When the first names were announced I read some comments on r/LocalLLaMA that they assembled a team with too many high egos and this was going to fall apart, because of general soft-skills issues.
I know nothing about the situation, but that comment was strangely specific
The way people normally live is that it's a pretty slow life and they have like a specialised skill, a hammer, a solid area that they know completely and it's connected to their primary experience through their work. Then they read tons and tons of what AI says which isn't connected to any lived experience, it activates the pattern seeking back of the mind to try and make sense of it, and while normal life is like a focused brush that touches reality all the time, spend too much time with something that is just not part of the category of direct lived experience and the brush becomes like a frizzy stump with hairs aiming everywhere, cognition going everywhere. The AI sticks to your interaction with it like glue and you can hover away from lived experience while it still seems like not a big step from the previous chat, and if you're not used to anything of the sort you don't have a cognitive tool to ground back to reality with. I think that's what happens. 'Don Quijote read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant' is an example from the literary age. I personally read too much than is practical. Now the emotional driver is more esoteric than need for courage, like people think they're 'chosen', their souls are 'starseeds', it's like twilight where the boring person with nothing to offer gets the attention of the cool glittering immortal just because. Good reason is usually too slow to keep up with the sort of flicker of daydreams that can whisk away attention if not aware of any 'cognitohazard'. It's a new symptom of the usual case of the 'mouse utopia' + 'rat park' + 'bowling alone' thing. But I think there's always an emotional reason that makes the 'choice' of entertaining falsities, in a sense understandable with empathy, but with obvious consequences. What can be said, causes are structural, people have different circumstances, different ways to fix it.
I bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently.
The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!
All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.
Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.
Reminds me of the Electric Monk from Douglas' Adams "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" [0]
It's essentially a robot built to believe things on behalf of its owner, offloading the tiresome burden of religion to a machine.
In the book it is explained as a natural evolution of other machines, like a dishwasher washes dishes for you, a VCR watches TV for you, an electric monk believes for you.
Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill.
Just write a 10 TB hard disk full of plaintext mantras and let that bad boy spin at its usual ~5k rpm for a cost effective 50 PB of mantras per minute. Or go MAAS and write a few them into S3.
technology wont count as the prayers were not written out by someone with reencarnatory mojo at a monestery, and then the prayer wheel sold to help both the new owner with carma and the monk and temple survive with money,also the physical action of spinning the wheel while the one holding is praying would count as intentional, a remote powered machine may likely be a stretch, or most likely with buddists,"bit prayers", ha! would have
value inversly proportional to there speed of execution, lest the ancient megga temple prayer wheels loose there "value"
It's hard to say where rules lawyering ends and hermeneutics begins, but as I am aware it's presumably somewhere before installing an EUV etching machine on a Tibetan mountaintop, I am joking.
That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.
Reminds me of kosher electric appliances to pretend you didn't turn on the light or whatever on fridays. If there is a god he must chuckle at these things.
The ultimate purpose of these laws is to cultivate a devotion to God. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with or "unclean" about consuming pork compared to beef, for example. It's a sacrifice that's made to instill a habit of devotion and of being attentive to spiritual matters.
(Indeed, among Christ's criticisms of the Pharisees is that they had lost sight of the spirit of the law and reduced it to an exercise in OCD and appearing pious in public while their hearts remained impure. From the Christian perspective, the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled by Christ and superseded by the New Covenant in which such dietary laws are no longer needed, as they would have already served their purpose. Of course, Catholics do practice dietary restriction on Fridays and during Lent as a matter of canon law as a penitential sacrifice.)
Ritual, in general, is not some kind of superstitious witchcraft or casting of spells, but a matter of spiritual practice and a system of signs communicating unseen realities. Everyday life contains similar practices. We use signs to communicate truths that cannot be perceived through our senses all the time (think of all the gestures we use in everyday life). This is to be expected, as human beings are also corporeal beings, and we communicate through signs that can be perceived through the senses.
Even if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?
Clearly an operations lead tasked with exponential increases in mantra output.
In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time....
But look at the consequences. They have zero OpSec!
These very manuals are now for sale on the open and dark web and anyone can buy one and start accumulation of karma points! FFS, the chant password has already been distributed and they changed nothing! There is no encryption, it's all plain text at rest. SMH.
