Meth is a crystal, and crystals vibrate in synchronous harmonicity. What does this tell us about meth?
... no, the fact that some hallucinogens are derived from fungi does not give rise to consciousness. I accept that you read that somewhere; that does not make it true. But, really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Or take DMT as a crystalline, naturally produced substance. As far as I know, there's no Methamphetamine in nature, although I've become very careful with the terms none/all in biology.
Nice strawman you got there. Meth is a man made synthetic compound. Fungi cover this earth and are one of the few natural drugs that cause brain elasticity and can cause personality change.
The theory is real and, of course, controversial[0]. The formation of consciousness is still a mystery and I’m simply discussing a theory. If you have another theory you deem right, let’s argue on merit, not personal attacks.
Nowhere in my comment did I attack you personally. I made an analogous argument; reductio ad absurdum. LSD is also a man-made synthetic compound, and promotes neuroplacticity. And if you've ever known a meth addict, you'll know that the substance can cause significant and enduring personality change.
You're advancing a pseudoscientific theory, and I'm ripping it on its utter lack of merit. Please don't take that personally.
For the record, the first time LSD was created it was made using lysergic acid derived from ergot, a mold found on rye. It is a semisynthetic drug, and cannot be created without an organic source.
> really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!
Sometimes really bad ideas can actually turn around when taken to irrational extremes. Tons of evidence in history of people who are batshit crazy, somehow figuring out something amazing simply by being impossibly committed to something really, really stupid. But of course, being batshit crazy has other problems, and nearly all of the really stupid stuff does not turn around like that.
It has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.
I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation left with? Hey kids betcha can't resolve the Collatz conjecture, our superintelligence can't either! Still pretty depressed about it, to be honest. Intellectualism is dead. We can return to happy agrarianism, I guess. At least the AI doesn't wanna eat my snap peas.
I don’t think this will happen, but it’s possible for humans to adjust our philosophy of mathematical work so that we deprioritize “egotistical” (this is a bad word for what I’m going for, but I mean the desire and economic necessity to associate novel work to your name) discovery and prioritize learning; I’ve never really learned something well without lots of personal insights along the way.
If this is not possible it does make me question whether mathematics ever had any value except for economic or industrial reasons. I do believe it does however, so it must be possible.
This is no time to despair. It's the time to take a stand. If you don't want to see your discipline go the way of the dodo, then do something about it.
I don't know what you should do because I'm not a mathematician. But superintelligence schmuperintelligence. We didn't stop running because we have cars or playing chess or Go because there's chess and Go engines. Even more so than chess there's no point in maths unless it's people doing it, for other people. AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away. We gotta stop that bullshit, and we can stop it. And if we don't, if we just sit around and wait for OpenAI and Anthropic to destroy society then that's not their fault but ours.
Sorry, I'm not great at pep talks. Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!
> AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away.
There are people who appreciate and have use for math and art, but don't or can't produce. Those same people are now given tools to produce works that they enjoy and can do pretty damn well at.
> Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!
This is a horrible perversion of the quote. Aside from it's questionable use in this context (as it can be construed as a violent call to action), Tyrion made the battle cry for self-defense against a threat to their lives. Generally, AI reducing the dependence of one human on another's work is incomparable to this.
> - OpenAI invites researchers to use their models, in fact giving at least 100,000 researchers free access[1], but there are also those that pay
I've been thinking along exactly these lines... they very well could have a 21st century Mechanical Turk and its real superpower is getting people to "collaborate" asynchronously but it's just stealing their ideas and laundering them.
I don't think it's purely that, of course... but "consult other clients' transcripts" would be an easy tool to write.
I've been pretty disappointed with those mathematicians who I once respected so acutely, embrace the leopards. Now, they are complaining that even mathematicians' faces are getting eaten. They chose to ignore the claims of rampant plagiarism laundering through training for several years by visual artists and open source developers. And here we are: Tao is finally concerned about the future of the people sharing a cage with this once-cute kitten.
The army would be highly heterogeneous, and almost certainly not built to purpose. Consider the fleet of Tesla vehicles to be one source of ready-to-hack kinetic impactor drones and incendiary devices. But also... militaries around the world are developing murderbot tech. An Amazon delivery drone could drop a brick from 20 feet up.
The self driving vehicles could target food delivery -- not your ubereats, but farm trucks and roads. Destruction of logistic infrastructure results in mass starvation. Individual targets for a complete eradication would take more effort, but a significant cull of the global population seems quite feasible with today's tech.
But folks are also doing virus research with AI. If such a lab gets hacked to make a super-virus, and its containment gets breached by a kinetic impactor, it could be cataclysmic.
I guess where I'm going with my question is that if some ne'er-do-well AI wants a large drone army, then it needs to somehow hack all of those drones unnoticed (or hack the virus lab). Hacking some drones is surely doable, but hacking enough to have a large drone army, especially ones with weapons or explosives, I have major doubts that it's both possible and would go unnoticed.
As far as I know, the fleet of Tesla vehicles is a single OTA away. Hacking individual drones is a highly distributable task. Deployment of prepared hacks could happen in the blink of an eye world 'round.
But I hope you're right! It's not like the world's armies have enough nukes to eradicate all data centers or anything.
> Edit: YESSSS -4 points; those are rookie numbers! Help me pump them up, HN technofascists! Prove my point for me!
Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.
I am sneering at only the technofascists in the community, who deserve the derision of those who are anti fascist within the community, or really anyone who is saddened by the way the technofascists are sullying the name of the tech community.
But good to know that -4 is rock bottom.
If a community prevents you from sneering at fascism, that community is a problem.
Don't bother, it isn't an effective use of time. Just go organize and vote, that moves the needle, nothing here does. Midterms are coming. This place is just a unique coffee shop. Participate in it for what it is.
When my votes are between the democrat who supports Israeli fascism or the republican who supports American fascism, it doesn't really feel like voting matters.
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