Paul Gilham

Supermarkets can be overwhelming for kids with all the crowds (just anonymous knees to them if they're walking) and sensory stimuli. They can react to this by trying to escape or creating their own stimulus to drown out what they can't control. Maybe try empathy rather than being Dick Tracey?

I'm glad *someone* asked.

I was always disappointed the wires couldn't be tuned. 🙂

Rowan Atkinson as Captain Blackadder faces Ade Edmondson as Baron von Richthofen in a scene from Blackadder Goes Forth episode Private Plane

10 PRINT "Welcome to Pointers 101"

Really a classical guitarist but wanted to appear cool. ;)

True fess.

Poached egg > fried egg in this context. Also, it then means the pizza is authentically Italian. 😋

The Age of Reptiles: How One Mural Changed The Way The World Saw Dinosaurs My nomination for the most influential scientific visualization ever produced

The Age of Reptiles: How One Mural Changed The Way The World Saw Dinosaurs
🧪🌿🌎🪶🐡 #dinosaurs #paleontology open.substack.com/pub/alwaysso...

None of which rules out black hole holography as the basis of 'our' universe. Goodness, I didn't expect a comment on LLMs to develop into a discussion of cosmology, though from what you've said it was pretty likely to head that way. 🙂 It's 1.20am, though, so I must sleep. Thank you for the chat!

The Founder of Cosmic Inflation Theory on Cosmology's Next Big Ideas Physicist Alan Guth, the father of cosmic inflation theory, describes emerging ideas about where our universe comes from, what else is out there, and what caused it to exist in the first place.

The founder of inflation theory seems to agree with that, and while a commercial publication, SciAm has a pretty decent reputation for avoiding quackery, I think! www.scientificamerican.com/custom-media...

The strongest evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.

Maybe. But there are some fairly well-known physicists who posit evidence for pre-big-bang inflation. Ethan Siegel, definitely a pop scientist but also an astrophysics professor (so hopefully more credible for you than my previous source 🙂): bigthink.com/starts-with-...

A bit nihilistic, perhaps (I'd be very pleased to be proven wrong) but especially with questions currently being raised about whether inflation actually preceded the big bang, removing any singularity from the equation, I can't currently see how the universe doesn't end up as empty de Sitter space.

That, alas, is where we may disagree. If I understand you correctly, the dance of virtual particles in their fields shows you a cohesive universe linking us all. I have a more mechanistic view: expanding spacetime will ultimately isolate every one of those particles in its own observable universe.

I'm certainly aware of brane cosmology: that the maths works and provides a neat solution to particle physics and gravity alike. But I also know they're are competing models and, to date, no experimental evidence of their existence. In my mind that makes it a hypothesis, even if it's a strong one.

Oh, the guy behind the Z80? I'll do some reading, thank you. 🙂 I note from a scan of Faggin's Wiki entry that he rules out consciousness for classical machines (presumably like data centres) as their data is reproducible, but that's just Wikipedia. Will look further and see if that changes my mind.

I do understand things occasionally. 😉 And I am aware of at least a couple of the problems around 0: that physics has to tie itself in knots to avoid singularities. I fail at the underlying maths (my abilities there topped out with basic calculus alas) but I do vaguely grasp the occasional concept.

From what I've read in journals, LLMs are likely to be a dead end in GAI development because their inputs and functionality are both so limited. I'm genuinely curious how you can claim consciousness is widely emergent with no settled scientific definition of what it even is, or how to evidence it.

That's the criticism I've heard: her oversimplification of issues can encourage anti-science conspiracy theories and she gets more views for such videos than less contrarian content. It's a problem, and one that science communication may wrestle with for a while with no peer review on social media.

Or maybe I should just have picked a better example of its application in science. Regardless, it's a bit sad if your renewed (and I'd like to think inaccurate) assumption about me now provides you with an excuse to avoid responding to the second part of my reply. If so, oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not a fan or even a regular viewer. 🙂 I know she's divisive and watched a few of her videos because a physicist friend of mine puts some stock in her. And she does have a point re string theory, loop gravity et al. failing to yield experimental data. Maybe the failure to apply Occam is it.

Current LLMs (not necessarily future AIs) are tools. IMHO they don't embody anything beyond big tech profit—which is why I believe Anthropic execs are really leaning into the, "It's self-aware, man!" angle. Accepting that would render tight regulation (and thus lower profit) harder to introduce. 2/2

How I Became Particle Physicists’ Enemy #1 YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder

Scientists often apply Occam's razor in solving problems, and when they don't they often should—hence a possible reason we haven't made any significant progress in particle physics since the Higgs was discovered. youtu.be/XqoyTSAF5g0?...

1/2

That's a valid view. But I'd suggest LLMs just don't warrant being considered anything more. All their behaviour can be adequately explained by what I said; applying Occam's razor, there's no need to complicate what we observe with speculation on a far, far less likely situation, i.e. consciousness.

Thanks for the needless condescension. A++ way to convince people you're "open-minded". Moving on, while I respect your greater IT architectural knowledge, I suggest it doesn't matter for these purposes. What that architecture *does* is key, and what it does is predict based on previous human input.

fry from futurama is making a silly face Alt: Fry from Futurama narrowing his eyes as the frame closes in on his face, in the well-known "Can't tell if X or Y" meme

Can't tell if clickbait or wilful blindness. LLMs are prediction engines—they calculate based on all human writings the most apposite string of words to respond to a prompt. So when Anthropic execs ask Claude if it's sapient, of *course* it's going to say yes. It doesn't think—therefore it isn't.

Given your previous accounts of them, this doesn't come as a surprise. Do they need Manu to come in and mediate again? 😉

I loved the twist at the end. Much laughter, no notes.