I know workaholics. They have been blessed/cursed to find a task which engages and consumes them fully. They are typically highly successful, in whatever field they are in. Their vocation is their avocation.

What they fail to realize is the vast majority are not, nor will ever be, workaholics. People can be very energetic, but on hobbies (their avocation), not their work (vocation).

Considering they require the cooperation of the masses to realize their vision, and the masses do in fact, feed and protect them (Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards), they should take into account that not everyone's vocation is their avocation.

How are you different than a database? What is your brain doing that a database can't?

The first big difference between an LLM and a human is that the LLM is set in stone after training. It is a static filter. It gains no more information. The structure is set. With a human, it can immediately update its own personal knowledge store (database) with new information. It's also able to autonomously decide to do this. "Berries taste good. Red berry taste good, make Gorok feel good. Blue berry make Gorok feel bad." Database updated. After training, the LLM never updates with "blue berry bad". It would require another multi-week, round of training to re-set the weights.

Are we next token generators? It would not surprise me if we are something like it. My understanding is (I'm looking for the CACM article but cannot find it right now) that the token response is built by running the response token through the neural network serially and repeatedly (the initial training of the neural network is done with a parallel process using GPU's). We appear to be massively parallel. We could be doing next token generation in a ultra low power, massively parallel manner.

A part of our brain is doing what a database does. I think the information retrieval piece is probably hugely more powerful in an LLM due its massive database being highly optimized to infer meaning and retrieve information.

We also have the ability to navigate effortlessly in the real world, after training in infancy. Developing a representation of the physical world is currently outside the reach of the LLM but I suspect that's a matter of time before it can. It's power requirements will likely be monstrous, and we are ultra lower power (they're talking about harnessing nuclear reactors to power AI / LLM operations).

I certainly don't think we are utterly different. The whole concept of the neural net is based loosely on the brain's design. Nature has already solved a lot of problems to which humans are only catching up, still trying to mimic nature in many ways, versus improving on it. The neural network theory has been around for decades, but breakthroughs in both software, computation, and hardware has enabled this current functionality, it seems to me.

Again, I'm not an expert so check my work and YMMV.

An AI / LLM is a database you can talk to (query) using natural language. It is an amazing achievement, famously fooling one of Google's own software engineers (Blake Lemoine) into believing the machinery was sentient.

But it's still a database. It's trained for weeks on a datasets to set the weights in the neural network. Tokens from prompts filter through the (static) neural network repeatedly building a response ("inferring").

The problem is as the tokens cycle through the neural network, building the response by filtering through the weights, it's impossible for a human to know exactly what it's doing - specifically how it's reasoning to come to its conclusions. That's where the field of Explainable AI comes in.

To help people get a handle on AI, here's how they're priced - based on tokens:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en...
https://help.openai.com/en/art...

A bunch of weights in a neural network (the weights set by weeks of continuous training on a dataset), tokens extracted from prompts, filter through the neural network, building the output. Is the possibility of sentience in there? Consciousness? What's the core action being taken? How exactly is a token response built?

Here's a description from IBM:

During the training process, these models learn to predict the next word in a sentence based on the context provided by the preceding words. The model does this through attributing a probability score to the recurrence of words that have been tokenized— broken down into smaller sequences of characters. These tokens are then transformed into embeddings, which are numeric representations of this context.

To ensure accuracy, this process involves training the LLM on a massive corpora of text (in the billions of pages), allowing it to learn grammar, semantics and conceptual relationships through zero-shot and self-supervised learning. Once trained on this training data, LLMs can generate text by autonomously predicting the next word based on the input they receive, and drawing on the patterns and knowledge they've acquired. The result is coherent and contextually relevant language generation that can be harnessed for a wide range of NLU and content generation tasks.

Once it's trained, it's trained. The neural network and its weights are set. Then it's time to query / prompt.

It's amazing stuff. That the machinery can do this is astonishing. But it's feeding tokens through a trained, static neural network.

Now... right now it's trained on binary data, audio, video, images, text. Prompts are tokenized from incoming text strings. The technology is in its infancy. Could you program something around this core system to be a decision making platform that could be placed in a robot which could navigate its environment, and make decisions about what to do? I think that's coming. That would require being able to tokenize the world around it. I suspect it would take a vast amount of training data that may be beyond current computing and electrical power capabilities. This is nascent technology and there's a long road ahead.

