Kinetic theory stuff for one, like deposition, growth, sandpile type things. Complex networks and lots of dynamics stuff falls under statistical physics umbrella but not statistical mechanics. Stat mech's amazingly wide applicability makes it easy to think it's THE approach to approaching things statistically, but it's not. The broad encompassing approach has a name, statistical physics.
There is a distinction. Usually statistical mechanics means the ensemble theory and partition functions that connects microscopic systems to macroscopic ones from material point of views. However, statistical physics is a bit more generic, for example complex networks may not use ensemble theory or partition functions and could use only statistics on the network, such as average neighbourhood or similar.
What I'm getting from this discussion is that we use Statistical Physics to refer to anything covered by Statistical Physics AND Statistical Mechanics, while we use Statistical Mechanics in a narrower context, but it is also possible that some use SM loosely.
I used to shame PG for his elitist views. Now I celebrate his moral courage.
One man cannot fix everything.
Dear PG (I'm sure you don't read HN, but this is yet another echo),
As I said on X, your own platform (YCombinator) is still full of hateful bigots who would censor/downvote even the mildest form of speaking against the genocide. Proof: this comment being downvoted. Downvoting as a mechanism is akin to censorship. It's being abused.
Having a difference of opinion on a very complicated geopolitical situation that is the culmination of a century of regional conflict is not being a "hateful bigot" or abuse.
> Having a difference of opinion on a very complicated geopolitical situation that is the culmination of a century of regional conflict is not being a "hateful bigot" or abuse.
i think it's worth stating simply and unequivocally that denying or defending a genocide that is the culmination of a century of colonialism and apartheid is Bad
Genocide is both extreme and labour-intensive. No one wakes up in the morning and decides to become an extremist; it takes an awful lot to turn someone into an extremist. That 'awful lot' has to happen to many people for a genocide to actually happen.
The genocide itself is simple enough; the thousands of years of conflict leading to the genocide are not. Anyone who believes they can unpick all that history to come to a neat conclusion about who are the 'goodies' and who are the 'baddies' is a fool.
My only interest in this conflict is in keeping it as far away from myself, my kith and my kin as possible.
I actually do think there are people in the Israeli government who wake up in the morning and work very hard all day planning on how to move every single Palestinian, dead or alive, out of Gaza and the West Bank.
Nazi Germany provided people the opportunity to become an extremist by answering a job ad, and put together a whole murderous infrastructure of extremism in about a decade.
That's certainly not true. They perhaps didn't know the full details, but Hitler was very clear about his intention to eradicate Jews from Europe even in 1939 when the Holocaust had barely started.
They definitely knew that Jews were being rounded up and sent to camps for slave labor in horrid and dangerous conditions that would kill many of them.
There are no goodies in this conflict, it doesn't matter whether some folks refuse to acknowledge their own tribe or ethnicity is doing or done some absolutely horrible things. No amount of whatabouttism is changing that, rest are details.
When anybody has doubts about how fucked up world and humans are, I just direct them into this medium-term conflict, facts are easy enough to find.
There are many occurrences of "intent" and "destroy" in that document. It includes both the definition you mentioned, and analysis of how it applies in Gaza.
To answer the point that a lot of the data comes from Hamas, the other major data source is the Israeli military (e.g. the "COGAT" link somebody posted above with pictures of grocery stores overflowing with produce) so it's surely equally suspect. If third parties were given free access to do their own investigations, that would be useful, to be sure. The party blocking access (and blocking humanitarian aid) is the Israeli military.
>You're reading an awful lot into something not being included in a radio interview.
It isn't something. It is the primary thing here. For a professional such an omission can be only deliberate. The radio interview would be heard by millions of people while the report would be read by a much-much-much smaller number of people. Such an omission in the whole context of the other things - like not calling out genocide of Jewish people by HAMAS on Oct 7, 2023 - can lead to only one conclusion.
today on NPR the head of that UN agency which produced that conclusion of genocide in Gaza failed to give proper definition of genocide which was the very first question by the interviewer. The part she omitted? She omited "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,"
From your link to NPR's transcript of the interview:
CHANG: So first, can you just define for us what is genocide, according to the U.N. Genocide Convention?
PILLAY: Firstly, it's accepted by all that genocide is a monstrous crime, an extremely serious crime, which is the killing and destruction of a people in whole or in part. That's why we say it has a specific overarching intent.
