Hacker News: lucms_

New comment by lucms_ in "Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards"

lucms_ — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:00:32 +0000

It's a subtle issue. Supposing "consciousness" here means the subjective, first-person experience of one's own, we don't really know anyone else other than ourselves to be conscious. I only have evidence of the existence of my own subjective experience. I can only experience my feelings, my thoughts, my sights, my hearings, not of anybody else's. We are all pretty sure that every other human is conscious, and animals, and so on, but it's something that our brains have to do for us, not something that we empirically, evidentially know to be true -- to the point, in fact, that we can get fooled, as in the case of LLMs passing the Turing test.

What the author seems to observe is that this non-evidential judgement that other beings are conscious is due to us caring about them. The brain creates this perception so that we care about them, form bonds, work together, and so on -- evolution selects for cooperation. So the question of whether we will think of AI as conscious is that of whether we will care for it like we care for another being. And, in this regard, the author points out that "intelligent agents" that appear to do this work effectively together.

My personal point of view is that it's unclear what being an AI is in order for us to even talk about it being conscious. Is it the computations happening in the GPU according to a set of weights? Is it the weights themselves? Is it the architecture? Does it include the code around it, that gives it the context and prompt, and hooks the response to a terminal, or to a client host, etc.?

New comment by lucms_ in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"

lucms_ — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:21:29 +0000

The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.

New comment by lucms_ in "Show HN: Nova JavaScript Engine"

lucms_ — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:07:32 +0000

Isn't data-oriented design about organizing the data in a way that reflects the most common access patterns of the program? The approach of placing all numbers in a big number vector, all Arrays into a big Array vector, and so on, would be "data-oriented design" if it actually reflects the most common access patterns. So, is it the case that when you read a number you also want all those other numbers that come together with it in the cache line? Is that the case for Arrays? For DataViews? In other words, does this approach to allocating memory reflect the most common data access patterns in JavaScript programs? I'm not saying it's a bad approach, and I'm not even trying to imply that it's not DOD, I'm genuinely asking.

Edit: maybe a better question is: does it reflect the most common data access patterns of a JavaScript Engine?