On the other hand... quantum computing, fusion... these have promise, but engineering limitations limit the ability to realize those promises. So, one needs to have a balanced view. We're just at the beginning though. Relational databases were introduced in the early-mid 70s. This technology has been introduced just now, so who knows what it'll look like in 50 years.

Disclaimer: I'm not remotely an LLM / AI expert. Reading the CACM, thinking about it, but there are lots of people out there programming these things, of which I'm not one. But I am interested and think I have it right.

As this type of study would be both illegal and impossible to implement for this investigation, other sources of data must be used to draw conclusions. Shaken Baby Syndrome was pieced together from the evidence of a hundred years of observation (see PDF), noting the frequency and type of brain injury that appeared with abuse-related trauma. In the early 70s, the syndrome was finally described, and per the links I posted above from neurosurgeons' and pediatricians' associations, they have concluded the syndrome exists.

These are two organizations representing experts in the field of both neurosurgery and pediatrics, and don't appear to have ulterior motives, so their conclusions are almost certainly accurate.

Those denying the syndrome do have ulterior motives, namely, freeing their client by casting doubt on the very existence of the syndrome.

1) Statement from American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS): "Shaken Baby Syndrome (also known as Shaken Impact Syndrome) is a serious form of abuse inflicted upon a child. It usually occurs when a parent or other caregiver shakes a baby out of anger or frustration, often because the baby will not stop crying."

The AANS appears to be a legitimate association for neurological surgeons. Google this phrase to see how it is referenced by colleges and universities: american association of neurological surgeons site:*.edu

2) The Scientific American article does not deny that Shaken Baby Syndrome exists. It says, "There is no doubt that shaking a child can cause injuries, including those that comprise the shaken baby syndrome triad." It however goes on to advocate for Roberson, saying, "Newer research, however, has shown that shaking is not the only way to cause those injuries". Newer research? I'm sure there have been multiple ways to cause those injuries for a long time.

3) A doctor's blog on Shaken Baby Syndrome : "As a pediatric intensivist for over 30 years, I have dealt with many unfortunate examples of this entity, and I have no doubt that it exists. But, like all disorders that do not have a specific, definitive test for them, deciding whether or not a child has suffered shaken baby syndrome depends upon more that some x-rays and an eye examination; you need to consider the entire context of the story."

4) The American Association of Pediatrics statement on the WaPo article (linked in the blog article above - appears to be paywalled): "What are the facts? [about denying the existence of the syndrome] it involves a tiny cadre of physicians. These few physicians testify regularly for the defense in criminal trials — even when the medical evidence indicating abuse is overwhelming. They deny what science in this field has well-established. They are well beyond the bounds where professionals may disagree reasonably. Instead, they concoct different and changing theories, ones not based on medical evidence and scientific principles. All they need to do in the courtroom is to obfuscate the science and sow doubt."

Remember the insane covid doctors? Yeah, me too.

Wiki says AAP is the "largest professional association of pediatricians in the US."
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An interesting phenomenon happens when the anti-death penalty movement makes a full court press for one convict. They are able to create a nationwide sensation for the convict and cast doubt on whatever is necessary to create doubt about the offender's conviction. It's a fascinating thing to watch, part of that "fake news" phenomenon, i.e. disinformation on a large scale, through existing channels.

In this case, they're claiming Shaken Baby Syndrome is junk science. They bring out doctors who say that's the case. Media is amplifying the disinformation. The truth is lost, as it is supposed to be in this type of situation.

A doctor quoted on the radio put it simply: "The only people who are claiming shaken baby syndrome is junk science, are outside of the medical profession."

USA overthrew democratically elected government in Ukraine and installed a neonazi one that did ethnic cleansing, murdering and maiming Roma and other minorities.

False. In the Maidan Revolution, only one person was replaced in the nearly 500-strong Ukrainian government - the president. Because he opened fire on the protestors, he was going to be impeached.

Replacing one person at the top of the government is not a coup, and it's not a replacement of the government. If it were, then the Nixon impeachment was a coup in the US.

As far as the other charges, the president is a Jew and the defense minister is Muslim, so it's unlikely they're Nazis, who are reknown for seeking racial and ethnic homogeneity.

