Posts by Aether@poa.st
(DIR) Post #B2RNSpfG0UJUu9fing by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-19T10:57:22.204307Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
The mythology of conscious AI. https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/This article gets one important thing right: LLMs are not conscious.>In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made a startling claim about the AI system he was working on, a chatbot called LaMDA. He claimed it was conscious, that it had feelings, and was, in an important sense, like a real person. Despite a flurry of media coverage, Lemoine wasn't taken all that seriously. Google dismissed him for violating its confidentiality policies, and the AI bandwagon rolled on.Lemoine is a crazy as a sack of rats on ecstasy. And was also completely and very obviously wrong, which is not the same thing.>As AI technologies continue to improve, questions about machine consciousness are increasingly being raised. David Chalmers, one of the foremost thinkers in this area, has suggested that conscious machines may be possible in the not-too-distant future. Geoffrey Hinton, a true AI pioneer and recent Nobel Prize winner, thinks they exist already.Wait. David Chalmers said what?Huh. He did say that. A mostly sensible article summarising the evidence on both sides, concluding that pure feed-forward LLMs are not conscious but extended LLMs with recurrent processing (feedback loops) could be.https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/could-a-large-la...Back to Noema:>Taken together, these biases explain why it's hardly surprising that when things exhibit abilities we think of as distinctively human, such as intelligence, we naturally imbue them with other qualities we feel are characteristically or even distinctively human: understanding, mindedness and consciousness, too.A little bit of nonsense thrown in at the start but an accurate description of the problem in the end.But then it all falls apart:>The very idea of conscious AI rests on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation.Which is rather like assuming that water is a molecule made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.>More specifically, that implementing the right kind of computation, or information processing, is sufficient for consciousness to arise.Because it is.>This assumption, which philosophers call computational functionalism, is so deeply ingrained that it can be difficult to recognize it as an assumption at all.As much as the molecular structure of water is an assumption.>But that is what it is.Nope.>And if it's wrong, as I think it may be, then real artificial consciousness is fully off the table, at least for the kinds of AI we're familiar with."Kinds of AI we're familiar with"? Do you mean feed-forward models, which are definitely not conscious, or enhanced systems with feedback loops?>Challenging computational functionalism means diving into some deep waters about what computation means and what it means to say that a physical system, like a computer or a brain, computes at all. I'll summarize four related arguments that undermine the idea that computation, at least of the sort implemented in standard digital computers, is sufficient for consciousness.>First, and most important, brains are not computers.And we're dead.Brains are obviously computers and it is trivially easy to prove this.Take a line of BASIC code, like:14 PRINT 9+5What does that do?It prints 14.How do you know?Because you can execute that code in your head.How can you do that?Because your brain is a computer.It may be more than a computer, @cirnog thinks so but he is gone, presumed missing. Though I would argue that nobody has produce a coherent, let alone convincing argument for qualia, but consciousness is unquestionably a computer.There follow dozens of paragraphs of irrelevancies I won't get into, but suffice to say that it all goes downhill from there.
(DIR) Post #B2ROYqLuShVMjK3Jbs by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-19T11:09:39.566181Z
85 likes, 41 repeats
Just looked it up and holy shit it’s real!
(DIR) Post #B2XbGDlPex4gBoBvg8 by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:00:13.233357Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
Good evening poast
(DIR) Post #B2XbNKcoY1ENUqYn0C by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:01:30.274344Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Micron has bought a 300,000 square foot factory in Taiwan from Powerchip for $1.8 billion.https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microns-fab-...Powerchip manufactures DRAM, but is much smaller than Micron or even Taiwanese competitor Nanya. Micron is valued at $400 billion and is the largest pure-play memory company in the world. Nanya's market cap is now around $25 billion, and Powerchip is around a third of that.The new site is expected to be producing DRAM in volume by the second half of next year.
(DIR) Post #B2XbaiYEtyk7T0nr6W by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:03:55.956154Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
Tesla has restarted construction of it's Dojo 3 supercomputer based on the in-house AI5 chip. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomput...Also the future AI6 and AI7 chips, because the company plans to be in production of those designs before it finishes building this computer. Making it two generations obsolete before it is operating.
(DIR) Post #B2XblFTtKAGYUcn6UC by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:05:50.062284Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
pick a struggle
(DIR) Post #B2Xc1vSuzls9L2HvWa by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:08:50.805129Z
14 likes, 1 repeats
(DIR) Post #B2Xc47EmCNMwQYiYMa by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:09:14.834837Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@SuperSnekFriend Hello snek friend
(DIR) Post #B2XcnpArgm9Zj6gRiy by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:17:30.335179Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
The Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis triggered by aliens. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/bank-of-england-...Well, it's good that someone on Airstrip One can see the danger.What?Oh. The other kind of aliens.
(DIR) Post #B2XdaiSjQqPd6FM0si by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-22T11:26:20.444304Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
Firehound vibe-coded apps with known vulnerabilities, along with the number of files and database records exposed.https://firehound.covertlabs.io/And 99% of the apps analysed so far have vulnerabilities.