The phrasing is a bit clumsy (e.g. "that's why we say") but the idea that Pillay is trying to sneakily hide something here is rather bizarre. It seems very likely that "specific overarching intent" is meant to refer to the specific clause you highlighted. Obviously a live radio interview is going to be a bit less polished than the final written conclusions of a two-year study; that hardly implies malice.
>The phrasing is a bit clumsy (e.g. "that's why we say")
You're kidding. "Top UN legal investigator" on genocide is clumsy with genocide definition. And not on some detail. She is "clumsy" on the main thing delineating genocide from the other crimes otherwise similar.
That isn't clumsy. That is absolutely incorrect. It isn't "why ... intent" . The intent in genocide is the "why". She obviously knows it, and thus does it deliberately. There is no other explanation here.
The full report itself has all the precise detail you're asking for. It's not like the interviewee is insinuating one thing but the report actually says something else. What exactly do you think is being covered up in this interview?
That's not what they said the UN investigator was clumsy with. They said she was clumsy with how she orally delivered their justification for why they think it fits the definition of genocide.
> Firstly, it's accepted by all that genocide is a monstrous crime, an extremely serious crime, which is the killing and destruction of a people in whole or in part.
The UN investigator is saying that the genocide as it's been perpetrated leaves no doubt that it is intentional by observing of the scale and horror of the destruction. "That's why [they] say it has a specific overarching intent."
Gaza Health Ministry is literally Hamas. When they took power, they replaced the leadership (much like RFK Jr. is doing at the CDC now). In addition to GHM leadership being unqualified Hamas operatives, all numbers and repots are vetted by Hamas proper before release.
Please stop polluting the conversation with ChatGPT slop.
The Gaza Health Ministry, whatever that is, is known to be undercounting deaths because it doesn't count corpses that haven't been reached.
Why is a former Israeli general saying that deaths are at least 200,000?[0] And Israel military intelligence saying 80% of death are civilians? Are they also Hamas?
Netanyahu is on record prior to October 7th bragging about how Israel aided Hamas, a designated terror organization by their book, in order to weaken the PLO. You have no legs to stand on.
You're arguing in bad faith or being willfully ignorant because you're not adressing what has been talked about ad nauseum by the other side.
I didn't get it - do you agree or disagree that the Ministry of Health is HAMAS which is a terrorist organization which in particular perpetrated genocide of Jewish people on Oct 7, 2023.
HAMAS perpetrated the genocide of Jewish people, and now its propaganda is used as the basis to declare genocide supposedly perpetrated by the Jewish state while fighting against HAMAS. You don't see anything strange here?
And another strange thing - why UN didn't call out the genocide of Jewish people by HAMAS?
Is your argument that if they do a genocide, you get to do a genocide? That's what it sounds like.
I'd love to get data from an unbiased source, but how do you do that in this situation? Ministry of Health can't be trusted, Israeli sources can't be trusted, independent journalists don't have reasonable access and are regularly killed while reporting.
> And another strange thing - why UN didn't call out the genocide of Jewish people by HAMAS?
I would think priority needs to go to activity that is ongoing. This report may help bring an end to the ongoing activity, but the Hamas attacks are not ongoing.
This report was specificially not on that topic, but mentioned that it may qualify as genocide. The ICC did issue an arrest warrant for a Hamas commander and there was widespread condemnation of the attacks. Further specific reporting would likely benefit from cooperation of Israeli sources, but Israel doesn't like to cooperate with the UN.
> And another strange thing - why UN didn't call out the genocide of Jewish people by HAMAS?
Just look at death tolls maybe?
October 7, 1200 people.
While despicable, nowhere near the effort Israel is putting in, right?
Aside from the affect that the Israeli government has pretty much said they want to get all the Palestinians out of Gaza and are actively working towards that.
> Hamas, given the chance, would be performing real genocide.
Genocide requires intent and deeds. I think it's reasonable to consider the attacks of October 2023 to be genocide. The intent is clear from their founding statements, and the deeds likely qualify as well.
However, I also think it's reasonable to consider the ongoing war in Gaza to be genocide as well. The statements from officials waver but are often genocidal in nature, and the destruction and loss of life is too.
It's not a contest, both genocides are bad. But using one to justify the other doesn't make the second one better.
But they are. They are at the forefront of a multi pronged effort to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Do you need for me to spell out how that would be genocide for the Jews, or are you at least familiar enough with the Middle East for that to be clear?
Be there no mistake, even if Hamas wins that does not mean peace. Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies are waiting to pour into the holy land, those Shiites will do the Sunni Hamas exactly what Hamas had done to the Jews. And Hamas knows this.
