Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and deliverables.
While the person creating the task will need to provide some details and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.
For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies:
- Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or
- Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology.
For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolution developed algorithm for processing the world is wired to our senses. Similarly a bat's perception of the world has evolved along with bat senses and is not the same as ours.
Without any of the evolutionary pre-wiring, a human conscious dropped into a bat would be deaf, dumb and blind.
The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness.
> "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat.
This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.
> If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat".
This is what makes the question so difficult. The human would experience what is like for a bat to be a bat but in the context of human understanding and consciousness. It already makes too little sense so maybe an analogy to attaching a debugger is getting close? Or "running a bat" as a VM or inside a sandbox in the human mind hypervisor, one brain brain hemisphere is the bat (with virtual peripherals), the other observes and experiences everything as a human.
But in the end the goal would be to have the full bat experience on your own skin and perception, and then process it as a human to understand as a human would.
The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively
Yes, the guy with a PhD in Machine Intelligence, co-author of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which is universally considered the bible of the field, recipient of the AAAI fellowship award and the Turing Award, and the inventor of Temporal Difference Learning doesn't know what he's talking about.
Sure, but does that mean he's right all the time about all things, including everything in his own field?
He is saying no generative AI is going to produce output that is both good and novel because it is always derivative. And then adds a generative AI (Claude Code) into his list of AI that have produced output that he feels is good and novel, invalidating what he is arguing.
"...no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white."
If you read it he says that CC has additional aspects beyond ordinary GAI, namely the ability to verify. That aspect is necessary for GAI to be good and novel.
Although personally I think code doesn’t actually need to be very novel so it’s actually the best example.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
I don't completely disagree but its worth noting how new a lot of the empirical evidence in favour of LLMs are, so its not impossible to be a tad ignorant of the present
You know it’s occurred to me recently that there really is no value in this age to any kind of professionalism or seniority
If you don’t agree with somebody, nothing else matters
It’s like people (you as an example) have taken the concept of experts and fucked it up so bad that simultaneously everybody thinks they’re an expert while also dismissing everybody else who claims they are an expert
It’s like the whole concept is entirely poisoned. Worse everyone is smugly pointing at the Wikipedia for “appeal to authority.”
Nothing new I suppose, Socrates after all was driven to suicide by the madness of his society accusing him of impiety.
Surprisingly enough, Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning Richard Sutton knows perfectly well what he's talking about. The whole talk is about the need to have the ability to test novel outputs against reality and iterate to find ones that are good. This is exactly what Claude Code, the agent framework, adds to Claude, the LLM, to allow it to find novel coding solutions that actually work.
It's part of the culture where I live, but the heat keeps increasing. 45 in dry heat (unless you work outside) is fine if you get cooler nights to recover, but when you don't get a break, it's lethal. Also aircon helps you but adds significantly to the heat outside in urban areas, causing what feels like a vicious circle. Anyway, where I live aircon is not common and electricity costs are high.
As a child traveling around northern Spain and rural southern France we got caught out and had to stop and wait for a service station to reopen so we could buy petrol. All part of the experience.
I've lived in a few places that would get consecutive 40C+ days. Perfectly fine unless the wind is a strong northerly blowing from the interior. The 37C in Brisbane this year was much less bearable due to the higher humidity: 75% rather than 45%.
I always thought the TV show Ozark was fairly accurate in it's depiction of money laundering. The family would buy a small business that they could inject cash and cook the books with fake sales.
any tips based job; serving/waiting, stripping, bartending, etc. gig/service work. freelancer websites that offer escrow, etc. Shopify. Hell, github sponsorships. You don't even need a physical store these days, or a business for that matter. Cashapp even. The list is endless and it's easier than ever.
Now I just need some dirty money to go through the hassle of cleaning
Can we just say it was basically vibe coded, but with real humans in the loop?
Version 5 was when the source material dried up, and the hallucinations became more frequent and obvious.
As far as I remember there was a basic outline of major plot points and where all the major characters ended up (a prompt) and were left to fill in all the blanks.
I mean he references a "murder of ravens" several times. It's an unkindness of ravens and a murder of crows. Classic LLM mistake right up there with the emdash.
Atlassian's in-built AI assistant for JIRA will generate a task description with a complete SDLC task breakdown, requirements and deliverables.
While the person creating the task will need to provide some details and modify some of the generated text (if they bother to read it) - the sheer verbosity and the fact it's clearly generated just makes you not want to engage with it.
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