This is very much a "if you don't like X about your country, just move to a different one" kind of "solution". The costs are extreme to the point that pretending it's viable is insulting. Really it's just a way to silence legitimate complaints.

No shit. That's why, even if it's an exaggeration to call the entire stock market a pyramid scheme, you can't justify the claim that it's entirely "underlying business activity that drives total returns". That's the real question (from which dividends are, yes, a distraction).

That's exactly the question, though, since a lot of stocks seem priced disproportionately to their business activities.

Maybe it's in the video I didn't watch, but I really think paragraph one should make clear what kind of keys and why. Cryptographic? Asymmetric? How do they do the job, at even the most basic level? It never explains, just dives into abstract claims of superiority and usage stats. I gather relays are involved; this would be a good thing to mention right away instead of making me sift it from the HN discussion.

Maybe literally any of the other yellow-to-red flags about their behavior? I mean, yeah, if you only post about your own stuff, don't expect HN to treat you kindly, but that wasn't what you initially responded to. And by the way, I've seen your name enough to know that you should know that getting flagged is not a 100% guarantee of doing anything wrong, and if the comment or poster did do something wrong it might not be obvious from the comment itself. Generalizing from flags to a rule about all comments under your own post, as you seem to do here, seems wildly unsound to me.

I've been here a long time, and, uh, what? I don't know if OP's comment in particular is a good one, but I don't think there's a problem in general with adding a little HN-specific commentary.

(Anyway, I checked the github profile in OP and didn't see any plausible candidates for the link, so either it's private or deleted (or never existed, but that seems less likely).)

On the other hand, the hype of "Sam Altman and his like" being plainly exaggerated doesn't mean there's nothing at all behind it. It's plain to see there's something important about LLM capabilities. I don't even use them myself, as emotionally I find them entirely repugnant, and I can still see that.

We need to wait to get the whole story about LLMs, but we don't need to wait to confidently reject both extremes of opinion about them.

Regardless of whether you're using AI (please don't btw) or coming by your em-dashes honestly, people who fixate on trivial obvious cues will notice your em-dashes and assume you're using it.

Even more dangerously, I think they're even rarer than people who can convincingly pretend to be one. So even if you go looking for such a person you're heading into the danger zone.

> If we understood conscious experience well enough to capture and replay it so closely that the person who had the experience could verify it, then almost no one would care about the hard problem.

Practically speaking, though, perhaps this is correct.

Anyway, if someone claimed to create such a machine I would, in fact, very much doubt that it actually creates the same experience simply because no human brain is quite physically the same, so it will interact differently with the machine. That's true even if experience is entirely physical.

> The only realistic way we either build that device or prove that it can't be built is science.

There's another possibility: the device remains in the realm of hazy infeasibility forever, where no one succeeds convincingly but we also never articulate why it's impossible. I think this is more likely. Certainly the engineering would be extremely difficult.

Any candidate device will face the usual objections about the relationship between experience and its physical correlates, plus the one I mentioned above about physical differences between brains, and probably a dozen more depending on the details. You'll be able to choose to believe it proves consciousness is physical, or not, but you can already choose that today with equally strong evidence. It's like a binary Rorschach test for your assumptions about metaphysics.

Anyway, further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism I was in fact looking this up recently for fiction-writing purposes.