Please do spell out the end game. It looks like Hamas is currently reduced to a guerilla operation. They won't be eradicated but how they're close to winning is beyond me.
I still don't understand how you can be worried about one side committing genocide if you're okay with the other side doing it.
>Just look at death tolls maybe? October 7, 1200 people. While despicable, nowhere near the effort Israel is putting in, right?
Crime of genocide has nothing to do with numbers.
It sounds though that for you the numbers do matter, and that the 1200 deaths isn't enough for you. What number is enough for you?
>No one is justifying October 7.
You haven't heard any pro-Palestinian protests and their various supporters?
>Aside from the affect that the Israeli government has pretty much said they want to get all the Palestinians out of Gaza and are actively working towards that.
Moving refugees from one camp to another may be warranted to solve serious security issues (Jordan for example kicked out Palestinians from Jordan back then when the Palestinians attacked Jordan which was hosting them at the time - a lot of similarities to how Palestinians attacked Israel. Nobody argued against expelling Palestinians from Jordan back then). Or do you mean that Gaza is the Motherland of those living there, and they aren't refugees anymore?
> Crime of genocide has nothing to do with numbers.
It does, not in absolute sense put in percentages. Also, besides weapons of mass destruction you cannot commit genocide in a day on a population this big. It's the persistence that does it.
No one ever called 9/11 genocide either right?
> You haven't heard any pro-Palestinian protests and their various supporters?
I mean in this thread, obviously. You want to own all of the stuff coming out of ben gvir and smotrich? Because if you do, we can settle the genocide discussion right here.
> Moving refugees from one camp to another may be warranted to solve serious security issues
So as soon as you've invaded an area and created the refugees you can push them wherever you want?
We're not talking about Israel pushing refugees out of their country.
And finally, where are they supposed to go, and how?
Aside from everything else already said here, you don't allow journalists in and those that are still there get targeted/killed.
It's quite hard to get information out when you're actively trying to make that to be the case. But I understand why they wouldn't let im journalists. That would completely undermine the narrative.
Also, why are you so opposed to taking something from one side of the conflict when you are YOURSELF quoting the Israeli government...
> Getting fed and accepting a sound bite from a biased media source is not complicated. Actually caring to learn and validate true facts about the situation in Gaza is a complicated and nuanced process, I'm afraid.
Your tweet is from a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
When Daniella Weiss explains that the purpose of the settlements is to "change the reality on the ground", it's probably best to believe her.
//Yet this is what the grocery stores look like, as of two weeks ago
Israel has systematically obstructed food entering Gaza, in the easily-confirmed words of Daniela Weiss again “THE ARABS WILL MOVE, DON'T GIVE THEM FOOD.”
In terms of qualifying a Famine, all three criteria have been met long-since.
Starvation: At least 1 in 5 households face an extreme shortage in their consumption of food
Malnutrition: Roughly 1 in 3 children or more are acutely malnourished
Mortality: At least 2 in every 10,000 people are dying daily because of outright starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease
The figure _compiled and published by Israel_ confirms it. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56k tonnes of food to enter the territory; less than a quarter of Gaza’s minimum needs for that period.
Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat.
Oh yes and the closed-doors, Jewish-only property-expos in America at the moment offering properties in illegally occupied Palestinian territories are just one more piece of that biased media I suppose.
Really looking forward to 'Stealing Sunset' - where Indya Moore, Rain Dove and Heydon Prowse posed as real estate influencers to gain access to the Israeli realtors, hoteliers and developers making a killing from real estate and tourism on Palestinian land.
They included Tomer Mor Yosef, VP of Kass Group, who developed the ‘Magic Kass’ mall, hotel and amusement park in the West Bank); Ze’ev Epshtein, owner of Harey Zahav, who infamously photoshopped blueprints for beach front villas on the bombed out ruins of Gaza; and Shelly Levine, one of Israel’s leading realtors for overseas purchasers in illegal West Bank settlements.
Just to address one of your points:
2 in every 10,000 people are dying daily.
With a population of 2.1 million, that fraction is 420 people a day.
Can you provide a source for that claim? Your link to the Guardian has roughly 20% of that number, which was provided by Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health
There is certainly hunger. It is an active war zone. But your numbers are grossly exaggerated.
When you mention the relatively small amount food entering between March and June, you neglect to mention the 6 months supply of food that was provided in January. That seems to be an important factor.
