Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45630375

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Otherwise really interesting, thanks for sharing!

They would understand code and data are in the same place, that all flow control effectively boils down to a jump, and they have a _more_ accurate picture of the inside of a machine than anyone starting out with Python or JavaScript could hope for.

Having spent 25 years to get to assembler, I wish I'd started it sooner. It's truly a lovely way to look at the machine. I'll definitely be teaching my kids how to program in assembly first (probably x86-16 using DOS as a program launcher)

It isn't pretty and you better be able to control the rollout of both sides because backwards compatibility will not be a thing. But I'll take it over a giant pile of code generation in many circumstances

Sad but I don't want another device that wants to be more than it is, I basically want an updated version of my gameboy from the 90s and that's it. No downloads, no network, no social, just a game you can quietly play anywhere when you have a bit of time, no nonsense

I trust the TSA agents brain to not get hacked in the next 24 hours, a database run by them, not so much.

> Yes. You can’t? This is not > really a convincing argument.

Fair, I believe it's called begging the question. But for some context is that people of many recent technological ages have talked about the brain like a piece of technology -- e.g. like a printing press, a radio, a TV.

I think we've found what we've wanted to find (a hardware-software dichotomy in the brain) and then occasionally get surprised when things aren't all that clearly separated. So with that in mind, I personally without any particularly good evidence to the contrary am not of the belief that your brain can be represented as a static state. Pribram's holonomic mind theory comes to mind as a possible way brain state could have trouble being represented in RAM.( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory)

> ...you are looking at implementation details and feeling a disconnect between that and the possibility of inteligence. Do you feel the same ridiculousnes about a meatblob doing things and appearing inteligent?

If I was a biologist I might. My grandfather was a microbiologist and scoffed at my atheism. But with a computer at least the details are understandable and knowable being created by people. We haven't cracked the consciousness of a fruit fly despite having a map of it's brain.

>> a computer couldn't spontaneously pick to go down a path that wasn't defined for it.

> Can you?

Love it. I re-read Fight Club recently, it's a reasonable question. The worries of determinism versus free will still loom large in this sort of world view. We get a kind of "god in the gaps" type problem with free will being reduced down to the spaces where you don't have an explanation.

Top of the file you'll need this offset for DOS (or 7c00 for an MBR) to adjust your pointers with based on where the program gets loaded:

[bits 16] [offset 100]

I bet you can use more than 64kb of memory, I set ES to A000 and write to video memory in mode 13. So I imagine if you have a data source -- know your (LBA) block offsets (MBR style) or use a DOS interrupt to load a file -- you can still stomp on some memory outside of the given 64k and set your DS register there.

I haven't done it yet but if I wanted to load a .wad file or something that's the line I'd follow ;)

The big limits if you don't want to get into disk IO, is 512 bytes or less since you're basically running your program as a master boot record. To get more you'll need to load some LBAs from disk which yes there is an interrupt for and osdev has even better stuff.

Other than that, the difference between a .com file (usual limit 64kb single segment) and an MBR style bootable program is pretty minimal

The only question I have though is... How? I see DOS initialize all of the segment registers to the same address. Is this something DOS specific like special bits in _start or something? Or something I do myself?

I guess I could imagine my one mega .asm file that includes all my resources and then in _start I just set my segment registers to "further down in the file" using labels. But yeah, I'm a newb at this but love the simplicity of graphics programming like this, tips very much appreciated :)

I think it's less about the randomness and more about that all the functionality of a computer is defined up front, in software, in training, in hardware. Sure you can add randomness and pick between two paths randomly but a computer couldn't spontaneously pick to go down a path that wasn't defined for it.

This makes computers incredibly good at what people are not good at -- predictably doing math correctly, following a procedure, etc.

But because all of the possibilities of the computer had to be written up as circuitry or software beforehand, it's variability of outputs is constrained to what we put into it in the first place (whether that's a seed for randomness or model weights).

You can get random numbers and feed it into the computer but we call that "fuzzing" which is a search for crashes indicating unhandled input cases and possible bugs or security issues.

Take the same model weights give it the same inputs, get the same outputs. Same with the pseudo-random number generator. And the "same inputs" is especially limited versus what humans are used to.

What's the machine code of an AGI gonna look like? It makes one illegal instruction and crashes? If if changes tboughts will it flush the TLB and CPU pipeline? ;) I jest but really think about the metal. The inside of modern computers is tightly controlled with no room for anything unpredictable. I really don't think a von Neumann (or Harvard ;) machine is going to cut it. Honestly I don't know what will, controlled but not controlled, artificially designed but not deterministic.

In fact, that we've made a computer as unreliable as a human at reproducing data (ala hallucinating/making s** up) is an achievement itself, as much of an anti-goal as it may be. If you want accuracy, you don't use a probabilistic system on such a wide problem space (identify a bad solder joint from an image, sure. Write my thesis, not so much)

It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated circuits for our computations but is nothing by comparison to our minds.

Ask yourself, why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism -- put the same random seed value in your code and get the same "random numbers" every time in the same order. Computers need to be like this to be good tools.

Assuming that AGI is possible in the kinds of computers we know how to build means that we think a mind can be reduced to a probabilistic or deterministic system. And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. Your experience may differ and it might be fun to talk about.

In Aristotle's ethics he talks a lot about ergon (purpose) -- hammers are different than people, computers are different than people, they have an obvious purpose (because they are tools made with an end in mind). Minds strive -- we have desires, wants and needs -- even if it is simply to survive or better yet thrive (eudaimonia).

An attempt to create a mind is another thing entirely and not something we know how to start. Rolling dice hasn't gotten anywhere. So I'd wager AGI somewhere in the realm of 30 years to never.

Domestication of plants was "easy" when tested in a controlled setting selecting seeds carefully at a university. Estimated that wheat in the agricultural "revolution" (a much scoffed about term in the book) could have been domesticated in 200 years if purposeful. Instead agriculture took something like 3000 years to become dominant versus mixed food sources (mostly gathering, fishing and hunting, with some low-effort planting on riverbanks).

And yes to your point, the idea that there is some sort of progression in human societies is contradicted by the recent decades of evidence in archeology -- every arrangement you can imagine seems to have been tried (stationary+hunter/gather, nomadic farmer, alternating back and forth, shifts toward farming for hundreds of years and then back to fishing for thousands). Humans time on the earth has been much longer than our recorded history, with more variety and less boring than we usually assume.

Anyway I hope that inspires someone to pick up the book, it really is a good read.

Perhaps my usage is too light, no IDEs, no electron anything, no streaming, and few tabs because I shutdown the laptop instead of suspend it -- but I don't see what all the fuss is about needing to upgrade anything. 16gb of ram and an i5 is fine, even for the modern web, disable JavaScript and/or run ublock origin.

The new fangled ARM stuff ;) strikes me as essentially similar in character to smartphones: future e-waste with no possibility of repair. Choose wisely, choose x86 and modularity

I'd be curious about how yours has held up. I overclocked my iBook back in the day to play DivX (bumped FSB from 66 to 100mhz) and it eventually cooked around 2010.