207
points
HAL3000
Joined 434 karma
- I think your entire analysis is based more on a hunch than on data. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
US is 9th, so the south alone would rank even lower.
- > If they're not available, then I can't consider them an option?
Who knows where you live and what options you have? Who knows what you considered? Maybe that's why the question was asked?
> I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Charging infra have nothing to do with their cars besides maybe the US. They are barely leading in anything anymore, especially in countries with heavy EV competition, like China. When I was in China this year, I saw Teslas everywhere, but most of them were a few years old. Most of the new cars were Chinese EV brands, and they seemed better on most metrics in the same segment, which included quality. They're losing market share in the EU and worldwide.
- > Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle.
Where did you get that? That's not an established scientific theorem, it's a philosophical stance (strong physicalist functionalism) expressed as if it were empirical fact. We cannot simulate a full human brain at the correct level of detail, record every spike and synaptic change in a living human brain and we do not have a theory that predicts which neural organizations are conscious just from first principles of physics and network topology.
> We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain
That shows dependence of experience on brain activity but dependence is not the same thing as reduction or explanation. We know certain neural patterns correlate with pain, color vision, memories, etc. we can causally influence experience by interacting with the brain.
But why any of this electrical/chemical stuff is accompanied by subjective experience instead of just being a complex zombie machine? The ability to toggle experiences by toggling neurons shows connection and that's it, it doesn't explain anything.
> We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston.
We do have a good handle on how non conscious physical systems behave (engines, circuits, planets, whatever) But we don't have any widely accepted physical theory that derives subjective experience from physical laws. We don't know which physical/computational structures (if any) are sufficient and necessary for consciousness.
You are assuming without any evidence that current physics + it's "all computation" already gives a complete ontology of mind. So what is the consciousness? define it with physics, show me equations, you can't.
> It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go.
We design transformer architectures, we set the training objectives, we can inspect every weight and activation of a LLM. Yet even with all that access, tens of thousands of ML PhDs,years of work and we still don't fully understand why these models generalize the way they do, why they develop certain internal representations and how exactly particular concepts are encoded and combined.
If we struggle to interpret a ~10^11 parameter transformer whose every bit we can log and replay, it's a REAL hubris to act like we've basically got a 10^14-10^15 synapse constantly rewiring, developmentally shaped biological network to the point of confidently saying "we know there's nothing more to mind than this, case closed lol".
Our ability to observe and manipulate the brain is currently far weaker than our ability to inspect artificial nets and even those are not truly understood at a deep mechanistic concept level explanatory sense.
> Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information.
Ok but then you have a problem, if anything that processes information is a computer, and mind is "just computation" then which computations are conscious?
Is my laptop conscious when it runs a big simulation? Is a weather model conscious? Are all supercomputers conscious by default just because they flip bits at scale?
If you say yes, you've gone to an extreme pancomputationalism that most people (including most physicalists) find extremely implausible.
If you say no, then you owe a non hand wavy criterion, what's the principled difference, in purely physical/computational terms between a conscious system (human brain) and a non conscious but still massively computational system (weather simulation, supercomputer cluster)? That criterion is exactly the kind of thing we don't have yet.
So saying "it’s just computation" without specifying which computations and why they give rise to a first person point of view leaves the fundamental question unanswered.
And one more thing your gasoline analogy is misleading, combustion never presented a "hard problem of combustion" in the sense of a first person, irreducible qualitative aspect. People had wrong physical theories, but once chemistry was in place, everything was observable from the outside.
Consciousness is different, you can know all the physical facts about a brain state and still not obviously see why it should feel like anything at all from the inside.
That's why even hardcore physicalist philosophers talk about the "explanatory gap". Whether or not you think it's ultimately bridgeable, it's not honest to say the gap is already closed and the scientific explanation is "sufficient".
- > It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
- All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.
- You are purposely misinterpreting what he wrote. He said that it doesn’t matter how you die, it shouldn’t whitewash you. If you were radical and widely considered dangerous to the fabric of society, your death doesn’t magically absolve you of that or erase everything you said while alive.
- > I'm saying the left has a bigger problem with violent rhetoric and actions
Here is some data that seems to say something different. It was posted as a response to Musk’s comment, "The Left is the party of murder."
https://x.com/SocDoneLeft/status/1965887912530293069
Btw It’s really crazy to read what a person who has 225M followers on X writes when he replies "Exactly" directly to claim that people who fund the Left, like Bill Gates, are murderers.
- > possible revolutionary products ahead.
Which products? EVs are a commodity. Self driving technology is better at Waymo, and in China, the latest Huawei version of self driving, installed in Avatar cars, is on par with Tesla’s and even better in some cases. What’s left? The Optimus robot? Unitree from China and Boston Dynamics (owned by Toyota), are ahead of Tesla. Not to mention the hundreds of startups in China working on the same thing, all using essentially the same transformer based architecture with only minor tweaks. There’s no moat this time. What Tesla still excels at is marketing and hype, but even that has its limits.
- > gpt5 has always been about making a "collection of models" work together and not about model++.
No, it wasn’t. Have you read and listened to Altman’s hype around GPT-5 from a year ago? They changed the narration after the 4.1 flop, which they thought would be GPT-5, and it seems some people fell for it.
> Capabilities ~90-110% of their top tier old models at 4-6x lower price
Maybe they finally implemented the DeepSeek paper.