Also of note - there have been warnings of imminent mass starvation in Gaza since October 2023, and none of those warnings came about until recently, at which point Israel increased the amount of food entering Gaza.
The IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) report issued on August 22, 2025, confirmed Famine (IPC Phase 5) in Gaza Governorate, marking the first official famine declaration in the Middle East. The report, based on a special snapshot for the period of July-September 2025, projected famine to expand to other governorates and highlighted catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, particularly among children
As you're a green account, I won't be responding to any more of your ghoulish bad-faith engagements.
// The United Nations chief has described the famine confirmed in Gaza City and its surrounding areas as a "failure of humanity".
Antonio Gutteres said the situation was a "man-made disaster" after a UN-backed body, which identifies hunger levels around the world, raised its food insecurity status in parts of the territory to Phase 5 - the highest and most severe.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says more than half a million people across Gaza are facing "catastrophic" conditions characterised by "starvation, destitution and death".
The report was labelled an "outright lie" by Israel, which has denied there is starvation in the territory.//
Don't other countries border Gaza? Why can't food flow through Egypt?
I see lots of blame on Isreal, but to me it seems Isreal was provoked into this fight, and the other countries bordering Gaza are unwilling to take refugees or help in any meaningful way. It is odd to me that Isreal is taking the blame for actions clearly endorsed by anyone that has to deal with Gazans. Is it because they are the ones taking action?
> Don't other countries border Gaza? Why can't food flow through Egypt?
Even the most simplest of research would give you the answer to that question. The main escape/aid route from Egypt to Gaza is the Rafah crossing. This is now de-facto controlled by Israel.
Israel requires that aid from Egypt go through security checks, customs clearances, etc. There have already been dozens of reported instances where food from Egypt has gotten spoiled waiting for clearance. It was sensational news earlier, but folks have mostly given up reporting on this now. It is clear that Israel wants Palestine to suffer.
> It is odd to me that Isreal is taking the blame for actions clearly endorsed by anyone that has to deal with Gazans.
Pardon me, but I didn't know that Egypt and other neighbours were bombing Gaza. Can you give me relevant citations ? I mean the nation-state bombing Gaza and controlling its access to food would logically take the blame for massive civilian casualties and famine right ? Or does your supreme logic lead to another interpretation ? Kindly explain your chain of reasoning for enlightenment.
> other countries bordering Gaza are unwilling to take refugees
My apologies, but this is unforgivable ignorance. Please be aware that Egypt has taken >100k Palestinian refugees since 2023. I don't have the recent figures for Jordan, but they have taken in millions of Palestinian refugees over the last couple of decades.
Why can't food flow through Egypt? Before the war started, Israel restricted all access to and from Gaza by sea and air and had land crossings under tight control. It had two functional crossings with the enclave: Erez, which was for the movement of people, and Kerem Shalom, for goods.
Gaza has a single crossing with Egypt, at Rafah, which was run by Egyptian authorities. As of July 2025 it is 'managed' by the Gaza Division of the IDF
Aid delivery via Rafah is hampered by the fact that the Rafah crossing is designed as an entry point for people, not goods, making it difficult for large convoys to pass through.
The Rafah crossing has been repeatedly bombed, causing disruptions in aid - not to mention deliberate bombing attacks as Israel forces Palestinians to flee via Rafah, and then bombs the crossing.
The war has prompted Israel to conduct more stringent checks on aid as it seeks to prevent the entry of what it calls “dual-use equipment,” products it says are “intended for civilian use but liable to serve military needs for the strengthening of Hamas.”
Trucks carrying aid must pass through three layers of inspection before they can enter the enclave, Griffiths, the UN under-secretary-general, has said.
This is further compounded by Israel's draconian 'dual-use' inspections which create intentional bottlenecks at the Rafah crossing, supposedly prevent the entry of what it calls “dual-use equipment,” products it says are “intended for civilian use but liable to serve military needs for the strengthening of Hamas.”
Among items deemed “dual use” by Israel are power generators, crutches, field hospital kits, inflatable water tanks, wooden boxes of children’s toys and, “perhaps most depressingly, 600 oxygen tanks.”
Provocation or any other citable action may explain, but in no way excuses, the war crime of collective punishment. No one other than Zionists have endorsed war crimes as the way to 'deal with Gazans'.
Israel are 'taking the blame' because they are committing war crimes with impunity, including the murder and subsequent coverup of journalists and aid workers.
As for the unwillingness to take refugees, that is simply facilitating the endgame of Israel - the depopulation of Palestine and contested territories.