(DIR) Post #B2bjaA8eQLgH0Gv7pI by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-24T10:52:18.918786Z
4 likes, 0 repeats
Good evening poast.I am going to be hiding out in my insulated, double-glazed, air-conditioned bunker for a week.
(DIR) Post #B2bjtcE0DwXtc6hQbQ by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-24T10:55:50.345306Z
4 likes, 0 repeats
You can get an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, an Asus X870 motherboard, and 32GB of RAM for $939 at Newegg right now. The will even give you a bonus mouse. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/newegg-9800...That's a $480 CPU, a $300 motherboard, and memory that did cost around $100 but suddenly finds itself at $440. And a $125 mouse that isn't worth $125 or it wouldn't be included for free.Just one small problem: Asus is currently reviewing (though not recalling all of its 800-series motherboards over a string of failures specifically involving the 9800X3D CPU. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboard...ASRock has been battling this for months. It's rare, but seems to keep happening.Oh, and the faster 9850X3D is here. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-s-Ryzen-7-9850X3D-5-...It's only slightly faster, but it's only slightly more expensive. If you were planning on a 9800X3D build or upgrade an existing system that already has DDR5 RAM it's not a compelling option but not an awful one either.
(DIR) Post #B2bmDCw69lEMsjnLF2 by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-24T11:21:04.587417Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@SuperSnekFriend Your in the freezer and I am in the oven
(DIR) Post #B2eySprhCT2MCeNb6m by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-25T12:48:28.897454Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
It's like some people forgot that the target audience for shounen is young boys
(DIR) Post #B2fpMREb9sSJe5vWHQ by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:15:54.961895Z
7 likes, 2 repeats
Good evening poast
(DIR) Post #B2fqYjHhyRkR3Yo2bI by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:29:20.507157Z
8 likes, 4 repeats
Replication crisis as a service. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/You may have heard about the replication crisis science, and if you haven't, why are you here, you should know how fake and gay mainstream research is. Half of all published medical research, for example, cannot be replicated, and for preclinical trials the rate increases to four fifths.An interesting point from that Wikipedia article is that 70% of scientists have tried and failed to replicate another researcher's work, but only 20% have been contacted by another scientist trying to replicate their work.Which is perhaps by design:>This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It's fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it.Management science, huh? Bad as things are in medical research, at least they admit to baseline reality.When someone tried to correct the record on this particular paper, his efforts were not well received:>The authors ignored me, the journal refused to act, and the scholarly community looked the other way. Two universities disregarded evidence of research misconduct - even after the authors admitted publishing a misleading report.>The article remains largely uncorrected - misleading thousands of people each year.>I believe our systems for curating trustworthy science are broken and need reformation.What is needed is a latter day 1573 expulsion for all eternity, but make it stick this time. >Having received no response from the authors, I contacted Management Science. After getting advice, I submitted a comment.>It was rejected.>The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my "tone".As the article says, ah, the tone police.>The authors did admit to the editor that they had misreported a key finding - labeling it as statistically significant when it was not. The authors claimed the error was a "typo." They intended to type "not significant" but omitted the word "not".That's one hell of a typo.The story gets worse from there. And that's just a single paper out of millions.
(DIR) Post #B2fqkIbL0YTjm4VLF2 by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:31:25.962661Z
9 likes, 3 repeats
Washington state wants 3D printers and CNC milling machines to monitor everything you do and report on you if you are creating something that could be used in a firearm. https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/25/washingtons-3d-pr...Thus violating both the First and Second Amendments with a single piece of legislation. Such efficiency!
(DIR) Post #B2frClVL8jPfWaGyR6 by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:36:34.662008Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
>Google won't stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI. https://archive.is/XiPAjThe Verge may have gone full-blown retard but on this they are not wrong. Google is sometimes completely reversing the meaning of tech articles in its AI summaries.
(DIR) Post #B2fs9twNPzJSm37KXw by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:47:15.493053Z
6 likes, 3 repeats
A New York startup has built a machine that produces gasoline from air.https://www.jalopnik.com/2083556/new-york-startup-buil...Which is perfectly possible, just not very efficient. After all, dinosaurs breathed air, and all our gasoline comes from liquified dinosaurs.It takes carbon dioxide and water vapour from the air, electrolyses the water, and combines them to create methanol. Then it goes through a series of more complicated process to turn the methanol into usable fuel.The device costs an estimated $20,000, and if you have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas costs around $1.50, though the article doesn't mention exactly how this was calculated.Since you probably don't have a free source of electricity, a gallon of gas will actually cost between $10 and $30, which is why dinosaurs always win.
(DIR) Post #B2fswVeWVbtjdTwdAO by Aether@poa.st
2026-01-26T10:56:02.136513Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@Crux_Invictus @dankumimusu I have seen this movie, was to much of a deviation from the book imho