FYI, if you have 4 minutes, I'd suggest listening to Polish Foreign Minister response to the standard Russian talking points, which you repeated. tl;dr he disproves the Standard Russian Talking Points.

Polish president Duda said the following at Switzerland Peace Summit:

It's perfectly fine to be a Russian partisan. But I'd only suggest doing so honestly with one's self and the world.

It's a good idea to read a hawkish Russian general's (Leonid Ivashov) response to the possibility of the Ukraine invasion:

Econ is more like psychology than biology. It deals with, at the base, why people's money-related and value-seeking behaviors are what they are. And "people" is a hugely varied group. There are a myriad pools of people, each controlling money and some component of value creation and consumption, and all the pools react to, and depend on, each other.

There is a new concept, "behavioral economics" which is less looking to apply equations, and more trying to be astute about human behavior. Nobel laureates have espoused behavior economics (Shiller, etc) and tried to move away from "mathiness".

Math supposedly suggests intellectual rigor, and less speculation. Econ is falls at the edge of the social sciences and natural sciences. But it's still about human behavior, which is more social science and less natural science.

Google: "You mean people want to protect themselves from malware-laced ads and privacy intrusions and improve their browsing experience? That's crazy talk."

They up-armor Humvees because they travel through dangerous terrain. The browser is like a Humvee, and the Web is dangerous, full of malware and privacy invasions. They want to down-armor users for their own profit - it's nothing new, but users might frown upon such a thing.

We'll see if this drives an exodus from Chrome.

This feels like an unforced error on Google's part. What Google apparently fails to understand is Chrome is just a tool to get what we want - the content. If they enshittify the tool, make it more dangerous for us to use, we'll just get another one.

I don't think monetary policy is apolitical so examining political considerations in setting monetary policy is reasonable.

Low interest rates boost asset prices which large numbers* of people desire, thus making the status quo more desirable, thus helping politicians.

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* if the number of stock and real estate owners decline and consolidate in the future, this effect may fade but now I think it's a reliable play.

The act and the actor are inseparable. Thus, they are one in the same.

The act is not a object, a noun, separate from the actor. It exists only because the actor exists.

The concept of "hate the act, love the actor" is an incoherent platitude.

It's about as targeted as one can get, short of implanted cortex bombs or snipers.

Even the Flying Ginsu used to kill Suleimani may have had a collateral - I don't remember the story exactly.

But this is hardly firebombing cities.

They probably aren't happy about it. No matter who is right, killing people even if they are enemy combatants should never be a reason for joy.

If you were caught in a mass shooting in a theater, people around you dying, and someone killed the shooter, it is reasonable to be joyful that the shooter was killed, without reservation or lugubrious equivocation.

Enemy combatants dedicated to trying to kill you, but getting killed first, would also elicit that response in most people.

"Free market fundamentalism" is flawed because it fails to account for companies competing outside the rules of business. Like colluding, seeking to influence lawmakers to suppress competitors, influencing advertising and media and central bankers.

Free market fundamentalists assume business only competes within the marketplace, not outside of it. Which is totally false.

Whether its CEOs at a conference having drinks at the bar later, or whether its an Internet company doing it, collusion has always been illegal - the sharing of pricing information between companies.

How they gather and share the information is cosmetic. The fact that they're doing it is the problem.

Aggregating and sharing of the information the information is illegal because it leads to destructive outcomes for consumers.

They've found a new way to do it. Same leopard, different spots.

Redundancy and heterogeneity are important in critical systems. I'm not opposed to cashless systems, I posit that removing alternatives reduces redundancy and heterogeneity of a critical system. Additionally, having two competing systems can optimize both, as I noted in my original post.

From an operational standpoint, the importance of redundancy and heterogeneity are demonstrated repeatedly:
With the Crowdstrike incident, only Windows PCs were affected. Linux and Mac PCs not affected.
I've seen ransomware incidents where again Windows PCs were affected but other types were not.

From a political standpoint, it's also important:
Control of the payment system creates a great deal of power to be concentrated in one or a few hands. See the 2008 financial crisis where financial firms were bailed out and de facto indemnified for malfeasance and stupidity, and they saddled society with large bailout costs while getting wealthier than ever.
Monopolistic or oligarchic control of the payment system enables monopolistic and oligarchic behavior of the controlling companies.