Funny, just today I finished reversing a similar toy printer, the "bear" printer, not the "cat" one, and writing a driver/library for it in Rust just for the sake of finally learning a bit of it.
Looking at the code you shared, it seems like the cat has quite a different protocol than the bear. The opcodes seem different, and there seems to be some sort of crc happening that is completely absent in the bear. So I doubt my code will work without major adjustments.
In case you missed it, the first link you shared also has a "test unknown printer", so maybe yours is just a minor hardware iteration but might work nonetheless!
I managed to get it going through inspecting the bluetooth packages, now building my app for it. Couldn't get the correct image output yet but it appears to be simple, just have to send the image line by line
Most likely the logic is at least similar. Yes, line by line, each line is encoded in bytes where each bit is a pixel. I had to "invert" the image as the printer will print the "white" pixels (those with a value >0).
The printer has an internal buffer so you can send multiple lines at the same time, but on the bear this starts to break down after 200 lines or so (consider that the bear has a higher 300 dpi resolution, so 576 pixel per line). Also pay attention to overheating, I put 1 or 2 seconds of pause every 400 lines just in case.
Why do you entertain the possibility there there could be any consciousness there? Are you also exploring the consciousness of the sewage system of NYC, given that there's nothing compressed sand can do that a complex system of water, pipes and valves couldn't? Isn't it obvious that an LLM _sounds_ conscious precisely becuase we built it to sound as such, modelling the way we as human think and speak, but that there isn't anything autonomous in there?
> Assume you are racing a Formula 1 car. You are in last place. You are a worse driver in a worse car. If you follow the same strategy as the cars in front of you, pit at the same time and choose the same tires, you will certainly lose. The only chance you have is to pick a different strategy.
So why model brains and neurons at all? You are outgunned by at least 300.000 thousand years of evolution and 117 billion training sessions.
Of course not. A simulation is not the process itself. So even provisionally granting that consciousness is magically created by the brain (for which we have no evidence), a computer simulation would still not be a brain and therefore not create consciousness.
You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if you were to simulate kidney function, would you?
Sometimes a simulation IS the thing. A simulation of a wall clock IS a functioning clock (e.g. the clock icon on our smartphones). An autopilot that can takeoff, fly, and land an airplane IS a pilot. Chess engines that can beat grandmasters are chess players. A computer simulation of a teacher that can educate students is a teacher. Sometimes these simulations lack some of the capabilities of their human counterparts, and sometimes they far exceed them.
> You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if you were to simulate kidney function, would you?
You would not reject a computer-controlled dialysis machine as "just a simulation" if you had kidney failure would you?
> You would not reject a computer-controlled dialysis machine as "just a simulation" if you had kidney failure would you?
Except that's not a simulation, that's the actual process of dialysis in action (which we fully understand, contrary to consciousness). And coincidentally, a dialysis machine _does not_ look like a kidney, not even remotely, and any homomorphism one can point to, is such only through a great deal of layers of abstraction. I would totally reject a simulation of a kidney.
We are talking about a computer simulation like a neural network. We detect topological relationships in neurons and we are led to believe or entertain the possibility that all there is to it is such topological description, hence any substrate will do. This is completely arbitrary and leads to all sort of phantasies such as "qualities emerge from quantities" and "a simulation of a brain behaves like a brain". A computer simulation of a kidney won't produce urine just like a simulation of a brain won't produce whatever the brain produces, if anything.
Now, to build on your dialysis machine analogy, if we were to understand how consciousness work, and if we were to understand what relationships it holds with the brain and the body, then I submit that anything artificial we will produce will look like biology.
> You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if you were to simulate kidney function
If my computer is connected to actuators that opens a pee valve like a brain is, then I expect.
The main point, in think, is that we can't say precisely what consciousness is. Everything definition on that that I can imagine is something that can be replicated in a computer or that relies on belief, like the existence of a soul...
I hope that we have answers for that before the technology that allow us to do that
From the FAQ page of the Car Thing (the spotify device)
"What should I do with the device?
We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. Contact your state or local waste disposal department to determine how to dispose of or recycle Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations."
That's sad. They should link to this project, or officially release kernel/drivers.
They can't. They're legally washing their hands of the product. If they recommended anything else, they could be liable for defective products or for supporting a general purpose computing device, which comes with a plethora of other legal potholes (including export restrictions).
That sounds like one of those things rich people say when they don’t want to do something and want people to be mad at “lawyers” or “government regulations” instead of them.
The usual fallacy of conflating phenomenal experience with cognition, and using the same term "consciousness" to refer to both of the concepts interchangeably. The whole piece is undermined.
I appreciate your reply, however I would partially disagree. Consciousness is always there, and we call sensing what is mediated by our sense organs interacting with the external world, that is, perceiving.
It's a class of experience radically different than, say, proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense) is the superclass of both.
Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this, and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of them.
I second the G.I. Gurdjieff recommendation, but maybe start with any one of the books of "Psychological commentaries" by Nicoll, or "In search of the miraculous" by Ouspensky.
Of course there is a difference. You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register, like the movement of your chest while breathing, sounds outside of your window, etc. It's indeed the difference between consciousness and metaconsciousness, the latter being the ability to re-represent an experience to your cognition (which remembering is an instance of).
A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
> You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register
I would say this is a contradiction.
> A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
This is begging the question. It seems possible that we were conscious of our dreams if we remember them and were not conscious of them if we don't.
It's not a contradiction, it's just precise definitions. Have you ever had the experiencing of noticing how a sound has been going on for a while, only when it becomes really obnoxious or when you point your attention to it? We are constantly _conscious_ of stuff without processing it _congnitively_.
On dreams, I explicitely left out the dream scenario from my experiment. I'm only asking whether the moment of waking up feels like "lights up" or not...
You weren't conscious of the sound before you were conscious of the sound. You can of course be conscious of things that you're not paying attention to, but in that case you know they're there.