- > TSMC has bomb damage and Taiwan is blockaded
For anyone familiar with Chinese culture, history, and mindset, and who views China through that lens rather than a Western one, the probability of this is lower than the probability of Intel’s collapsing entirely in the next two years.
“Supreme excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“Victory without unsheathing the blade.”
“If swords are clashing, strategy has already failed.”
- Maybe there is a misconception about what his blog is about. You should treat it more like a YouTuber reporting, not an expert evaluation, more like an enthusiast testing different models and reiterating some points about them, but not giving the opinions of an expert or ML professional. His comment history on this topic in this forum clearly shows this.
It’s reasonable that he might be a little hyped about things because of his feelings about them and the methodology he uses to evaluate models. I assume good faith, as the HN guidelines propose, and this is the strongest plausible interpretation of what I see in his blog.
- > So your definition of memory safety includes some notion of "plausible" and "realistic"? Neither https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/ nor Wikipedia have such a qualification in their definition. It would help if you could just spell out your definition in full, rather than having us guess.
This is a strawman argument, you're arguing semantics here. You're a smart person, so you know exactly what he means. The perception created by your article is that people shouldn't use Go because it's not memory-safe. But the average developer hearing "not memory-safe" thinks of C/C++ level issues, with RCEs everywhere.
Unless you can show a realistic way this could be exploited for RCE in actual programs, you're just making noise. Further down the thread, you admit yourself that you're in a PLT research bubble and it shows.
- Thinking that doing something like that will stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is naive. It's not a technical challenge for them, it's a political decision, only a political decision. If they really wanted to, they would already have it. Enriched material was transported from these centers some time ago, as news outlets have already reported.
As for the facts, and not just the narrative: 60% enrichment is not considered weapons-grade enrichment, and it is not illegal under the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Therefore, today's attack is an illegal act of aggression against another country, violating international law. Those are the facts.
- Who knows but have you read what OP wrote?
"I just used o3 to design a distributed scheduler that scales to 1M+ sxchedules a day. It was perfect, and did better than two weeks of thought around the best way to build this."
Anyone with 10 years in distributed systems at FAANG doesn’t need two weeks to design a distributed scheduler handling 1M+ schedules per day, that’s a solved problem in 2025 and basically a joke at that scale. That alone makes this person’s story questionable, and his comment history only adds to the doubt.
- The US seems to be so far behind. For example, in Poland, Europe, you've had online instant bank payments for over 10 years. You’d go to a merchant’s site, click 'pay with my bank,' and an OAuth-like mechanism would log you into your bank to confirm the payment. Now it’s even easier with the introduction of BLIK, which lets you pay in shops, online, etc. Online payments are super simple: you click 'pay with BLIK' on a merchant’s site, go to your bank app (web or mobile), click the BLIK icon, and get a six-digit code valid for 60–180 seconds. You enter that code on the merchant site, and your mobile app shows 'Do you want to pay [xxx amount] to [merchant Y]?' You click yes, and that’s it.
- 1 point
- It appears that you are the only person in this discussion making many incorrect assumptions. Based on your comments, I would assume you are actually googling those papers based on their abstracts. Your last linked paper has flawed methodology for what it attempts to demonstrate, as shown in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477 The tests you're requesting are provided within the previously linked papers. I'm not sure what you want. Do you expect people to copy and paste entire papers here that show methodology and describe experiments? You wrote, "I'm asking you to define 'real reasoning'," which is actually defined in the blog post linked earlier in this discussion. In fact, the entire blog post is about this topic. It appears that you are not thoroughly reading the material. Your replies resemble those of a human stochastic parrot.
- It appears that they do not contradict that definition. Please read this article, where you can find the definitions in the context of the crime of apartheid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid
There is a section there about definition of racial discrimination, it's not only about race.
"According to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD),
the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.[17]
This definition does not make any difference between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.[18] Similarly, in British law the phrase racial group means "any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin"
- I'm not sure I agree with you, in the Humans Right report and Amnesty International report they clearly show evidence for systemic apartheid. Also former UN chief says Israel’s treatment of Palestinians may constitute apartheid [2].
Overview[1]:
"Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive governments have created and maintained a system of laws, policies, and practices designed to oppress and dominate Palestinians. This system plays out in different ways across the different areas where Israel exercises control over Palestinians’ rights, but the intent is always the same: to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
Israeli authorities have done this through four main strategies:
Fragmentation into domains of control
At the heart of the system is keeping Palestinian separated from each other into distinct territorial, legal and administrative domains
Dispossession of land and property
Decades of discriminatory land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions
Segregation and control
A system of laws and policies that keep Palestinians restricted to enclaves, subject to several measures that control their lives, and segregated from Jewish Israelis
Deprivation of economic & social rights
The deliberate impoverishment of Palestinians keeping them at great disadvantage in comparison to Jewish Israelis"
1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
2. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-occupation-ap...
- As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Building support for a coup takes time and must be justified by a pattern of behavior from your opponent, not just a single action. Extensive backchanneling and one-on-one discussions are necessary to gauge where others stand, share your perspective, demonstrate how the person in question is acting against the organization's interests, and seek their support. Initially, this support is not for the coup, but rather to ensure alignment of views. Then, when something significant happens, everything is already in place. You've been waiting for that one decisive action to pull the trigger, which is why everything then unfolds so quickly.
https://youtu.be/CbHeh7qwils?t=437