The marketplace is a terrible mechanism for truth-finding except for all the others. What's your proposed alternative that doesn't just relocate the problem to whoever gets to be the arbiter?
A trillion in a money market fund @ 5% is 50B/year.
Over the course of a few years (so as to not drive up the price of politicians too quickly) one could buy the top N politicians from most countries. From there on out your options are many.
After a decade or so you can probably have your trillion back.
I really do like this answer, but it would seem to have the property of being anti-inductive in that the cost for current politicians is so low because nobody is doing it at scale but if someone did that would force other people to ... well, it's an interesting thought experiment at least!
After implementing a behaviour tree library and realising the power of select & sequence I found myself wondering why they aren’t used more widely.
I’ve never done anything in crypto but watched in horror as people created immutable contracts with essentially Javascript programs. Surely it would be much easier to reason about/verify scripts written as a behaviour tree with a library of queries and actions. Even being able to limit the scope of modifications would be a win.
I believe your comment pattern matches to the classic comment 9224, was the point I was making. Yes, this might be easy for you.
> an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..
> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
But the whole point of the blog post is that a person who didn't know how to do it did the thing. If the thing is the goal, they succeeded. They now have a thing they didn't have before, after not knowing how to do that thing. A new capability was unlocked by the LLM.
Microsoft is saying they're generating 30% of their code now and there's clearly been a lot of stability issues with Windows 11 recently that they've publicly acknowledged. It's not hard to tell a story that involves layoffs, increased pressure to ship more code, AI tools, and software quality issues. You can make subtle jabs about your peers as much as you want but that isn't going to change public perception when you ship garbage.
The whole point is that the outages happened not that the ai code caused them. If ai is so useful/amazing then these outages should be less common not more. It’s obviously not rock solid evidence. Yeah ai could be useful and speed up or even improve a code base but there isn’t any evidence that that’s actually improving anything the only real studies point to imagined productivity improvements
> A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences.
So like a Claude Code session?
The code persists as symbols with stable identity. The tests provide direct feedback. Claude tracks what it wrote versus what I changed - it needs identity to distinguish its actions from mine. It forms hypotheses about what will fix the failing tests, implements them, and immediately experiences whether it was right or wrong.
The terminal environment gives it exactly the "stable substrate where 'being someone' is definable" you're asking for.
I tend to look at consciousness as a spectrum. And when we reduce it to a binary (is it conscious?), we're actually asking whether it meets some minimum threshold of whatever the smallest creature you have empathy for is.
So yeah, Claude Code is more conscious than raw GPT. And both probably less than my dog.
Okay, you're right. There is a world, and some hypotheses, and some falsifiability.
But how rich is this world?
Does this world progress without direct action from another entity? Can the agent in this case form hypotheses and test them without intervention? Can the agent form their own goals and move towards them? Does the agent have agency, or is it simply responding to inputs?
If the world doesn’t develop and change on its own, and the agent can’t act independently, is it really an inhabited world? Or just a controlled workspace?
If you accept the premise that the consciousness is computable then pausing the computation can't be observed by the consciousness. So the world being a controlled workspace in my eyes doesn't contradict a consciousness existing?
I also agree. GP wrote: "It's a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens" which poses an interesting visual. Perhaps there is something like a proto-consciousness while the LLM is executing and determining the next token. But it would not experience time, would be unaware of every other token outside of its context, and it fades away as soon as a new instance takes its place.
Maybe it could be a very abstract, fleeting, and 1-dimensional consciousness (text, but no time). But I feel even that is a stretch when thinking about the energy flowing through gates in a GPU for some time. Maybe it's 1 order above whatever consciousness a rock or a star might have. Actually I take that back - a star has far more matter and dynamicism than an H100, so the star is probably more conscious.
I agree, evaluation of consciousness is another problem entirely.
However, the point I'm making is that even assuming an agent/thing is capable of achieving consciousness, it would have to have a suitably complex environment and the capability of forming an independent feedback loop with that environment to even begin to display conscious capability.
If the agent/thing is capable of achieving consciousness but is not in a suitable environment, then we'd likely never see it doing things that resemble consciousness as we understand it. Which is something we have seen occur in the real world many times.
The fact that it's a hugely complicated yet nevertheless completely abstract machine of pure logic which isn't running in the thought experiment's universe of pure text but within our phenomenally complex universe of meat and stuff riddled with paradoxes.
> There are 4 children in our village at the "local" primary school
Four?
How... What?
How does any of this actually work (you clearly live there, so it obviously does?) That seems like you're living somewhere that's just like ... empty? How do any services/infrastructure/... How many old people live in this village?
Is this the demographic collapse people are going on about?
That sounds like the village in which I spent my teens. Population of ~500, and for <18s there was myself, my sibling, and there was a "new" housing estate had a handful of kids around 5.
We didn't have nice paths, there was a (former) main road going through the middle of the village. As far as local infrastructure, there was the pub, a car mechanic, and every few years a corner shop would open up and last about 2-3 years before shutting down again.
If you needed groceries you went to the larger village (population ~1000) which was about a 40 minute walk along the main road (which only got dedicated pavements after I had moved out), or a 5 minute drive. For amenities that larger village had 2 bars, 2 churches, a takeaway, a supermarket, a primary school and a garden centre.
If you needed anything more than groceries, you needed to go to one of the nearby towns which were ~20-30 minutes by car and (according to google maps) ~2 hours walk.
That's about here, although the town is only a 10 minute drive.
And people moan that some kids get taxis to school, because the government has decided that it's not worth operating a school closer than 5 miles, but when you need to shift 2 people you don't put on a minibus.
There's only two primary schools within 10 miles which have fewer than 50 pupils on the (7 year) roll though, it's not an overly rural area. I suspect townies would have palpitations when they find out about state boarding schools, because if you live on Tresco you can't commute to the high school every day
I'm very aware of that, yes. There needs to be a good process, the current situation where AWS simply does not care, or doesn't know also isn't particularly good. One solution could be for victims to notify AWS that a number of specified IP are generating an excessive amount of traffic. An operator could then verify with AWS traffic logs, notify the customer that they are causing issue and only after a failure to respond could the customer be shut down.
You're not wrong that abuse would be a massive issue, but I'm on the other side of this and need Amazon to do something, anything.
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