I just got the v14 upgrade a few days ago, and it's a mixed bag. On the plus side, it now handles parking, as in I give it a destination, it drives me there, goes into the parking lot, picks out a spot and parks in it, all with zero human input or intervention. On the negative side, I think v14 needs a little more compute horsepower than my 2025 Model S has. I used to have a 2020, with previous-gen computer, and as FSD got more capable it actually degraded a bit, becoming indecisive and occasionally "stuttering". With the new car that went away entirely. I was very impressed. With v14, in the new car, it's began to get indecisive and stutter again. Not often, but it happens. I think this is a result of the model not being able to complete its processing quickly enough, because it doesn't have enough compute.

I'm hopeful that they can refine and optimize v14, though, to fix that problem. Other than that, and the fact that on the country roads where I live it always wants to drive too slow (the roads are small, but the speed limit is 45 and everyone drives 50-55, while the car is clearly not comfortable going over 35-40), it's extremely good.

Experience is just a feedback loop. Stuff happens externally, triggering computation and generation of explanations, then the events are stored in memory -- including the memory of the explanations. Then, later explanatory computation (reflection / introspection) uses those memories and creates additional memories. These layers of reflective/introspective computation constitute the experience of consciousness, but there's really nothing special about it. It's just cycles of self-referential computation.

I'm pretty confident that as our AI models begin to run more continuously as agents rather than episodically as task-focused systems, and as they gain better ability to reason about and generate explanations of their own previous "thoughts", they'll reach a point where we'll have to call them conscious or at least admit that we can't distinguish what they do from what we do.

If it's about control, why is Google leaving ADB installation open? That undermines their control. Unverified limited distribution accounts also undermine their control. Why isn't Google just doing what Apple does, and requiring a verified developer account before you can do anything at all?

I'm curious how you interpret these decisions within your "100% about control" theory.

So... your argument is that if Google isn't 100% successful at keeping malware out of the Play Store, they aren't doing the job at all? You think identifying malware at scale is easy? I used to work on Android security and know a lot of people on the anti-malware team. It's incredibly difficult, especially since it's a continual cat-and-mouse game with malware developers who do all sorts of things to obfuscate what their code does. Google has hundreds of talented engineers focused on this problem, but there are tens of thousands of people producing malware; it's big business and there's a lot of money in it.

As the announcement said, Google finds that 50X as many malware installations on Android devices are from sideloading. You really don't think it makes sense for Google to try to reduce that?

Hobby game developer here - same thing applies. It doesn't matter how good the game you make is. If nobody knows that it exists, it won't sell, simple as that. And there are literally a few hundred games published EVERY DAY, so no you can't hope to be somehow discovered by accident or through the Steam (Epic, GOG, etc.) recommendation features. Well, not at scale. Maybe a few people will randomly find you, but without some marketing efforts, it's just that - a few.

Marketing, no matter how much we techies dislike it, is an essential part of any at-scale business. Customers need to know you exist. They need to know your product exists. They need to know your product can do something they would like.

There's a fine line between advertisement as manipulative exploitation and getting information to people interested in it. For a while, I had hopes that the Internet and search engines would solve that problem. Imagine if there were no advertisement. Anywhere. At all. But you had a magic machine on your desk or in your hands that, if you need something, can tell you where to get it. Need new dishes - here's all the shops selling dishes in the vicinity. Need a new computer - here's all the places you can look at computers and here's all the online shops who'll send them to you. Need a blowjob - here... well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, it seems I massively underestimated how much advertisers like to keep their jobs, and the whole shit became even worse online.

You utterly misunderstand what consciousness is or, for that matter, what 99% of the universe are.

If you grind the universe to a fine powder and look at the result, you can also claim that trees don't exist. Or planets. Or, really, anything.

It is clear to everyone not a complete idiot or fanatic, that consciousness, whatever it ultimately is, is something where structure, organization, patterns and connectivity matter a whole lot. It's not just matter, it is also how that matter is organized in space and time. The exact same molecules can make a pile of trash or a car.

More than that. A simulation can do things like introduce randomness, recursion, non-trivial dependencies or emergent behaviour that are not easily expressed in equations. There's a huge area where we use computer simulations because either the equations are not known or a calculation of the equations is computationally impossible but a simulation is possible.

Getting it to land on the Moon is relatively trivial. Getting it to land safely is as hard as reusable space craft, but different in many ways.
OTOH, its been done several times, so the expertise exists. (OTTH, remember that some have landed and tipped over.)

I wouldn't count it a safe trip, Not the first few times he does it. And presumably it needs to be a round-trip to count as a success.