Please tell your commanders at the IDF that under no definition of genocide is "number of deaths" a consideration.
Genocide is defined by intent, and the European Jews have intended to remove or kill all Palestinians since they began the Zionist project last century, culminating in their decision to start a war by attacking and invading Palestine in 1947/1948, with Palestine being occupied by a foreign invasion force ever since.
My “commanders at the IDF”? Good faith commenting is a site rule here at HN. I am neither Jewish nor Israeli, but I shouldn’t have to state that fact, nor should it have any bearing on this discussion.
Could you provide citations for these? Just because they are statistically relevant 1s and 0s that an LLM has constructed and rendered as UTF-8 text doesn't mean that they're true.
I think what happens is things come from people with certain views, who seem to be part of some specific tribe, and so the presumption is they’re just spinning a thing for their own angle.
This happened all the time during COVID. Facts about its transmission and impact, would be immediately dismissed depending on if it went with the story we already accepted.
Everyone has already accepted a story of “Israel good”, or “Israel bad”, and online forums hardly change anyone’s mind.
"genocide good" ? that can't be, but it seems to be the case for a vocal minority on HN (I got banned several times over the last two years for accusing Israel of genocide ad starting a shit storm of angry mob comments)
> Proof: this comment being downvoted. Downvoting as a mechanism is akin to censorship. It's being abused.
I agree it's hard to talk about anti-establishment issues on corporate owned media, but I feel like HN isn't really putting a thumb on the scale. As my proof, you assumed the comment was being downvoted, but it shows no sign of that (isn't particularly low, not faded at all). Unpopular opinions will obviously do poorly in a popularity contest, but I feel the tide is shifting among those informed on the issues.
Downvoting on HN doesn’t go lower than -4. If it’s used as a method of censorship, and you care about internet points, then you practically have to post nothing else useful to make it work.
Downvoting moves the comment down the reply tree and greys it out making it harder to read. Flagging comments completely hides them from many users, especially when logged in. And flagging submissions sends them to oblivion.
So these methods are definitely used to suppress topics or opinions, for better or worse. But when it comes to genocide it's obvious that those committing it also have the power to abuse every mechanism available to suppress information and discussions condemning it.
The fact that you can’t see any reason other than bigotry why this comment would be down voted is exactly what he was talking about in his essay on wokeness.
"You’re bringing emotion and hunches and your own biases to this more than the reasonable reply." <-- what are you talking about or is this a generic observation that is being applied here out of context?
Humian philosophy acknowledges that logic is driven by conviction and justified post hoc. Meaning: if my logic is driven by conviction, so is yours. All logic is, in the end.
If you think about it, all thinking is magical (in the sense that we, the universe and any of this exists at all.)
Having said that, there is no magical thinking in asserting that the government is bad at software. The government is bad at 99% of the things it does, but that 1% is keeping stuff running, despite the government trying really hard to fail at that 1%, too.
For ascii to look right, not messed up, the generator has to know the width of the div in ascii characters, e.g. 80, 240, etc, so it can make sure the lines don't wrap. So how does an LLM know anything about the UI it's serving? Is it just luck? what if you ask it to draw something that like 16:9 in aspect ratio... would it know to scale it dowm so lines won't wrap? how about loss of details if it does? Also, is it as good with Unicode art? So many questions.
They don't see runs of spaces very well, so most of them are terrible at ASCII art. (They'll often regurgitate something from their training data rather than try themselves.)
And unless their terminal details are included in the context, they'll just have to guess.
Runs of spaces of many different lengths are encoded as a single token. Its not actually inefficient.
In fact everything from ' ' to ' '79 all have a single token assigned to them on the OpenAI GPT4 tokenizer. Sometimes ' 'x + '\n' is also assigned a single token.
You might ask why they do this but its to make it so programming work better by reducing token counts. All whitespace before the code gets jammed into a single token and entire empty lines also get turned into a single token.
There are actually lots of interesting hand crafted token features added which don't get discussed much.
I understand Brussels is the de facto capital of the EU in terms of the EU institutions located there. One random association that came up when I read this is that Brussels is where the Session team is located (Session is the P2P version of Signal) and I'm sure they have a stake in this. Just not sure if they're involved in lobbying against encryption backdoors or just watching it unfold like the rest of us.
I'm one of those people who over-share and never comfortable keeping secrets (other than login credentials) while also being paranoid that we are relying on a certificate authority based system that's supposed to protect us but is fundamentally designed to enable state surveillance - a suspicion I've always had despite certificate transparency, pinning, etc) - You can downvote me for having this suspicion, but it won't make me more trusting of the security theater business.
