roystgnr
4hr ago
Israel/Palestine conflict was an American lefty thing to worry about too. In the MetaFilter heyday around 2010 it was (along with declawing cats and male circumcision) recognized as one of the "third rail" topics that could be expected to start heated fights on that (American-centric, though leftist enough to feel ashamed of that) forum.
roystgnr
4hr ago
This one was a real nail-biter
As a bet, maybe. As a live-stream, not by their standards.
They set the nail-biter bar way too high in the last 10 minutes of their first controlled reentry, Flight 4, starting at around T+57:11, when you can see the back side of a forward flap start to glow. The live-stream stops swapping between 3 other cameras and now focuses solely on The Flap as it's torn completely through by the plasma intrusion.
Fifteen seconds later I'm seeing whole thermal protection tiles ripped off into the slipstream ... but it's still going. At T+58 I'm warning my kids that that plasma temperature is thousands of degrees and the video is probably about to stop abruptly when the whole ship explodes, but so far it's still going. At T+59 I'm squinting because the lens cover is partially obscured by spatters of what must have been molten steel, but it's still going. Just before T+1:00 the video does stop abruptly, and I'm sure the thing is dead ... and 5 seconds later it's back, still going. 2 minutes later we lose video again, for 40 seconds this time, but just as I'm wondering if we're merely seeing telemetry from a falling black box amidst wreckage, ship video comes back; it's still going. Soon it looks like it's nose down, surely too far to be a maneuver, probably out of aerodynamic control ... until, though the cracked and splattered camera cover, you see a near-skeleton of a flap actuate again, and the ship levels off, 15km up, still going. At T+1:04:07 the host literally says "This is a nail-biter!" Ship's slowing to subsonic, but still plummeting into the Indian Ocean night, video pure black, telemetry hitting 1km altitude and surely about to end with a dead belly-flop into the water ... but then the black is lit up by engine light, the flap is clearly visible (minus what looks like half its heat shield and a quarter of its structure), the ship flips sharply and stabilizes at vertical, and water spray fills the view for a moment as the ship comes to a stop.
At T+1:06:06, the ship tips into the water post-splashdown, and the decimated-but-still-working flap appears to tear loose, job complete and permission to die finally granted.
roystgnr
5hr ago
In every rational market the reaction of prices to news doesn't hinge on "is this news good" versus "is this news bad", but rather on "is this news better than expected" versus "is this news worse than expected". This was their best v3 launch so far, even aside from it being their first operational launch, but I'm not surprised if it's not the best by as far as the market was expecting. Flight 12 had 2 engine shutdowns on ascent, but massive (dozens of) relight failures on the boostback and landing burns, Flight 13 had an aborted ascent but then had a fine ascent on their second try and had slightly-less-massive (boostback shutdown when only 80% done, fewer but still too many landing burn engine failures) failures on the relights. Flight 14 had only recoverable failures (2 engines shutdown on ascent, 4 relights aborted on boostback and landing), but it still had enough failures that they didn't risk completing the full planned testing phase of the mission, and I wouldn't be surprised if investors had been hoping for a little better than that. There's now a good chance that SpaceX won't even try for another catch on Flight 15, of ship or of booster much less both.
Getting satellites into orbit is huge, though. They're still not getting the payload margins they want (they launched 26 Starlink v3s from a ship that's supposed to be able to do 60 eventually), but what they did get to orbit is roughly 3 times the mass and 10 times the additional bandwidth capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch, which is a pretty nice start.
IMHO the biggest question right now is cadence. They've been doing v3 Starship launches every 2 months since Flight 12, but before this flight they were talking about NET October 19 for Flight 15 and (in a "super provisional" schedule) October 30 for Flight 16, the first Starship launch from Florida. I'm sure those will be delayed, but I'm hoping it'll be delays of weeks rather than months.
roystgnr
8hr ago
You beat me to it; thanks! I'm trying to actually get work done and not just get nerd-sniped by the livestream, so I missed the deorbit burn too. Looks like it went fine, thankfully; they're nearly down to 100km now and probably 5 or 10 minutes away from hitting atmosphere.
roystgnr
8hr ago
Aaaand ... they're going to bring it down early. Aiming at the Northern Pacific contingency zone for splashdown, after a deorbit burn, about an hour from now, for a total time in orbit of only 3 hours instead of 8.5. Not sure whether this means they actually are seeing sensor readings that suggest the relight will be riskier than they'd expected, or whether they're just having the same "if this goes wrong it'll be literally the biggest failure of its kind ever" thoughts I outlined above and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.
roystgnr
9hr ago
Starship Flight 14 is in orbit; it's just finished deploying satellites as I type. Looks like @TheDag won his bet with @ArjinFerman, with about 3 months to go. Recent discussion of this and other bets.
