhattan project initially had less information than what is now available on the internet.

> The scientists in the Manhattan project initially had less information than what is now available on the internet.

On the other hand: the Manhattan project had access to much better physicists than the typical terrorist group has. :-)

But physicists today have much more information and compute and could be more productive.

it really should be .gc.ca for us to be sure.

Here's a chain of trust you can follow:

https://parl.gc.ca -> https://parl.ca

https://www.parl.ca/Committees/en/LANG/Contact?parl=37&sessi... -> ourcommons.ca

in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.

There is always the Australian system. Mandatory voting, preferential votes, majority rule.

The Preferential part is the most important, it means you can vote for who you want but also have the second preference get a vote if the first fails to get a wide enough margin. That first vote however will get additional resources based on vote tally with the next election cycle. If either of the last two majority parties fail to get the necessary votes to hold control and you have a hung parliament, they then have to negotiate with other parties to gain their preference.

Its not perfect but it looks like the best case system I have seen.

Regardless of whether LLMs are conscious or not, they have no known mechanism for experiencing pain and suffering, and there's no reason to believe they have one (such as a limbic system). So why worry about it?

Mistreatment and abuse, even when directed at a machine, make you a worse person.

Even if you are only interested in getting good results out of them, LLMs tend to work better when they are immersed in a narrative of open collaboration.

Have you ever been forced to code something impossible and tedious by a user who keeps getting more and more frustrated as you keep trying?

maybe the bacteria are conscious. How sure are we that they're not?

The only strong argument I have against it is the anthropic principle -- there are billions of times more bacteria than humans, so it's overwhelmingly unlikely that I'd be a human rather than a bacteria.

Not a very good argument of course.

why is that obviously false? To a functionalist, a pen and paper and a set of rules is sufficient for consciousness.

Gist of the argument:

If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.

Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.

This only seems insane/crazy from the perspective of everyday life. But philosophically it checks out, "We live in a simulation" and all that.

The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.

> The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.

That's just not true. I've broken from "science can explain everything" and there's no mud. All of my beliefs are backed with careful reasoning. If there's an unknown, I don't fill it with random garbage.

Isn't pain just a manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals in the brain and body? It's not "clearly nonsense" to me that you could cause pain by writing a sufficiently long sequence of 0's - for it to be obviously wrong, you'd have to have some understanding of where consciousness comes from.

If you don't understand that, how can you assert that it doesn't come from mathematical relationships?

What specifically you mean by "manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals"? The brain is a system of physical particles. Why do I feel pain when the system is in state X but feel happy when it's in state Y? Physics can't explain that.

Do you seriously think that there's any chance that writing a lot of zeros on a piece of paper will create a feeling of pain in some conscious being?

This seems like a logical error. I don't understand how an internal combustion engine works, but I know it doesn't come from goblins jumping up and down inside.

The fact that you know it literally means you understand, at least to some extent, how an internal combustion engine works (i.e. it is powered somehow by combustion, and jumping goblins are not combusting generally).

If you would have zero knowledge about ICEs, how would you know?

Once or twice I've experienced extreme pain, and it was downstream of a bright light shining on a wet rock for millions of years.

I try to imagine myself long ago, on the outside looking in, with someone explaining to me that extreme pain, wondrous art, hunger, triumph, and despair would all unfold in due time where the rocks were wet and the lights bright enough.

I can imagine myself calling this clear nonsense.

TL;DR, the arguments are:

- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals. - because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious

These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.

Chiang also claimed that LLMs are text-based DeepFakes, I thought that was the more interesting point (maybe harder to argue correctly about).

"nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious" - that seems like an odd take. There are plenty of people in the camp of panpsychism that would be happy to argue that even simple IF/ELSE AI's are potentially conscious.

Well said. I think a more honest article would’ve been if the author just said “they aren’t conscious because that feels kinda weird and crazy, amirite?”