The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

Facebook is not in chronological order.

While you may be correct that the claim about consciousness being from beyond the observable universe is not falsifiable thus beyond the scope of scientific credibility, so too is any current understanding that would support an assertion that "Anthropics models work *just* like human consciousness".

We have pondered the question in a philosophical way, and can assert certain trends based on evidence, but in a comprehensive fundamental sense, the question has to date remained philosophical at the levels that the Anthropic paper needs. Note that the paper even explicitly acknowledges this facet of their work as philosophical, and the generated responses reflect upon that. It puts a lot of weight on the models being able to self-assess accurately and then using the result to show that they can self-assess a consciousness. Including one area where I noted that the "j-space ablated" output indicated that it was just token prediction, and seems like they use that to illustrate that it is conscious that it lacks consciousness...There's a lot of circular reasoning around the headline claim.

People do not tell the truth about their motives when answering polls. News at 11.

What in the world are you talking about???

"avoiding the homeless" is NOT the reason Americans don't take public transit.

Feel like those are more akin to science philosophy than concrete scientific understanding. Which tends to happen in scientific pursuits when we dig deeper than what we can realistically actually explore in a strictly scientific way. Biggest problem is we struggle to recognize it as philosophy when it comes out of scientific thinking. We *want* to know more than we can piece together through scientific basis and for lack of a better option we go for the unfalsifiable and subjective opinion.

I recall a physicist explicitly addressing the phenomenon in his field. He refrained from participating in the musings because all he could do was figure out what math worked and hope someone comes up with better math, the wilder speculation upon unobservable implications was beyond the scope of what he felt science could do, but it's a very popular thing in physics.

I perused the paper, I think the comment was pretty spot on. Specifically the part where they have as a casual assumption that they know how human consciousness works.

If a company came out with a service that would burn your data into a crystal that you could wear as jewelry, and the crystal was reasonably durable (ideally diamond, or something similar), that would be a useful (or at least novel) way to store valuable data long-term. Assuming there was also a convenient way to read it back when required, of course.

This, however, isn't that. The whole point of git is that it distributes copies of your repository onto every client that clones it, so that the likelihood of everyone accidentally losing all copies at once is minimal.

Good point!

It's basically shaking the magic 8 ball and it works, but it's totally a judgement call when it has worked 'enough'. It doesn't necessarily progress from easiest to hardest issues to find, it just is a bit random. Hard to say how many passes before you've *probably* got the real ones. My experience has not been that false positive rate increases, sometimes you might have all false positives but a continuation will flag real issues.

Indeed, they take needles in haystacks and make smaller haystacks that have some of the needles. They don't catch some things and they falsely flag a lot of things, but they do either directly or get close to something.

One issue in our codebase that was caught was pretty much spot on. Now upon it being highlighted, it was obvious to anyone that the inexperienced developer screwed up, problem was no one had the attention span to notice. The other issue close to real that it caught was actually not the flaw it indicated, however while looking at the jankiness that caused it to mis-indicate, a real issue was discovered. So it's indicated "fix" would have done nothing and left the codebase vulnerable, but the finding *was* useful in identifying an actual problem and fix.

However, it does open up a gigantic mess in customer engagement. Customers like to use every security tool at their disposal and hold the vendor accountable. Fine, except now we are inundated with false positives because the LLM indicates something, the customer has no way of knowing if the LLM is right or not, and we have to address false positives. We are now having to consider how to "fix" false positives by steering the LLMs away from indicating bogus things when analyzing our product. When it was the occasional misguided security researcher making a misunderstanding, no huge deal, we could discuss nuance and come to an accord. With the LLM mess, there's no skilled human to appeal to, a skeptical customer, and just a lot of volume...

Darl McBride used to refer to the "spiffy agent technology" that was going to find the allegedly infringing code, so that particular grift is nothing new.

Whatever you may think of capabilities, the narrative has always been about what they think sounds best in the moment.

So at one point, only the owner class matters, investment is King and every other concern can be bulldozed. The business opportunity down market would never be as much as what employee replacement would be.

Now they see a need to balance it because shockingly the people still have some leverage, whether it's banning construction projects or getting skittish with retail investment. Further the stories around employee replacement have gone permanently bad at prominent companies like Ford. So they need to move the goal posts to dodge the negative optics and recalibrate expectations.