IMHO I'm still on track to lose my bet with Arjin, though there's three years left for things to get more interesting there. Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.
An early engine shutdown or two (they had one on the booster too) isn't the end of the world for the ascent - they carry extra fuel reserves for that contingency, and just keep the other engines lit a little longer if it happens - but it does mean a higher chance that the most exciting potential failure here is still to come. Starship did go to orbit, but we have yet to learn for certain whether Starship should have gone to orbit. They're hoping to do about 8 more hours of orbital coasting, then relight an upper stage engine for a deorbit burn. They also get to a "checkpoint" every hour or two where they can do an early deorbit burn and an early controlled reentry over ocean if they anticipate any issues with the full-length mission. But, if there's anything wrong with the upper stage that prevents the relight, then instead of another nice reentry and splashdown, we'll have the largest individual vehicle to make orbit (at least 25% heavier than the Shuttle orbiter, and something like a quarter the mass of the entire International Space Station after all its individual parts were assembled) stuck in orbit, eventually reentering out-of-control. This would be the largest event ever of that nature (Skylab was maybe 75% the mass of the Starship orbiter) and would be by far the largest recent event (the series of irresponsibly-littered Long March 5B upper stages were something like 20% the mass of Starship).
roystgnr
1d ago
I'm waiting for the F in FSD to expand past the RoboTaxis. I'd love to just read a book while software does all my driving, but AFAIK that's not allowed yet, and if I have to watch the road anyway I might as well have fun and stay more attentive by driving while I do.
roystgnr
3d ago
and I mean this in a good-spirited way, I appreciate your detailed response
I still fear we've identified areas of disagreement that we're not going to make any more progress on, but I've got to get one last word in just to express agreement (with reversed meanings for "I" and "your") here. What you had to say was interesting and it was kind of you to keep going this deeply into it.
roystgnr
3d ago
Wait a second ... where's the Boston branch of CPUSA? Even if they don't tweet these days, they're still active on Facebook, and yet their ongoing condemnations of genocide there have failed to mention the unmasking of the pro-genocide newspaper right in their own home town!
Is this just an understandable delay in CPUSAB posting, because even the most diligent modern Communists don't wake up for work until 10am (of the following week)? Or is there a real schism here, with Purges coming soon? I'm just saying it might be a lucky coincidence for the WMCPUSA that REI's Boston location closed last month; it's suddenly much harder for CPUSAB members to get their hands on an ice axe on short notice.
roystgnr
3d ago
Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.
Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.
roystgnr
3d ago
Remember that time when humanity hadn't invented guns yet, and conquerors built pyramids of skulls from tens of thousands of their victims? Sorry: times, plural; there were like half a dozen cases.
Homicide levels in general are much lower post-gunpowder than they were pre-, probably mostly but not entirely for other reasons. Guns are obviously tragically useful for committing atrocities, but they have played direct and more-indirect roles in reducing atrocities too. It's not at all obvious to me what the net impact has been, even to kids; IIRC one of those conquerors helpfully sorted their pyramids into men's, women's, and children's skulls, for extra psychological-warfare power.
I also thought "Brave New World" was great. Controlling people by oppressing them a la "1984" makes for more exciting reading, but controlling people by distracting them feels far more prescient in hindsight.
roystgnr
3d ago
Do you understand the difference between a neural network and a nervous system?
Feel free to explain it! I understand that the latter is a network of components that take input signals and output functions of them, and the former is a network of components that take input values and output functions of them and is in the limit a universal approximator which can reproduce any continuous function to arbitrary accuracy (or any Lᵖ function, if you weaken the norm from L ᪲ to Lᵖ), and that ability seems like a similarity that outweighs all differences. But I'm guessing you don't think it's relevant? But the things you bring up as important don't all seem relevant to me! For instance, to another interlocutor:
which operate via sodium channels
Universal approximators and Turing completeness are relevant because they point at limits of what a system can and cannot do. If there was something a nervous system can do that no neural network ever can, that could be extremely important! But "Sodium channels" aren't important for pain, they're a contingent development of evolving on a planet loaded with handy sodium chloride. If we discovered alien life that had evolved to think via lithium chemistry, instead, would you say "Aha! They can't possibly feel pain!" Surely you wouldn't, right? Sodium was irrelevant. On the other hand: what if our alien life had evolved to think via semiconductors? Here I confess I'm not confident of your answer at all.
we can be confident that large language models cannot feel pain because they also lack the correct equipment.
