> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
> a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here
I feel like that overstates the point quite a bit. There's a lot that's similar: neurotransmitter release is stochastic at the vesicle level, ion channels open and close probabilistically, post-synaptic responses have noise. A given neuron receiving identical input twice doesn't produce identical output. Neither brains nor LLMs have a central decider that forms intent and then implements it. In both, decisions emerges from network dynamics, they're a description of what the system did, not a separate cause (see Libet's experiments).
Now pretty clearly there's a lot that's different, and of course we don't understand brains enough to say just how similar they are to LLMs, but that's the point: it's an interesting thought experiment and shutting it down with a virtual eyeroll is sad.
Using "cyber" as a noun there seems language coded for government. DC has a love of "the cyber" but do technologists use the term that way when not pointing at government?
My theory is this: Until recently, "cyber x" meant the same as "Internet x" (because Internet ≈ Cyberspace), except that "cyber" sounds a bit cooler, and security organizations wanted to sound especially cool, so they were the ones who used "cyber" most, causing the shift in meaning.
Cybernetics is actually about feedback control systems. The original meaning has been distorted because the general public doesn't have the background to distinguish different kinds of magic. The Sperry autopilot was a cybernetic system, as were electro-mechanical gun computers.
Sure, but that hasn't been the common use for "cyber-" for the past ~46 years, which is about ~2x longer than the time between when the term "cybernetics" was coined and the "cyber" was taken from it in 1980.
When I was like 12, I remember my fellow horny youths (or it could have been anyone, I guess!) in AOL chatrooms constantly asking each other "wanna ciber?"
That would be "cyber" as a verb, not "cyber" as a noun. Would anyone have understood what you meant back then if you'd said "I was in a cyber just now" instead of "I was cybering just now"?
I ran several Gemma 4 quants on my 24gb mac mini, and with proper context size tuning they're quick enough I guess, but I would really love to see them working well on an iphone with 2/3gb of ram...
Yep, I've been writing it that way forever, it just tends to get autocorrected.
> In informal contexts, a hyphen-minus (-) is often used as a substitute for an en dash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses (--) for an em dash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The autocorrection facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
Oh yes, typing two hyphens (--) to represent an em dash (—) is something I’ve definitely seen and used. I’ve just never seen anyone type an em dash (—) but display it as two hyphens (--).
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/snap-circuits-pro.html
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