No. You could record the original "seed" and reuse it. Since that would produce the same results, the results aren't random, even if you never actually record the original parameters. Unpredictable and random aren't quite the same concept.

From Google's FAQ

Will Android Debug Bridge (ADB) install work without registration? As a developer, you are free to install apps without verification with ADB. This is designed to support developers' need to develop, test apps that are not intended or not yet ready to distribute to the wider consumer population.

Obviously, ADB can't distinguish the cases of (a) an app developer who just wrote an app using ADB to install an APK on their device for testing and (b) any random person using ADB to install an APK on their device for whatever reason they like. This means that random people can use ADB to install APKs from unverified developers.

Well, if that were the point of the system, you'd be right, but it's not. The point of the system is to make it hard for malware authors to distribute malware to large numbers of users without getting quickly shut down. This system doesn't "scan apps" at all... Android just won't install downloaded APKs that don't have a Google-provided signature on them, but it will install ADB-installed APKs without a Google-provided signature because app developers need to be able to build and test apps without having to send every version off to a Google server for signing.

I don't know about more explanatory power, but here's another theory for you: Consciousness doesn't really exist, at least not as far as we know. What we perceive as our own consciousness is just a result of the effort of one part of our brain to generate explanations for the results of computations by another part of our brain. The process of generating explanations requires a little bit of recursive analysis that looks like introspection and self-awareness, except that nearly all of what it's allegedly introspecting is actually completely opaque to the computation that generates the explanations. Note also that there needn't be any actual correlation between the generated explanations and the computation that is being explained (there's actually pretty good empirical evidence that our explanatory systems are just as good at explaining something we actually disagree with as something we decided, BTW).

Now, why did we evolve such an explanation engine? Because it was adaptive for a communal species, of course, especially when coupled with another ability that co-evolved with it: Rich, detailed communication (speech, and more). We developed the explanation engine so we could use the explanations to convince others in our community that our unexplained computation results (decisions, actions, etc.) are better than theirs. This development was both communally adaptive, because battling explanation engines (people arguing with each other) actually result in the construction of better joint computations, enabling the community to make better collective decisions and thrive, and individually adaptive because the better explainer is able to get their way more often and increase their status within the community.

So, within this theory, your questions are all pretty easily answered: (1) Consciousness is just an illusion that arises from the layered structure of our brains, which are, indeed, purely physical objects, though incredibly sophisticated. (2) This apparent consciousness and the logic circuitry that underpins/enables it closely matches evolutionary adaptiveness because it is actually an evolutionary process: The explanatory engine operates by generating, testing and selecting postulates, just as evolution operates by generating, testing and selection genotypes. (3) Consciousness is illusory so the question of where to draw the line doesn't make sense, but you can also clearly see that rocks don't have anything that might appear to be consciousness because are no computational processes going on in them. Cities might, however, especially when you note that human cities contain institutions that both compute (make decisions) and attempt to explain those computations, but we'd really need a much more precise definition of "consciousness" to attempt to answer this question. Such a definition is impossible, however, because consciousness is just an illusion anyway.

Actually that's sort of true. Algorithms can't generate actually random results...but the results can be so nearly random that there's no way to tell. But it's not really random because if you compute the exact same algorithm a second time with the exact same parameters you get the same result. AFAIK, meaning in this context isn't well defined.

More to the point, with regard to 4, if you only simulate a small portion of the (apparent) universe you don't need to simulate anything outside the lightcone. And most of what you simulate will be empty space.

Of course, the longer the period simulated, the larger a lightcone you'll need to simulate.

From the summary:

In its blog post, F-Droid warns about the impact on users and Android app developers. "You, the creator, can no longer develop an app and share it directly with your friends, family, and community without first seeking Google's approval,"

You can still develop an app and share it directly with whoever you want without registering, you just have to convince them to use ADB to install it, rather than clicking a link on a web site or downloading from an app store (like F-Droid). This adds a lot of friction and requires your potential users to trust you quite a bit more, because it feels like they're taking a bigger risk, even though there isn't any actual difference in risk. I expect that we'll start to see apps packaged with ADB for a "single-click install" from a Windows machine, to reduce the friction as far as possible. Users would still have to do the dance to enable developer options, enable USB, then tap "accept" on the ADB key popup, though an installer could (and probably will) walk them though that.

Also, although I don't think details are available yet, Google says there will be an option for "limited distribution accounts" which don't require any fee or ID verification, but can only distribute their apps to a limited number of devices. For people who just want to share with friends and family, this should cover them.

Food was a significantly larger percentage of disposable income in the 60s and 70s. And, as I mentioned before, that steady decline in the money spent in food was actually offset to a large degree by an increase in eating out (or ordering in). If we still ate at home as much as we used to, the drop would be even larger.