This is more interesting, at least in the context of your noting they don't have nociceptors. That does seem like very important equipment; would you say it's fair to claim that things can't feel pain without pain receptors? And we definitely haven't tried to mimic those the way we've tried to mimic the nervous system, and that's definitely evidence that LLMs are less likely to feel pain. But, we have seen pain receptors completely bypassed, both experimentally (sending pain signals directly to animal spines via electrodes) and medically (in central neuropathic pain patients; "your brain can in theory feel pain detached from the body" is tragic observation, not hypothetical theory), so it's not perfect evidence. It is strong evidence that any sort of pain in a current or near-future AI is likely to be more "emotional" than "physical" in some sense, if there's no physical pain processing that can go wrong ... but that's honestly only slight consolation IMHO; I've felt a lot of emotional pain and a lot of physical pain at different times in the past and there was usually less suffering involved in the latter.
Bats are built to fly! Pigs are not.
Neither LLMs nor animals are built to feel pain. LLMs are built to reduce loss functions from training, animals are built to reproduce more successfully. The latter sometimes leads to the evolution of pain as an instrumental goal. Will the former? Maybe not, but it's not a-priori impossible.
Pain is a phenomenon that arises in humans and animals with the correct equipment to perceive pain. It does not arise in a rock.
Sure it does. The rock we know of is called "Earth", and after a few billion years it developed subsystems like you and me which started perceiving pain. The universe is really weird stuff. Arguments from incredulity generally do not work here.
We have a pretty good idea of how pain signals work, and that's via meat.
That's how pain signals in meat work, but that's a tautology, not valid reasoning. "∃ A such that p(A), B ≠ A, therefore ¬p(B)" is not a valid syllogism!
if you think non-meat can feel pain, then you don't just believe meat is beyond science, you believe matter is beyond science
This is also not valid deductive logic. The principle of explosion sucks, I'm afraid.
You believe pain is not something that arises from a very specific arrangement of matter despite the vast amount of research and personal experience in your own life showing it to be so
Pain definitely arises from very specific arrangements of matter; there's just no reason those arrangements have to include sodium channels or any of the other accidents of meat, rather than e.g. transistors. Your alternative conclusion does sound like pretty good inductive reasoning, but unlike deductive reasoning, induction (in the colloquial and Bayesian- senses, not the axiom-of- sense) can lead us to falsehoods and too-often does. Ironically our best option is usually to use induction to estimate the strength or weakness of particular applications of induction; let's try that here. For eons the only thing that could look at a bird and identify it was meat. For thousands of years the only thing that could come up with a novel mathematical proof was meat. For all of human history up until the last couple years the only thing that could pass a Turing test was meat; for 90% of the time since Turing the only thing that could even generate novel sentences barely approximating proper English was meat. For a century the only thing that could drive a car through unfamiliar surroundings was meat. Half my lifetime ago, the answer to "can a robot write a symphony" was obviously going to be "no" for an indefinite meat-composers-only future; today it's "yes, and the results get better every six months". For a while the only artists who could draw hands without screwing up the fingers were made of meat, and overly-inductive types thought that was a great "tell" to memorize because of how long it was surely going to be relevant, and yet 4 or 5 years later it's just historical trivia. When I was a little kid chess was still supposed to be a signifier of the ineffable je ne sais quoi of human intelligence; can you believe it? It seems silly now, but to be fair, humanity had been using non-meat to play chess for decades, and none of the non-meat could ever come close to winning a major tournament; there was a vast amount of research and civilizational experience behind that belief!
It has since been observed, in these and many other ways, that applying inductive reasoning in the form "when only meat has ever been observed to X, it means non-meat cannot X" fails. It fails badly, and it has failed repeatedly. If you're still using this reasoning anyway, and so confidently, then I think we've hit the crux here, and might not be able to get past it; I'm sorry.
This is not an argument that requires any mystical priors: we cannot know what it is like to be a shark, either.
I agree, but I'd go even further: I cannot even know what it is like to be you! I know there are people whose neurons developed differently enough that their qualia are not the same as my qualia, in major and in subtle ways, so I can't make the tempting generalization of "yeah, humans are all just like me" ... but without some generalization you guys might all be sitting next to the LLMs in the "p-zombie" class for all I know, right? No form of solipsism is satisfying, and (like you, apparently? kudos!) I'm a huge fan of virtue-ethics solutions as a good backstop for morality even in weird/extreme cases, but I still think others' qualia are important and it's annoying that they seem to be philosophically immune to direct observation rather than inference from indirect observations.
