Hacker News: pengstrom

New comment by pengstrom in "Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England"

pengstrom — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 10:43:12 +0000

I think politicians are right to be afraid. Surveillance of this magnitude isn't a ballot-box-level grievance. It's a Guy Fawkes/V-level injustice. They're stepping into territory where the very people they're supposed to stop might instead turn justified.

New comment by pengstrom in "Study mode"

pengstrom — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:06:00 +0000

The part about history perspectives sounds interesting. I haven't noticed this. Please post any concrete/specific examples you've encountered!

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 15:33:11 +0000

When you run out of things to occupy yourself with you end up thinking about thinking

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:56:49 +0000

There's this video by an unfortunately rude Youtuber that's actually quite interesting. I find his tribalism off-putting (and ironic), but he's clearly thought about it a lot. https://youtu.be/kse87ocS0Uo?si=Gi5f6uQFeJCrm_hF

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:50:57 +0000

I've never gotten the impression an animal was aware it could change me. Sure it'd make its wants clear until it got what it wanted or got bored, but that's a very primitive form of conduct. The cat clearly knows I can get it more foods between meals. The communication is limited, but I've never seen him come up with a better argument than that he really really wants more food. Dogs are stranger and clearly has a concept of social structure that cats don't. Both from their background as pack animals and deliberate domestication for assisting humans in work.

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:41:02 +0000

Strange. My knowledge of the fundamentals and processes in humans still makes me jelous of the apparent ease others fare in social situations. Clearly there's more to it than it seems. I'd be wary of equating bottom-up and top-down as principally equivalent.

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:35:37 +0000

Does it assume life, or are the qualities that makes an organism act in spite of us, and agency, one and the same?

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:29:50 +0000

I'm more optimistic but cynical. Everybody has the capacity, but can't be bothered for your sake specifically. A highly intelligent person can casually entertain several theoretical notions. A lesser can too, but it requires more effort. Effort that might be better spent elsewhere, or effort that makes social interaction awkward.

New comment by pengstrom in "How to Build Conscious Machines"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:24:53 +0000

My stab:

2: implicit world. Reacts to but not modeled. 3: explicit world and your separation from it. 4: Model that includes other intelligences of level 3 that you have to take into consideration. World resources can be shared or competes for. 5: Language. Model of others as yourself, their model include yours too. Mutual recursion. Information can be transmitted mind-to mind.

New comment by pengstrom in "How multiplication is defined in Peano arithmetic"

pengstrom — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:12:05 +0000

I think the fact that the initial _size_ of the recursion can be arbitrarily large is where infinity comes in. No matter your resources, there might be (must be?) a recision problem that's too large, that requires too many steps.

New comment by pengstrom in "Cheap Thrills, an album cover by Robert Crumb (2020)"

pengstrom — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:30:36 +0000

Jesus. I couldn't finish that documentary. I only knew him by his more popular art, but that film put me off anything he'd done. His family was a mess, and he himself is without a doubt the last person of it I'd ever want to meet. Every single interaction he had with a woman (even by proxy) on screen made my skin crawl. A creep of the highest caliber.

New comment by pengstrom in "Study suggests a 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form"

pengstrom — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 05:25:26 +0000

Economics is a social science, the study of how people interact with things of value. It cannot be hard, since it has a feedback loop.

New comment by pengstrom in "Git Branches as a Social Construct"

pengstrom — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 12:36:05 +0000

You're looking at it wrong. We can't change the laws of physics, but we can change society. That's the practical difference.

New comment by pengstrom in "Let's try to understand AI monosemanticity"

pengstrom — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 23:54:39 +0000

I'd say 'in spite'-ness is pretty spot on for life in general

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:28:49 +0000

That's true, I might have been a little aggressive on the claiming

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:13:15 +0000

I always cringe when I hear evolution brought up as some invented method or mere developmental happenstance. It's a cold, unavoidable consequence of variation, selection and inheritance, in the absolutely most general way possible.

The universe evolves, life just found a way to make it quicker. Then we invented sexual dimorphism to make several selections within a single generation. Our human intelligence allows us to evolve ideas at an even faster rate.

The effects of evolution are in the realms of science, but evolution itself is the superstructure science, and anything else, has "evolved" in. It's time.

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:06:04 +0000

"Only a sith deals in absolutes"

Science clearly works because humans have a genuine curiosity to find truth. While every person is flawed and prone to error, the curiosity points in the same direction, rising above the noise.

We've only recently had to even discuss this after the deployment of large scale truth poisoning making the errors non-uniform.

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 21:59:31 +0000

That's sad. I'd assume your love for you sister would make you find common ground in doubt and humility, virtues of both science and religion. Every single human tells themselves lies to feel better, we just call them Justice or Democracy. We're just self-conscious meatbags thrust into existence against our will, after all.

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 21:51:02 +0000

Technically only true for formal systems where you can axiomatically define A = not A, which is principally arbitrary.

New comment by pengstrom in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

pengstrom — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 21:43:40 +0000

Deutsch also heavily argues for explanations as first-class existence on the level of matter. For him, predictions are simply a practical concern. I still fondly remember his dialogue between Socrates and Apollo in dream, where he convincingly makes the point that even there he can find true knowledge about the world.