indiv0 · HackerTrans

15 दिन पहलेdiscuss

That’s a fair point. I wouldn’t want to take machine god’s proclamations on faith either. I’d prefer it if the knowledge was always within our grasp. There is also a possible middle ground where we don’t understand the questions or the answers but we still benefit from the effects of the application of that knowledge. “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and all that. Hopefully we can still judge the results based on the effects. Rejecting a call to genocide should be easy enough, but on the other hand the Native Americans couldn’t foresee what the smallpox blankets would do to them. Working from a position where you are the weaker side of a knowledge gap is a scary thought. It’s a rational fear and I think a lot of people will end up on that side of the divide if AI continues to advance.

indiv0

15 दिन पहलेdiscuss

My instinct is to agree with you. I believe that the drive to a deeper understanding of the problems is what helps us unlock new areas of study, and find opportunities to transfer techniques or bridge otherwise unconnected domains.

But let’s consider a hypothetical: what if an intuitive understanding of the true “boundaries” of mathematics (if such things exist) is beyond the capabilities of a human mind? If there truly is no way to simplify some proofs down from 200,000 line incomprehensible gibberish to something you could teach to a high schooler or undergraduate or even a PhD. Is the proof still worthless? Sure, at the moment, it might be. Finding such a proof and understanding the implications of it are different skills, the latter of which AI almost certainly does not possess at the moment. But there may come a time where the AI can view the bigger picture and make the leaps you described (say, an eka-Calculus from an eka-unit-circle). These leaps may be as unintelligible to us as the proof in OP is.

I guess the question is: assuming that we can’t make the proof beautiful enough to spark deeper human understanding, do we still want it if it sparks deeper AI understanding?

Personally I would hate to live in a universe where the boundaries of science are beyond intuitive human understanding, but I think it’s almost certainly the case. The idea that the rules are all within our grasp reeks of anthropocentrism to me. I would love for the universe to prove me wrong though. It’d be a pleasant, hilarious coincidence if they do fit within the boundaries of our understanding.

indiv0

18 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Been kicking around a similar idea in the back of my mind from the first moment "functional core / imperative shell" [0] and "sans-IO" [1] infected my brain. I've been chasing that high ever since.

Unfortunately, whenever I try to apply this pattern 100%, I hit all kinds of walls: language isn't expressive enough to support what I want; the amount of wiring/glue to support it becomes a burden; the resulting code is spaghetti because the "declaration of intent" lives too far from "implementation of the intent"; "oops I invented my Nth leaky DSL"; and so on and so on. Part of the problem is certainly my own capabilities as a developer as well.

I can't help but fantasize about the platonic ideal of a "perfect" system where all that nasty evil I/O is banished to the Shadow Realm and I can frolic in the Fields of Idempotency and Reproduciblity -- one of these days I'll bite the bullet and try Haskell.

Nowadays I aim for 80% "perfection", and only in the areas where it matters. In addition, instead of effects I rely more on "reduce complexity as much as possible", which is (frustratingly) much harder to put into practice than "use X library/pattern to solve all problems". Though if I can model the system as a state machine and proptest it [2], that usually gets me where I want to be.

Though my soul feels like I just woke up from a dream where I was perfectly content, and now I'm back in the real world with all of its imperfections [3].

---

As for your specific project, it heavily reminds me of the Crux [4] model, which is itself inspired by Elm [5]. Also Flawless [6]. I wish you the best of luck with it.

[0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...

[1]: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-case-for-sans-io

[2]: https://sled.rs/simulation.html

[3]: https://xkcd.com/224/

[4]: https://github.com/redbadger/crux#architectural-overview

[5]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/

[6]: https://flawless.dev/

indiv0

19 दिन पहलेdiscuss

You're not wrong, but if I'm talking to a Chinese Room, I'm still going to use pronouns and all sorts of meatbag-specific language. It doesn't matter if there really is a real person on the other end or not -- it's easier for me to just default to the assumption that there is. Monkey brain gonna anthropomorphize.

On the other hand if I try to talk to Facebook, all he says in response is "200 OK".

indiv0

19 दिन पहलेdiscuss

> music is basically a greenfield for AI wherever you look

AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH.

My girlfriend is studying musicology and she has some physical disabilities that make it difficult for her to write things down sometimes. So I try to help her by writing some AI-powered TTS/OCR/etc. apps here and there. It becomes painfully obvious that music was never considered an important part of any AI training dataset, anywhere.

These days, I'm pleasantly surprised by how well Opus 4.8 understands/explains music theory (as you said). But ask him to transcribe/OCR/OMR some sheet music and he'll confidently give you the MusicXML/Lilypond equivalent of "2 + 2 = horse".

I really hope this ignored area will be swept up with the rest of the rising AI wave, but it's still criminally undervalued.

indiv0

20 दिन पहलेdiscuss

My gut reaction is "I wish they'd just get to the point". Tbf some people would probably react the same way to my issue thread on the bug that I hit [0].

[0]: https://github.com/mnemosyne-proj/mnemosyne/issues/99

indiv0

21 दिन पहलेdiscuss

This thread will become a typical "haha slop company made slop" but I've been bitten by a bug exactly like this before in a (pre-AI, artisan) OSS project. The maintainer there didn't properly account for DST when calculating last backup time, so the app started and never stopped writing/re-writing backups continuously.

Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?

Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.

indiv0

23 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Can I get his decipher-forgotten-ancient-text skill? I want to try my hand at the Voynich Manuscript

indiv0

28 दिन पहलेdiscuss

GP wasn’t asking how you gauge their tone. They were asking how would you classify the tone of the comment they were replying to. The implication being “I wasn’t the first with a condescending tone”.

indiv0

2 माह पहलेdiscuss

Eventually even a system like that can be gamed, similarly to how Leetcode-maxxing and the like sprung up in response to typical SV interview questions. Studying for the job becomes studying for the test becomes studying for the pre-test test.

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