Why does DeepL translate "Panzerschreck" to "Panzerschreck"? Is that actually a word understood by English native speakers? I know the words "Panzer" and "Schreck" (normal word of used in the appropriate context), but didn't exactly know what a Panzerschreck is.

Well, a fitting translation seems to be "Bazooka". However, "Panzerschreck" sounds like an old fashioned German word (not too surprising I guess) that wouldn't be used anymore today. The typo which I think might be intentional makes it kind of silly.

I choose my nickname many years ago, when I was much younger and had troubles with correct spelling. Now it's too late to change it.

I just think of it as some kind of armored shrek :)

> Now it's too late to change it.

Really? May I suggest to reconsider that? Are you still a fan of World War II Germany?

We have general purpose hardware and we have hardware that's hard wired for specific purposes like ASICs and we have everything in between.

And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".

I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.

The counter to that is that altering the brain directly alters the consciousness. I can take LSD and I literally change. I can have parts of my brain removed and parts of my self disappear. It's not like cutting off a leg, where I lose capabilities but am still the same me.

The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me.

> The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me

The logical conclusion under the popular axiomatic framework of materialism, for sure.

But there are other possible logical conclusions depending on your philosophical foundations, e.g. the brain could be a receiver for consciousness which is translated into our worldly experience from somewhere else.

"an", not "the" alternative.

Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.

Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.

Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here.

Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.

I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho

If something happens "on the map" doesn't that imply the map to exist and be some sort of metaphysical thing? As opposed to a purely theoretical construction.

I think you can be a monist and still have a map. To me it's similar in the sense of "all models are wrong, some are useful." A mathematical model (a map) doesn't require a metaphysical foundation to exist. Right?

I agree that a monist can have a map. But you said "consciousness exists on the map" which (AFAICT) would imply the map to be "real" else how would something happen on it as opposed to being an emergent property of the contents of the territory?

For example temperature is an emergent property of matter, it does not happen on the map, do you agree? Assuming you do, what would it mean for temperature to happen "on the map"? (Obviously that's nonsensical so for a second here just don't think about what temperature actually is.) Would such a state of affairs not imply dualism?

Temperature is a model. It exists on the map.

Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons.

What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty.

I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.

Yes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.

Only if you ignore almost every input and output that neurons have.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/

This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).

I don't ignore anything. I just refuse to accept the magical thinking around biological machines that are our brains/bodies. There are inputs, there are outputs, there is hidden function.

And it seems that, given enough input/outputs/compute, it is possible to train the necessary function.

Details of how the building bricks look like (matmul, electromagnetism or quantum effects) are not that relevant in the broader picture.

What is missing right now, is the fact that the function in question changes over time in biomachines, while our LLMs are static at inference time.

I mostly agree, but I see two points that might be problematic:

a) The brain might have an entropy source (then it can't be modeled as a function). Trivially to fix, and in some sense, with diffusion models starting from random numbers, AI has done so.

b) The hidden function might be not computable. I would have no idea how that would work, but I think this is what it boils down to if people say "the human brain is more than a machine".

a) enthropy can be injected as well. In fact there are hidden sources in current training.

b) well, it can be the case that, say, certain kinds of computation are either too inefficient or outright impossible within the current model.

Who knows...

Agree and add, don't confuse the substrate for the computation. Of course it's also clear that we don't quite have a full and definite picture of what the computation consists of in the case of a biological brain as evidenced by our continued failure to accurately simulate even the simplest of organisms.

> Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons.

Yeah, but it's hard to explain this to people, especially AI-pro people. Too many are convinced that all we are doing is a cut-down version of the human brain, and it's hard to explain to them that, no actually, we aren't modeling the human brain to the level of granularity you think we are.

I believe you are overthinking it. I think the sister comment is right that it's a business decision foremost to restrict actions within specific plans for upselling purposes.

Without laws, AI companies have a strong incentive to be useful for their users, whoever they are, whatever they do. The only self regulation is about significant public outcry but that only helps so far.

They are great for self-teaching and great to cheat and not learn anything, depending on how you use them.

Main problem is that the technology was very disruptive for education and nobody has figured out yet how to utilize it at scale for schools and universities.

> will be different 3, 5, 10 years down the line.

Possibly, but it's not a necessity. Click baiting (i.e. yt videos) has evolved to stable standards, that's at least my impression.

Also, products often only get improved until they are "good enough", not until they are "good". It happens, but then they just iterate towards the "how bad can I become" baseline from the other side.

AI companies generally are not in the "let's make the best AI possible" business but in the "let's make the most money" business. This just hasn't fully manifest because they get flooded with VC.

To me it seems people had actual problems with newer versions. Additionally, a significant portion of the code changed within a very short time frame.

Doesn't matter if they did it by hand or with AI.

I just had the first case of a file not being copied correctly after using rsync that I noticed a few days ago. It was a raw image file so it was visually noticeable, some lines of pixels just went black. It may be unrelated, it may not have even been rsync's fault, but this drama and timing just makes me wonder if I got clauded there.

Do you not do the md5 or sha hashes of the copied zip file?

That's ... what rsync is supposed to do for you.

zip file?...

I was syncing photos from my phone.

I don't follow Rust closely, but I somehow love that they just did it. I like C++, but it would be much less confusing if the committee dared to change the language or std from time to time. Instead, they only ever extend (with super rare outliers).

For better or worse, that is one reason why many of us still reach out to C++.

Especially because ISO languages always have to care about multiple implementations, C++ isn't alone in this.

Note that the thing Rust is doing here doesn't break backwards compatibility, because of the edition mechanism. C++ doesn't have that (I don't know if they've considered adding it), so they can't do anything about language footguns without compatibility breaks.

Rust idioms do of course change over time, such that if you come back to the language after a while you'll have some catching up to do, but that's just as true of C++.

> (I don't know if they've considered adding it)

The paper you want to look up is “epochs” (the OG name for editions) but there were questions that never got resolved, and so the proposals are dead for now at least.

Editions for the time being don't cover all language evolution scenarios, e.g. breaking changes on the standard library, and having incompatible crates on the same build talking to each other.

Is anybody contemplating nontrivial breaking changes to the standard library? When env::set_var and env::remove_var were marked unsafe, that was done across an edition boundary even though it's unsound to leave them as-is in older editions.

Do you have a particular scenario in mind for incompatible crates? This doesn't seem like a language evolution problem.

On infrastructure level, let me as a user (easily) decide which Root CAs I want to trust. Have websites by default deliver certs that match my region (i.e. a cert from a European Root CA if I'm in Europe).

By itself, this won't do anything (because you will still be using service that utilize US servers, but will be an important step for the safety of the non-US world.

I guess it will be other way round. More services will be run independent of the US and this will result in pressure to also solve the cert issue.