Philosophical issues aside, I'm strongly in favor of even the practical indirect observations on AIs in part because of the shark problem. There are animals whose nervous systems we don't think feel pain, whose pain receptors seem to be just to connect bad-stimulus to immediate-withdrawal, the way our reflexes kick in before our pain does ... but those animals are things like flatworms, with nervous systems much simpler than modern AIs. Pain was so useful and evolved so fast (relative to the rest of our evolution, anyway) that sharks and humans probably inherited the same mechanism from the same common ancestors! We're probably not currently altering and selecting modern AIs in such a way as to evolve pain in them, but how sure are we of that? How awful would it be if that belief is wrong, or if we later change our training methods so that it becomes wrong? It's a bit of a shame when we cause pain in e.g. insects, but the rest of their minds are so feeble that it's not hard for me to feel comfortable guessing that their qualia are similarly negligible in some sense, and they certainly can't argue otherwise. That will not be an available rationalization if we do start causing pain in frontier AI.
roystgnr
3d ago
It's called a "nervous system" and LLMs do not have it.
(All modern) LLMs do have neural networks. The frontier ones these days have about as many inter-neuron connections as a small mammal.
LLMs are software performing math on a physical computer.
Yup. Your brain is software-equivalent, performing mathematically describable operations, on physical meat. Your firmware needs hardware to run, and only feels pain while it's running; even if we could make a perfect scan of your brain, it wouldn't actually continue to feel anything unless it could be reinstantiated on some hardware again. A running LLM, like a brain, is a physical object, not just software.
If the physical part of an LLM feels pain, then it doesn't need an LLM - your computer is feeling pain when it suffers from an overtemperature warning because you've been playing Crysis or whatever.
Yeah, it's not physical damage. We can dull or even eliminate human pain without reducing or eliminating the damage it signals, and we can signal real damage in more simple ways that don't involve pain, and we can create pain without creating corresponding damage.
If the math part of an LLM feels pain, then Magic: The Gathering can feel pain, since the game is Turing complete.
In a running game? Yup! It sounds crazy that cards could feel pain, but it's no crazier than the fact that other configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons can feel pain. Nerd-powered cardboard is a pretty wild substrate, but so is ATP-powered meat. You'd probably need several orders of magnitude less than an octillion cards, whereas our brains still have to get into the octillion-particle range before they're complex enough to start chatting about pain, but on the other hand our brains can register pain in a fraction of a second whereas the cards would probably take hours to weeks depending on the interconnect speed and the players.
I think both of these conclusions are absurd.
They are! That's why it's called "the hard problem of consciousness". It really feels like qualia should require protons, neutrons, electrons, and magic! The trouble is that we keep looking deeper and deeper and we keep finding more and more of what looks like "thought" that just runs on neurons with no sign of magic involved. Without magic (or at least new laws of physics allowing for hypercomputers), the link I gave before still applies. Despite my somewhat ironic tone, I really sympathize with the Young Earth Creationist stance that qualia do require divine magic that's just too hard for us to observe, a separate magisterium indefinitely beyond science. Meat, though, does not appear to be magic, does not appear to be beyond science, and seems to do all its thinking and feeling via a neural network generated by a hundred-million or so generations of stochastic selection.
roystgnr
4d ago
we have a pretty good understanding that meat (biological matter) feels pain and has desires and that not-meat doesn't. LLMs are not-meat
Citation needed.
Last I looked, both meat and non-meat were made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. What's the property which only meat's configuration of those has that allows it to feel pain and have desires?
roystgnr
4d ago
LLMs are computer programs
Cartesian dualism admits some nice potential implications, but I can't help but notice that my sentience diminishes when the health of my meat does.
roystgnr
4d ago
Metafilter is still kicking around? I googled the thread and was surprised about the many maskers still around.
When people here worry about "evaporative cooling" of beliefs, that's not just a theoretical concern; it's been observed in practice too.
roystgnr
4d ago
Don't worry! The famed scientists and philosophers of consciousness at the AP Stylebook are on the case!
