I've been calling LLMs digital intelligence. That's in my opinion what they are and on the digital/conceptual realm they are better than humans since LLMs are better generalists.

But I'd never state their conscious. For me consciousness extends outward from myself, since I can't trust anything else. It starts with the question like: why can't I control the movement of another person? Why can't I transfer my mind to another body and theirs to mine? Why is it that whenever I sleep, and similar things, I end up back to this place called "reality"?

I come to the conclusion that I am conscious and I'm a conscious being in reality. I am human and I've been raised by humans. Now, technically, all humans besides me could be zombies. They could be non-conscious beings that simply can act like humans. I'm sure we'll be able to create them in a few decades. However, I'm incentivized for multiple reasons to believe they're not zombies. Therefore humans are conscious too. All of them. Can I know for sure? No since I can't even trust my own senses fully or my own thoughts (the whole Descartes thing) but I choose to trust those things too because I need some reasonable-ish foundation to work from.

If humans are conscious, why aren't animals like us? Surely great apes must be conscious at least to some extent. Hell, some of them even have better short-term memory than us [1]. Well, turns out, from an anatomy standpoint they look a lot like us. Fine, let's assume they're conscious too.

Now we get into the territory that anything that has a large enough brain must be conscious because that's how we govern our consciousness. So you can extend this to all kinds of living beings.

I did this from my perspective. Of course, you should do it from your perspective. The same argument could be made.

For as long as we can't manipulate conscious experience in some way shape or form, we have no clue whether anything that isn't like us can be conscious. We'd need to be able to merge and split conscious experiences or we'd need to be very strongly able to understand why that isn't possible. And I don't mean just at the biological level but at the experiential level. Currently conjoined twins, and what they tell us gives some insight (being able to sense the other part that's part of the other twin).

Other than that, I claim we have no clue what consciousness is other than that we're experiencing it. So to call LLMs conscious is way too big of a claim. But they are definitely intelligent because they come up with things that I wouldn't have and it's useful to me. Perhaps a practical characterization of intelligence but it works for me.

I think for anyone to say something useful from this you'd need the trifecta of deep neuroscience knowledge, deep philosophy knowledge and (at least) a strong understanding of how LLMs work.

AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.

It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.

This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432318

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

It was such a fun birthday. It was basically a conference, haha.

I don't, but holy moly. That sounds insane!

Whatever it is, I'm sure it's load-bearing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815529

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

For example, I looked at eyeballvull [1]. It seems promising but I don't see wide support for example. I respect the author for still committing. A benchmark where an agent scans a repo in full is what I'm looking for.

But then I also wondered: maybe there are others out there that I haven't been aware of yet.

And, at the risk of potentially being flooded, for people that are curious about security aware software engineering with agents (or without them for that matter), let's have a chat! My email is in my profile.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08708

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48803408

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

To be fair, vibecoding this memo app in Swift didn’t take too long. There were some tricks to it, using xcodegen helped a lot so that I don’t need to use the Xcode project.

It’s fun to see Swift code. I used to do some Objective-C back in the day.

[1] another thing I made. It’s a sequel to the Alice in Wonderland stories. It’s also a SQL course. I vibe engineered it, meaning I looked at the code and used AI-assisted development.

Except for the story though that’s almost all fully me. LLMs aren’t great storytellers. The same is true for the lesson scaffolding, that’s almost only me.

So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said.

It's nice to have something that structures my thoughts by just thinking out loud.

I vibecoded it (it's approaching 20K lines including tests). It works quite well but there are some bugs, so will have to do some actual engineering. But the UX is working quite well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48354598

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Make usable software. Cheap code means that you can create a lot more prototypes to then perform usability tests by finding a user and sitting next to them. I mostly worked on internal apps lately, so perhaps it's much easier for me to do than it is for some others.