Viewing profile — markburns

> What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale? I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the worl…

To the first questions. No and no. But potentially where consciousness lives is emergent behaviour in systems with iterative feedback loops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_St…

People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they igno…

I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we hav…

I saw a fancy HTML table generator that had so many parameters and flags and bells and whistles that it took IIRC hundreds of lines of code to save writing a similar amount of HTML…

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00273442 I haven’t read it but I did find this

That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writi…

> Reflect on the structure of your own comment Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?

I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing. But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing. There’s definitely something to be s…

1-3-5-7-2-4 I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4) But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4)…

Can anyone explain the kind of dense cloud in the middle? Is that down to human perception? We don't give names to things we can't perceive uniquely?

I love the irony in the pitting of the US vs China, Iran & Russia, whilst talking about stoking division. Don't corollaries to your comments also apply at a higher level globally, …

I'd love to know why this happens so much. There's enough people in both groups that do spot it and don't spot it. I don't think I've ever felt the need for a sarcasm marker when I…

what set off the spinning?

So these are the really loud behaviours, and not necessarily what I was thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_inattention So there's a thing which I can't find the name …

I had a realisation recently that we’re pretty comfortable with regional dialect borders being an entrenched and normal thing that reach back in history a thousand years or more an…

People obeying the speed limit encounter fewer people obeying the speed limit than people speeding and vice versa. My theory: I think this explains why so many drivers hate other d…

> a refreshment, please > food or drink? > why do I need to specify. I've been out all day in the heat. Bring me a few refreshments.

That seems an uncharitable view of the reply. The search space is huge, we sometimes find needles in haystacks by accident, isn’t it exciting that we have tools now that can system…

The punchline is inside the article: > We at Johnny’s Software Lab LLC are experts in performance. Comment not intended to come across as snidey, just tickled me a bit after readin…

This is true of ChatGPT 4 with the default prompt maybe but that’s just the way it responds after being given its specific corporate friendly disclaimer heavy instructions. I’m not…

It's possible I'm too optimistic on this point. I feel I have a good grasp of how bitcoin works, but when it gets to layer 2 it gets fuzzier. The initial discussions sounded really…

There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network. There are other problems in terms of adoption and …

YouTube is one of those things that consumes more energy than bitcoin. That is bad, but it doesn't seem part of the public narrative that YouTube is bad because of global warming. …

Not read past the paywall. Could anyone let me know if this statement is clarified? > no politicians likely to trumpet it Irrespective of whether or not it's outsourcing to China a…