β-redex

Karma: 281

β-redex Mar 6, 2025, 11:17 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Can a finite physical device be Turing equivalent?

Notably, this was exactly the sort of belief I was trying to show is false

Please point out if there is a specific claim I made in my comment that you believe to be false. I said that “I don’t think a TC computer can ever be built in our universe.”, which you don’t seem to argue with? (If we assume that we can only ever get access to a finite number of atoms. If you dispute this I won’t argue with that, neither of us has a Theory of Everything to say for certain.)

Just to make precise why I was making that claim and what it was trying to argue against, take this quote from the post:

yes, you can consider a finite computer in the real world to be Turing-complete

I dropped the “finite computer” constraint and interpreted the phrase “real world” to mean that “it can be built in our universe”, this is how I arrived at the “a TC computer can be built in our universe” statement, which I claimed was false.

β-redex Mar 6, 2025, 9:41 PM
2 points
0
on: Can a finite physical device be Turing equivalent?
I don’t think a TC computer can ever be built in our universe. The observable universe has a finite number of atoms, I have seen numbers around $10^{80}$ thrown around. Even if you can build a RAM where each atom stores 1 bit,^[1] this is still very much finite.

I think a much more interesting question is why TC machines are — despite only existing in theory — such useful models for thinking about real-world computers. There is obviously some approximation going on here, where for the vast majority of real-world problems, you can write them in such a way that they work just fine with finite RAM. (E.g. the cases where we would run out of RAM are quite easy to predict, and don’t just crop up randomly.)
1. ↩︎
  You can maybe push that number up by e.g. using subatomic particles or using a number of different quantum states of a single particle, but I think with all the tricks you will still end up with some well bounded constant multiplier for how many bits you can store, which does not matter much for this argument.

β-redex Mar 6, 2025, 9:22 PM
1 point
0
on: Can a finite physical device be Turing equivalent?
Let $S = {0, 1}^{n}$ be the state space of our finite/physical computer, where $n$ is the number of bits of state the computer has. This can include RAM, non-volatile storage, CPU registers, cache, GPU RAM, etc… just add up all the bits.

The stateless parts of the computer can be modeled as a state transition function $f : S \to S$ , which is applied at every time step to produce the next state. (And let’s suppose that there is some special halting state $h \in S$ .)

This is clearly a FSM with $2^{n}$ states, and not TC. The halting problem can be trivially solved for it: it is guaranteed to either halt or loop after $2^{n}$ steps.

(Proof: It can be seen that if we ever get back to a state where we have already been, we will loop. So let’s suppose that after $2^{n}$ time we have had a different state at each time step, and haven’t halted. This is impossible, since there are only $| S | - 1 = 2^{n} - 1$ non-halting states, so there cannot exist $2^{n}$ distinct ones.)

β-redex Dec 6, 2023, 3:45 AM
7 points
18
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
I think the reacts being semantic instead of being random emojis is what makes this so much better.

I wish other platforms experimented with semantic reacts as well, instead of just letting people react with any emoji of their choosing, and making you guess whether e.g. “thumbs up” means agreement, acknowledgement, or endorsement, etc.

β-redex Dec 2, 2023, 7:33 PM
25 points
0
on: 2023 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
This was my first time taking this, looking forward to the results!

β-redex Oct 23, 2023, 1:38 PM
30 points
5
on: Which LessWrongers are (aspiring) YouTubers?
I know of Robert Miles, and Writer, who does Rational Animations. (In fact Robert Miles’ channel is the primary reason I discovered LessWrong :) )

β-redex Oct 15, 2023, 8:54 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rationalist horror movies
Don’t leave me hanging like this, does the movie you are describing exist? (Though I guess your description is a major spoiler, you would need to go in without knowing whether there will be anything supernatural.)

β-redex Oct 15, 2023, 8:47 AM
12 points
0
on: Rationalist horror movies
1. The Thing: classic
2. Eden Lake
3. Misery
4. 10 Cloverfield Lane
5. Gone Girl: not horror, but I specifically like it because of how agentic the protagonist is
2., 3. and 4. have in common that there is some sort of abusive relationship that develops, and I think this adds another layer of horror. (A person/group of people gain some power over the protagonist(s), and they slowly grow more abusive with this power.)

β-redex Oct 15, 2023, 8:12 AM
6 points
0
on: Rationalist horror movies
Somewhat related: does anyone else strongly dislike supernatural elements in horror movies?

It’s not that I have anything against a movie exploring the idea of “what if we suddenly discovered that we live in a universe where supernatural thing X exist”, but the characters just accept this without much evidence at all.

I would love a movie though where they explore the more likely alternate hypotheses first (mental issues, some weird optical/acoustic phenomenon, or just someone playing a super elaborate prank), but then the evidence starts mounding, and eventually they are forced to accept that “supernatural thing X actually exists” is really the most likely hypothesis.

β-redex Jul 13, 2023, 9:52 PM
14 points
20
on: Jailbreaking GPT-4′s code interpreter

These examples show that, at least in this lower-stakes setting, OpenAI’s current cybersecurity measures on an already-deployed model are insufficient to stop a moderately determined red-teamer.

I… don’t actually see any non-trivial vulnerabilities here? Like, these are stuff you can do on any cloud VM you rent?