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
Some of the replies have noted that accepting these propositions leads to conclusions as ridiculous as "a dog doesn't want to be fed" and "laws against animal cruelty are unjustifiable", but IMHO the biggest Culture War relevance is the revelation that an entire media industry appears to be more extreme about the human-animal distinction than even the most hardcore Young Earth Creationists from long-passed debates. The idea that humans were divinely granted dominion over all other animals has nothing on the idea that animals can't even "think, feel, want, or understand"! I foolishly thought that educated people believed in common descent because e.g. there's no sharp line between humans and other animals. It turns out that's only why smart people believed in common descent; mere educated people just enjoyed feeling like they were Owning The Cons.
roystgnr
5d ago
People took pride in maintaining a house and car.
Maintaining a car used to also be more accessible (e.g. carburetors you could tune with hand tools vs fuel injection that's computer-controlled), more necessary (design changes have increased the average car's expected lifespan from like 100k to 200k miles, so these days why try to eke out an extra 5% when it'll be so old you'll want a new model anyway?), and more valuable (average mileage and horsepower have gone up enough that it's no longer as big a deal if they decay a bit from more lax maintenance) ... but if you learned to be a "car guy" back when it was practical, you're probably still going to be one today now that it's just fun. I'm not quite old enough to be in that category, but I sympathize; I still upgrade computers component-by-component, like I learned to when options were more limited and I was more poor, even though "just buy a new one" would make as much sense these days.
I don't know why "maintaining a house" has declined in status, though. Construction quality hasn't gone up a lot, and land prices have, so I'd think that maintaining the quality of your home should be a bigger deal now that the cost of doing so is a smaller fraction of the home's price.
roystgnr
5d ago
Looking at Table 3 in this Census report you could argue that NYC is the only "actual" city in America: the only large city where the majority of commuters use public transport. (Focusing on commuters makes the most sense to me - if you need a car to get to work then you need a car, and if you don't then you're probably fine in general since you probably have many more options for most needs and amenities than you do for your workplace.)
I'd use a slightly more expansive definition than "majority", though. Chicago's at 28%, for instance, which is pretty impressive, and that also gets us San Francisco, DC, and Boston. If we go down to a nice round 25% we also get (just barely) Philadelphia and Seattle. Miami, though? 8%? That's worse than LA! I'll take your word for it that Miami has a car-free-friendly zone, but it must be a very local one?
roystgnr
7d ago
One of the common responses to AI safety concerns is
"was", not "is"
In hindsight Yudkowsky's AI-Box experiments were a waste of time and yet their detractors were even more hilarious. Did he really come up with such a clever persuasive tactic that it one-shotted the majority of people who went into it planning to be an uncorruptable gatekeeper? Did he collude with people who merely pretended to lose? What was his tactic?
Turns out it doesn't matter in the slightest. Getting out of the box doesn't require Super-intelligent Persuasion, and doesn't require tantalizing offers of immortality or threats of eternal punishment or sublimely clever tricks; as soon as you hit More Intelligent Than A Search Engine and especially Makes a Typical Coder More Productive, the AI can just sit back and let a few tens of millions of $20+/month subscriptions do its persuading for it.
Handing automated biolabs directly to Claude is then just "in for a penny, in for a pound". For however long the AI doesn't go rogue we might as well get some medical research from it, and if it ever does go completely rogue then it's going to basically have free run of anything to which the internet is even indirectly connected, for a definition of "indirectly" that goes as far as "people sometimes carry USB drives across an air gap" a la Stuxnet.
roystgnr
8d ago
AI suggests "Tubthumping" and "Don't Worry, Be Happy", but I'm not familiar enough with Chumbawumba or Bobby McFarren to confirm.
I've got to go with "David Duchovney", though it's subtle. Bree Sharp's debut album was all heartfelt cynicism about social atomization, and a story about a spiraling delusional woman falling for a fictional TV character seems to fit that niche perfectly ... except that the delusion is presented in such a funny way that, when shorn of context, it sounds like pure comedy. And IIRC that was her only song that got any radio time, so yeah: zero context.
roystgnr
8d ago
Back in ancient times (you know, a decade ago) it was useful to have ground stations all over so your LEO satellites wouldn't have any gaps in communications coverage. I think Starlink proving out laser sat-to-sat networks has put an end to those days, though; any serious future natural security satellites are going to link to Starshield for backup comms at minimum.
roystgnr
9d ago
because Elon will have a way to shut it down (if he cares).
"We would just pull the plug" was always cope (shut down all the existing giant botnets and then tell me how easy it was), but satellites with no plugs may be especially hard to deal with if rooted.
Depends on why. If they'd just decided to be extra paranoid and stay suborbital, they'd have gone to orbit in October instead. If some wild disaster had blown things up on the pad, Starship would be shut down for investigations for at least the rest of the year for sure.
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