There is no auth process. Anyone can walk up, grab a prayer turbine and start spinning it for all they are worth. I would not be surprised if I saw a motorcycle, on it's side, with the drive wheel touching a prayer turbine, and spinning it at 100s of RPMs.
Don't get me started on their callous handling of libraries that these texts reference or the complete lack of standards when new data is added. They just throw it into the pile and keep spinning. :|
They may have a handle on religion, but their data security sucks, frankly.
All depends on the prayer quota. If one can do "9 000 000 mantras per minute" easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life.
I guess you are the product of a culture formed by a theistic religion?
Buddhism has some very different ideas. Its also quite varied - Theravada is more different from Zen than protestant Christianity is from Catholic or Orthodox.
Most types of Christian prayer are about having in effect on yourself, so it would not make sense. Even intercessionary prayer is a personal request, so this sort of thing sounds wrong, but the prayer wheels arise from completely different beliefs.
I fail to see how your reply is remotely relevant to what I've said. Any way you put it this seems like a convenient "tradition" to allow people to pray less but make them feel as if they prayed more
But what if that's not how prayer works? What if rotating the prayer wheels is just as effective as saying the prayers out loud? And what if that effect really can be multiplied up mechanically, somehow, and what if it doesn't actually matter whether people say them out loud or not? There'd be little reason not to use prayer wheels. And the people using them would be doing the exact opposite of praying less. They'd be praying more!
You're claiming prayers are not real, but then seem not to be following through fully with this, by subsequently assuming that if they were real, it would be inevitable that they'd have to operate in some particular way. But that wouldn't automatically follow. I think this is the reply's point.
My point is that since writing is a human invention (and a recent one at that), having a tradition where you can conveniently multiply your prayers through scripture seems utterly convenient and manufactured
I think you have misunderstood me. "it does not make sense" is not a jab at Christianity (or Buddhism). The intended meaning is that something like a prayer wheel would not make sense given Christian beliefs but may do given particular Buddhist beliefs.
This feels like one of the quotes that needs to be quoted and I would quote you if I can understand what you mean by "turns out someone else made both" as maybe its me who didn't get its meaning (so can you please explain what you mean by this? thanks in advance!)
The hacker and the system share the same maker, so the search was never outside to begin with. Breaking in is ironic, because the hacker is already part of what was created by the superuser they are looking for.
Yes, that accruing is linear. I mean there are exponential examples in the religious system, such as more karma required for different things, the lifespans of deities in various realms and the length of the kalpas/ timespans of the ages.
And compared to saying it aloud by yourself it's orders of magnitude more. And when they cram the text into like neat folds with dense text, thats a few more. I just googled, yeah I still google because perplexity on comet is not my thing, 100 trillion prayers on a microfilm is an example I saw.
Maybe "exponential" means "big" to non-math people. Years ago in a writing class I took, English majors kept using "hyperbolic" to mean "exaggerated". That was hard to parse for this physicist.
Is that an innovation of Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism? I've only read Theravada texts, and in those, good and bad Karma are clearly differentiated. Attaining a pleasant rebirth is considered a wholesome pursuit that the teachings of the Buddha are supposed to help you with, though it is considered a lower pursuit than attaining Nirvana (the hierarchy is pleasant current life < pleasant rebirth < Nirvana, and the Dhamma claims to be the supreme authority on all 3).
There are definitely descriptions of virtuous and non-virtuous results of actions (karma) in Mahayana/Vajrayana Buddhism. A teacher of mine, who spent 20+ years as a Gelug monk, gave a nice talk about it from a Vajrayana perspective [1].
The major innovation in Vajrayana would be an addition to the hierarchy you laid out, which is full Buddhahood in this lifetime and the tantric methods to get there. Nirvana/samsara are considered two perspectives of the same reality [2].
Hmm maybe, anyways what I read was shantidevas way of the bodhisattva and some other texts like dhammapada and some tibetan texts and art
It speaks of merit that is good and that spinning the mani korlo generates merit, and many tibetan monks like shantidevas text
But yeah you got me I've copypasted from many separate things it's the result of a big cultural and literary melting pot
I am not an expert in buddhism but I think the idea of doing good karma is to get out of this cycle of life and death and to get moksh
So I mean, If we really think about it from an atheist's point of view as to what happens after death, its essentially moksh.