Cool exploration though, and it’s certainly interesting that OpenAI is giving you such a powerful VM for free (well actually not because you already pay for GPT-4 I guess?), but I have to agree with their assessment which you found that “it’s expected that you can see and modify files on this system”.

β-redex Jun 7, 2023, 9:08 PM
1 point
0
on: gamers beware: modded Minecraft has new malware

The malware is embedded in multiple mods, some of which were added to highly popular modpacks.

Any info on how this happened? This seems like a fairly serious supply chain attack. I have heard of incidents with individual malicious packages on npm or PyPI, but not one where multiple high profile packages in a software repository were infected in a coordinated manner.

β-redex Mar 29, 2023, 8:05 PM
1 point
0
on: Chatbot convinces Belgian to commit suicide
Uhh this first happening in 2023 was the exact prediction Gary Marcus made last year: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-language

Not sure whether this instance is a capability or alignment issue though. Is the LLM just too unreliable, as Gary Marcus is saying? Or is it perfectly capable, and just misaligned?

β-redex Mar 23, 2023, 11:01 PM
3 points
1
on: We have to Upgrade
I don’t see why communicating with an AI through a BCI is necessarily better than through a keyboard+screen. Just because a BCI is more ergonomic and the AI might feel more like “a part of you”, it won’t magically be better aligned.

In fact the BCI option seems way scarier to me. An AI that can read my thoughts at any time and stimulate random neurons in my brain at will? No, thanks. This scenario just feels like you are handing it the “breaking out of the box” option on a silver platter.

β-redex Feb 16, 2023, 9:40 PM
2 points
−3
in reply to: Signer’s comment on: How seriously should we take the hypothesis that LW is just wrong on how AI will impact the 21st century?
Why is this being downvoted?

From what I am seeing people here are focusing way too much on having a precisely calibrated P(doom) value.

It seems that even if P(doom) is 1% the doom scenario should be taken very seriously and alignment research pursued to the furthest extent possible.

The probability that after much careful calibration and research you would come up with a P(doom) value less than 1% seems very unlikely to me. So why invest time into refining your estimate?

β-redex Feb 10, 2023, 5:04 PM
7 points
0
on: Is it a coincidence that GPT-3 requires roughly the same amount of compute as is necessary to emulate the human brain?
There was a recent post estimating that GTP-3 is equivalent to about 175 bees. There is also a comment there asserting that a human is about 140k bees.

I would be very interested if someone could explain where this huge discrepancy comes from. (One estimate is equating synapses with parameters, while this one is based on FLOPS. But there shouldn’t be such a huge difference.)

β-redex Feb 8, 2023, 11:53 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Why Are Bacteria So Simple?
Indeed (as other commenters also pointed out) the ability to sexually reproduce seems to be much more prevalent than I originally thought when writing the above comment. (I thought that eukaryotes only capable of asexual reproduction were relatively common, but it seems that there may only be a very few special cases like that.)

I still disagree with you dismissing the importance of mitochondria though. (I don’t think the OP is saying that mitochondria alone are sufficient for larger genomes, but the argument for why they are at least necessary is convincing to me.)

β-redex Feb 7, 2023, 9:16 PM
1 point
0
on: English is a Terrible Programming Language—And other reasons AI won’t displace programmers
I disagree with English (in principle at least) being inadequate for software specification.

For any commercial software, the specification basically is just “make profit for this company”. The rest is implementation detail.

(Obviously this is an absurd example, but it illustrates how you can express abstractions in English that you can’t in C++.)

β-redex Feb 7, 2023, 9:02 PM
1 point
0
on: English is a Terrible Programming Language—And other reasons AI won’t displace programmers
I don’t think the comparison of giving a LLM instructions and expecting correct code to be output is fair. You are vastly overestimating the competence of human programmers: when was the last time you wrote perfectly correct code on the very first try?

Giving the LLM the ability to run its code and modify it until it thinks its right would be a much fairer comparison. And if, as you say, writing unit tests is easy for a LLM, wouldn’t that just make this trial-and-error loop trivial? You can just bang the LLM against the problem until the unit tests pass.

(And this process obviously won’t produce bug-free code, but humans don’t do that in the first place either.)

β-redex Feb 6, 2023, 1:02 PM
6 points
2
in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Why Are Bacteria So Simple?
Not all eukaryotes employ sexual reproduction. Also prokaryotes do have some mechanisms for DNA exchange as well, so copying errors are not their only chance for evolution either.

But I do agree that it’s probably no coincidence that the most complex life forms are sexually reproducing eukaryotes.

β-redex Feb 4, 2023, 12:05 PM
1 point
0
on: Small Talk is Good, Actually

I barely registered the difference between small talk and big talk

I am still confused about what “small talk” is after reading this post.

Sure, talking about the weather is definitely small talk. But if I want to get to know somebody, weather talk can’t possibly last for more than 30 seconds. After that, both parties have demonstrated the necessary conversational skills to move on to more interesting topics. And the “getting to know each other” phase is really just a spectrum between surface level stuff and your deepest personal secrets, so I don’t really see where you would draw the line between small and deep talk.

One situation I struggle with on the other hand is when I would rather avoid talking to a person at all, and so I want to maintain the shallowest possible level of small talk. (Ideally I could tell them that “sorry, I would rather just not talk to you right now”, but that’s not really socially accepted.)