We probably don’t want to use the current leader in cause of death for kids as a template for good policy.

Lots of stretching here. The paper uses simulations of microtubules to show quantum effects when tryptophan residues are excited by UV light. The paper only did simulations of microtubules, and those simulations did not include the bends and many many dynein molecules found on microtubules. The reason this is important is that researchers have been hitting every biomolecule with UV excitation for decades, including microtubules, and have never observed this effect.

A key finding missing from this video is that microtubules are dynamic. They are constantly disassembling and reassembling and recycling components. This occurs at very short timescales. Also, they do not bridge cell membranes. If information is passing through networks of microtubules, it is constantly disrupted and not affecting other cells. Synapses do handle cell-cell information transfer (where the role of microtubules is already well studied and not quantum in nature). Why would quantum microtubule information be limited to a single cell? Maybe it could influence coordinated assembly and disassembly at the termini, but the authors offer no evidence that there is any chemical effect of this quantum phenomenon, which would be required to change anything about how those enzymes behave.

We already know of a mechanism by which information is transported across microtubules: physical transport of signalling molecules. They are walked (quite literally, dynein is cool) along the microtubules to different sites in the cell. No quantum effects needed to explain this phenomenon.

This is a health issue, not a morality issue.

What do you mean by work? Do they stop everyone from doing stupid things? No. Do they have a measurable effect on behavior? Yes.

My shower thoughts are always repeating cycles of “fuuuuuuuck this feels niiiiiiiiice” and “time to turn up the heat a smidge.” Am I doing it wrong?

From someone who grew up with a racist father, it was likely a juxtaposition of the handshake with stereotypes of hypersexuality and uncleanliness among black men mixed with sexist ideals of young women and their purity.

I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.

As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.

Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.

Chinese EVs subsidized with prison labor and CCP funds to undercut the market and stagnate long-term innovation, what a boon to humanity!

Or I could invest in skills that benefit me and society while using my vote to push government policy towards outcomes that benefit humanity.

We are not in a recession. The problems with wage stagnation are not some temporary hiccup in the economy. It is a systemic problem. Stop conflating the two, complaining that a macroeconomic term with a very specific meaning isn’t defined the way you want it to be. Stop expecting the problem to heal itself if the fed lowers rates or taxes get nudged up or down or whatever. We know how to fix wage stagnation because we have done it before. Regulation. Labor protections. Minimum wage increases. Wage stagnation occurs in the absence of these things, and they can only be done by Congress.

The campaign is not the government. The meme manager will have literally 0 influence on foreign policy.

Changes to foreign policy are more likely to occur if you direct all this energy to the 30%+ of Americans that fully support an unfettered Israeli military, rather than disparage the only US president in recent history to openly criticize Israel during wartime. In the context of US-Israel relations, Biden is waaaay outside the norm in pushing back against Israeli interests.

Even though the law can be circumvented, it nonetheless provides resistance. Traveling to another state, filling out paperwork, paying extra money, etc all provide additional obstacles to overcome. If someone was having an acute mental problem and felt compelled to eat a barrel, a simple few hours delay in acquiring a gun can make all the difference. For someone planning on using a gun for criminal activity, at some point they might just consider employment as an easier alternative if acquiring a gun is too much of a pain.

We have already seen this effect in reverse with regard to immigration. Legal immigration is such a painful crapshoot that people are willing to surrender their fate to cartels as an alternative.

Read again. I have made no such claim, I simply scrutinized your assertions that LLMs lack any internal representations, and challenged that assertion with alternative hypotheses. You are the one that made the claim. I am perfectly comfortable with the conclusion that we simply do not know what is going on in LLMs with respect to human-like capabilities of the mind.

I have a different interpretation of those close calls: we were very very lucky and should not rely on defiance as a mechanism to avoid the apocalypse.

Nor can we assume that they cannot have the same emergent properties.

These cases are interesting tests of our first amendment rights. “Real” CP requires abuse of a minor, and I think we can all agree that it should be illegal. But it gets pretty messy when we are talking about depictions of abuse.

Currently, we do not outlaw written depictions nor drawings of child sexual abuse. In my opinion, we do not ban these things partly because they are obvious fictions. But also I think we recognize that we should not be in the business of criminalizing expression, regardless of how disgusting it is. I can imagine instances where these fictional depictions could be used in a way that is criminal, such as using them to blackmail someone. In the absence of any harm, it is difficult to justify criminalizing fictional depictions of child abuse.

So how are AI-generated depictions different? First, they are not obvious fictions. Is this enough to cross the line into criminal behavior? I think reasonable minds could disagree. Second, is there harm from these depictions? If the AI models were trained on abusive content, then yes there is harm directly tied to the generation of these images. But what if the training data did not include any abusive content, and these images really are purely depictions of imagination? Then the discussion of harms becomes pretty vague and indirect. Will these images embolden child abusers or increase demand for “real” images of abuse. Is that enough to criminalize them, or should they be treated like other fictional depictions?

We will have some very interesting case law around AI generated content and the limits of free speech. One could argue that the AI is not a person and has no right of free speech, so any content generated by AI could be regulated in any manner. But this argument fails to acknowledge that AI is a tool for expression, similar to pen and paper.

A big problem with AI content is that we have become accustomed to viewing photos and videos as trusted forms of truth. As we re-learn what forms of media can be trusted as “real,” we will likely change our opinions about fringe forms of AI-generated content and where it is appropriate to regulate them.

We do not know how LLMs operate. Similar to our own minds, we understand some primitives, but we have no idea how certain phenomenon emerge from those primitives. Your assertion would be like saying we understand consciousness because we know the structure of a neuron.

You seem pretty confident that LLMs cannot have an internal representation simply because you cannot imagine how that capability could emerge from their architecture. Yet we have the same fundamental problem with the human brain and have no problem asserting that humans are capable of internal representation. LLMs adhere to grammar rules, present information with a logical flow, express relationships between different concepts. Is this not evidence of, at the very least, an internal representation of grammar?

We take in external stimuli and peform billions of operations on them. This is internal representation. An LLM takes in external stimuli and performs billions of operations on them. But the latter is incapable of internal representation?

And I don’t buy the idea that hallucinations are evidence that there is no internal representation. We hallucinate. An internal representation does not need to be “correct” to exist.

No. Human evolution is driven primarily by mate selection.

How do hallucinations preclude an internal representation? Couldn’t hallucinations arise from a consistent internal representation that is not fully aligned with reality?

I think you are misunderstanding the role of tokens in LLMs and conflating them with internal representation. Tokens are used to generate a state, similar to external stimuli. The internal representation, assuming there is one, is the manner in which the tokens are processed. You could say the same thing about human minds, that the representation is not located anywhere like a piece of data; it is the manner in which we process stimuli.