Also I genuinely believe that if there is some spiritiuality in this world, then it would reward us for the work that we are doing by the amount of hard work.. ie, reading the 9 million mantras per minute was being that easy, and accruing karma was so easy, then even people who are more sinful than me can go to moksh because they can offset their karma by an insane degree by doing this thing and I feel like if the universe is from where we get our intelligence and we can deduce it that its kinda wrong, then ofc the universe knows that too and it won't be of much value.
Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good.
I mean no offense to religious people because i mean, I can understand you guys too. Life is truly scary. Even I want the comfort of a god or karma and even I pray sometimes when I truly feel desperate but the scientific part of me can't really let go of all the inconsistencies I feel like.
AFAIK, from my atheist's understanding of Buddhism, you don't get out of the cycle of life and death, samsara, with good karma. Quite the contrary, you're almost guaranteeing your next life will be that of some kind of angel that lives for millions of years, and delaying your eventual enlightenment by that much, since you can only get enlightened on Earth.
Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
Have thought about this too. I genuinely don't have an answer except doing good is feeling good with a sense of contentment.
And to be honest, for me its also doing good not because you want others to know but in spite of it, you should rather live your life in that sense of secrecy but honestly, that's what I consider "based" and its definitely nothing wrong with telling what good you did, but I really suffer from this sense of oversharing everything so to me its really one of an ideals.
I get what you are saying and its a good point and I am sure that there is some better reasoning than this good than "what my soul feels truly satisfy with"
Honestly, I might sound kind of idk preachy but I want to live my life in such a sense that it can have an impact. A positive impact. That's it. If people say my name in good intention. But also, I don't want to work only for people to say that I have good impact but rather knowing that the good that I am doing even in secret might come some day out. I do doubt how many secrets I can carry to grave in this interconnected world. I'd much rather be an open book with some dark chapters but I'd try to still do some good. I am sorry if I confuse you because I think I am a little confused too. Because I don't know how my definition of good can stand time and ever changing people. I can't convince anybody something, everyone have their own livelihood and they were parented differently and so they value different things and they have different meanings of good. Putting the word's meaning into umbrella means that I am taking the freedom away. There is no objective good in my opinion, only things happening. Chaos and reactions. We are lucky to spawn in into such an complicated world, but we were bound to happen because we are what happens when luck hands correctly. We were bound to exist in the randomness. It doesn't have much native meaning itself, this world. I feel like it just has some scientific rules and I don't know why it has that, but I doubt if there is some moral code embedded into the universe. Its our own intepretation.
I guess I am going all over the places for sure, definitely not a clear thought but a rough sketch. I sometimes feel a little guilt thinking that I might be polluting hackernews with such long comments since they might take up visual space away from some meaningful content than myself. But maybe I overshare.
In my mind that's easy. Doing "good" is just doing things that don't intentionally hurt others, unless it's to defend oneself or save many others from harm.
NFTs are the most metaphysical purchases possible. You're not buying a thing, you're buying a token that represents the idea of the thing, and its only value is that you're the person who paid for it and nobody else did.
If you disagree that this is an issue of metaphysics, fine, but google "NFT metaphysical" and you will see that there is an absolutely massive overlap between the world of woo-woo and the world of NFTs.
NFTs are, among other things, apparently cryptography for astrologers.
Noteto everyone who is prescribed adderall, dont fuck with the occult amphetamines and occult reading make for a rabbit hole that will turn you into one weird motherfucker.
His theological writings had profound effects on the church, the historically dominant power structure in the west and their behaviour for hundreds of years.
Yeah defining what's good is difficult, even using information theoretical arguments like preserving or creating order gets messy. But regardless of metaphysical truth there is tons of other stuff to analyse like tracing historical cause and effects of how stuff looks like in the world today back to, theological writers.
A large part of the development of Europe, especially after the Renaissance, was resistance to the church and its historical teachings. The Reformation, Renaissance, rise of deism, scientific revolution, etc were all in response to and in many cases disagreeing with historical understanding. Saying "our current civilization is based on the teachings of the church" ignores the many aspects of our civilization that came about in spite of said church.
I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output
They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)
Examples:
- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)
- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)
- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)
- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests
- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study
Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific
I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether
Team Protestant had, well, lets see. Isaac Newton is a good place to start, who singularly contributed more to science than everyone on your list combined.
And how about Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Euler, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin. That's off the top of my head, and this isn't even a subject I've really thought about.