"in collaboration with others at Thinking Machines"
If you're old enough, you might remember Danny Hillis' Thinking Machines from the late 80s. I wish they had chosen a different name (I say this for nostalgic reasons, having been in front of one of those cubes glowing with red LEDs back in the late 80s at MIT's AI Lab" (renamed to CSAIL at some point). Feynman did some amazing work on that, too: https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
In the U.S., the “THINKING MACHINES” trademarks were owned by Thinking Machines Corporation (the company Hillis co-founded), not Hillis personally, and those registrations were cancelled in 1998–1999.
USPTO Report
+1
The company itself went bankrupt in 1994 and its assets were dispersed (e.g., to Sun Microsystems, later Oracle).
There’s a new, pending USPTO application for “THINKING MACHINES” filed in 2025 by Thinking Machines Lab Inc., the company founded by Amira Murati.
I had no idea. But I believe the same deal with Einstein being a dick to his wife and never acknowledging his friend who taught him the math he used in his work (I read about that recently from a respectable source.) I guess that makes sense; no one is void of some deep flaw, it's just selectively hidden.
I was walking in a narrow street in Granada, Spain yesterday and two guys on their scooters where going at 40mph, on a street meant mostly for pedestrians. They pollute like cars (the stink is the same, even if smaller engine.) When people talk about cars ruining cities designed for walking, they should include scooters. They look cute in movies but they are not so pleasant to have around in practice. I don't mind the electric scooters the type you stand on because if you're going really fast on a narrow pedestrian and you hit someone it won't be so fatal, and you will get hurt probably equally, so people generally don't ride them at maximum speed. Also, they're essential for take-away food delivery.
Don't laugh. PMMs work! I built mine ten years ago when I realised I could improve the SOTA by a huge 20%. I've been improving it for the last 10 years and I get an average performance boost of ~0.25 every year. We will have Free Energy in the next 10 years.
Cool! Mine passively extracts unlimited energy from the expansion of space.
Not scientifically perpetual. But definitely, relative to the finite future lifetime of the human race, operable for perpetuity.
And by extracting dark energy, we can not only turn the big rip around. But by pulling dark energy out of space in a linear direction ahead of a ship, we can power the ship to high speed, as we contract space in front of the ship. Like fusion, we can use extracted dark energy to extract more dark energy. Essentially smoothly teleporting forward. No more fundamental speed limits relative to observers at distance. Looking forward to exploring beyond the observable universe.
I find your comment interesting, even though I'm not sure if I really get what you're saying. You built a perpetual motion machine? You then made improvements? Can you share details?
they are claiming that they built a PMM prototype, which is not fully satisfying the business requirements yet, but they are on track to do so based on all the amazing documented validated peer-reviewed published progress they made already over the years!
This is HN so I think it's fine to break standard protocol and clarify: I was joking. Specifically I was riffing off nakamoto_damacy's comment and carrying the comparison (of LLMs) with Perpetual Motion Machines (PMMs) to its logical conclusion.
I refer to the endless self improving runaway AI as an “information theoretic perpetual motion machine.”
This will work in a sense. It will do… something… and learn… something. It will be unrelated to the physical universe in any way. See also: procedural landscape generators, etc.
This makes sense on its face, but the flaw in the logic here is the implicit assumption that current procedures extract all information available in the datasets. We know this is not even remotely close to being true.
Many decades ago, statisticians made a similar erroneous assumption that maximum likelihood estimators, which also minimize entropy, are "optimal" in terms of saturating error. The fact that you can do better by smarter regularisation is the key to why DL works in the first place.
I'm no shill for AI, but you're going to need a better argument for why runaway AI up to obscene levels of performance is not theoretically possible. There are quite a few people, including some of my colleagues, that are looking in earnest but so far no one has found one.
Sure, it could up until some point where in order for it to figure out that it has to use a tool or access the Internet it will need more intelligence (to know that its answer or understanding is not sufficient or incorrect) How do we as humans know that? Someone tells us. Who's going to tell it? Then you end up at Minsky's Society of Mind, but also a distributed perpetual motion machine. Evolution seems to have figured out the intuition mechanism as some sort of probabilistic mechanism that's been honed for potentially millions of years, if not billions (white blood cells track pathogens, without having any neural network, so it's possible.) -- I think I opened a can of worms with these thoughts.
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