All of those are from the later scientific revolution (except Linneaus, Maxwell and Kelvin) and none of those are priests/leaders of a church. You’re correct in that they’re protestant and were surely religious but had little to no influence on protestant theology
Can you find any protestant priests with major scientific contributions during the reformation?
I only mentioned Weber as there are no other major contributions I can think of that actually influenced protestantism/wasn’t primarily from the scientific revolution
But the author didn't say that. He said "a large part of our civilization rests [on Aquinas]". That can be perfectly true even if there were other, equally significant, influences.
Yeah there's many influences. Pagan gods, greek philosophy, trade with asia, egypt, middle eastern religious inspiration and so on. And cultural geniuses maybe put their trust mostly in their lived experience and craft and so on like the sheer product and infrastructure of civilisation is mostly made by nonbelievers just doing their thing
Oh man I tried dual wielding with cursor, setting up a communication so they both can work at the same time on the same thing, got banned from cursor
Then tried with windsurf, ran a bad shellscript without reading it, used up the limit instantly, kill the script, oh man somehow it's still not working either I used the daily limit in an impossible way despite the minute limit supposedly existing, or the way it communicated sidestepped it into a limbo where it is just permanently confused and thinks for 300s then cancels a "test" prompt in the cli
A: I've had this name for a really long time. I used to be a big fan of Diablo2, so when I had to create my email address username on hotmail, i decided to use Mephisto as my username. But of course Mephisto was already taken, so I tried Mephisto1, Mephisto2, all the way up to about 9, and all was taken.
So then I thought... "hmmm, what kind of chracteristic does Mephisto posess?" Now keep in mind that this was about 10 years ago, and my English language dictionary composed of about 20 words. One of them was the word 'bad'. Since Mephisto (the brother of Diablo) was certainly pretty bad, I punched in badmephisto and that worked. Had I known more words it probably would have ended up being evilmephisto or something :p"
I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere
> I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse.
Surely you mean "would"? Because riding a horse and carriage doesn't imply any ability at riding a horse, but the reverse relation would actually make sense, as you already have historical, experiential, intimate knowledge of a horse despite no contemporaneous, immediate physical contact.
Similarly, already knowing what you want to write would make you more proficient at operating a chatbot to produce what you want to write faster—but telling a chatbot a vague sense of the meaning you want to communicate wouldn't make you better at communicating. How would you communicate with the chatbot what you want if you never developed the ability to articulate what you want by learning to write?
EDIT: I sort of understand what you might be getting at—you can learn to write by using a chatbot if you mimic the chatbot like the chatbot mimics humans—but I'd still prefer humans learn directly from humans rather than rephrased by some corporate middle-man with unknown quality and zero liability.
Yes, I'm acknowledging a lack of skill transfer, but that there are new ways of working and so I sarcastically imply the article can't see the forest for the trees, missing the big picture. A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised. I'm getting at the analogy of a technological generalisation and expansion, while logistics is not part of my argument. If you want to write a very good essay and if you're good at that then do it manually. If you want to create scalable workflows and have 5 layers of agents interacting with each other collaboratively and adversarially scouring the internet and newssites and forums to then send investment suggestions to your mail every lunch then that's a scale that's not possible with a pen and paper and so prompting has an expanded cause and effect cone
> A horse and carriage is very useful for lots of things. A horse is more specialised.
You have that backwards. A horse and carriage is good for traveling on a road. If you have just the horse, however, you can travel on a road, travel offroad, pull a plow, ride into battle and trample evildoers, etc.
No it's only half backwards because of the infrastructure there is scalability in amount of work you're right in the phrasing however but the intention/idea matters more. So the horse and carriage is a generalization of the core value of the horse and increases the core value and generalization -> general, horse more specialised or at least reduced to niches today like competitions and hobbies
No, because of Poe's law only the author of the comment can confirm. But the analogy makes sense then:
"[Of course] writing an essay with chatgpt wouldn’t make you better at writing essays unassisted. Sure, a student wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to produce a good essay."
I'm making an analogy as to the type of skill it is, so yes, means to an end. I wouldn't mean an apathetic student jumping through bureaucratic educational hoops and requirements, but perhaps a selfdriven person wanting to get something done.
What I'm saying is that yes writing essays is one skill and if it's your goal to write essays then obviously not doing it yourself entirely will make you worse than otherwise. But I'm expanding a bit beyond the paper saying that yes the brain won't grow for this specific skill because it's actually a different skill.
Thinking can be done in lots of ways such as when having a conversation, and what I think the skill is is steering and creating structures to orchestrate AIs into automated workflows which is a new way of working. And so what I mean is that with a new technology you can't expect a transfer to the way you work with old technologies rather you have to figure out the better new way you can use the new technology, and the brain would grow for this specific new way of working. And one could analyse depending on ones goal if it's a tool you'd want to use in the sense that cause leads to effect or if you would be better off for your specific goal to ignore the new technology and do it the usual way.
The task of riding a horse can be almost entirely offsourced to the professional horse riders. If they take your carriage from point A to point B, sure, you care about just getting somewhere.
Taking the article's task of essay writing: someone presumably is supposed to read them. It's not a carriage task from point A to point B anymore. If the LLM-assisted writers begin to not even understand their own work (quoting from abstract "LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.") how do they know they are not putting out nonsense?
> If the LLM-assisted writers begin to not even understand their own work (quoting from abstract "LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.") how do they know they are not putting out nonsense?
They are trained (amongst other things) on human essays. They just need to mimic them well enough to pass the class.
> Taking the article's task of essay writing: someone presumably is supposed to read them.
Soon enough, that someone is gonna be another LLM more often than not.
Can you point at some references? Horse riding started around 3500 BC[0], while horse carriages started around 100BC [1], oxen/buffalo drawn devices around 3000 BC[1].
"However, the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven. Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry."
Long discussion in History Exchange about dating the cave paintings mentioned in the wikipedia article above:
The 3500 BCE date for horse ridding is speculative and poorly supported by evidence. I thought the language in the bit I pasted made that clear. "Horse being driven" means attached to chariots, not ridden.
Unless you want to date the industrial revolution to 30 BCE when Vitruvius described the aeolipile, we can talk about the evidence of these technologies impact in society. For chariots that would be 1700 BCE and horseback riding well into iron age ~1000 BCE.
I think you are reading "carriage" too specifically, when I suspect it's meant as a wider term for any horse-drawn wheeled vehicle.
Your [0] says "Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry.", just after "the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven."
That suggests the evidence is stronger for cart use before riding.
If you follow your [1] link to "bullock cart" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullock_cart you'll see: "The first indications of the use of a wagon (cart tracks, incisions, model wheels) are dated to around 4400 BC[citation needed]. The oldest wooden wheels usable for transport were found in southern Russia and dated to 3325 ± 125 BC.[1]"
That is older than 3000 BC.
I tried but failed to find something more definite. I did learn from "Wheeled Vehicles and Their Development in Ancient Egypt – Technical Innovations and Their (Non-) Acceptance in Pharaonic Times" (2021) that:
> The earliest depiction of a rider on horseback in Egypt belongs to the reign of Thutmose III.80 Therefore, in ancient Egypt the horse is attested for pulling chariots81 before it was used as a riding animal, which is only rarely shown throughout Pharaonic times.
I also found "The prehistoric origins of the domestic horse and horseback riding" (2023) referring to this as the "cart before the horse" vs. "horse before the cart" debate, with the position that there's "strong support for the “horse before the cart” view by finding diagnostic traits associated with habitual horseback riding in human skeletons that considerably pre-date the earliest wheeled vehicles pulled by horses." https://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/11881
On the other hand, "Tracing horseback riding and transport in the human skeleton" (2024) points out "the methodological hurdles and analytical risks of using this approach in the absence of valid comparative datasets", and also mentions how "the expansion of biomolecular tools over the past two decades has undercut many of the core assumptions of the kurgan hypothesis and has destabilized consensus belief in the Botai model." https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774
Quite a fascinating topic. It's no wonder that Wikipedia can't give a definite answer!
Well the article says areas like data and cybersecurity. Obviously this will expand their networks and so on, beyond simple consulting it can lead to more startups in the sector. While I'm neutral (I want to travel freely) there is currently mounting backlash against surveillance expansion, handing over data, and so on
AIs lizard brain will be 60% 1800s apparently, it might act like a villainous steampunk anglosaxon twirling a mustache in moments of survival, or at least some blend of those values while playing 5d chess. Read it H G Wells "World brain" to calm it down like a fond childhood memory
This would be the funniest possible future, and a very distinct possibility depending on how the NYT lawsuit turns out in regards to IP holder rights versus AI "copyright laundering".
