Yet another incompatible definition - here first principles thinking is define as "how do reach a solution?". If that were true, then it wouldn't be any different from "problem solving".
I think I'll stop commenting in this thread as it seems like no two people in this thread are using compatible meanings of "first principles" thinking. Forget about equivalent meanings of it.
"First order" thinking from my knowledge is an entirely different concept.
That's the type of comment people make when they don't want to understand what the others side's actual views are, so instead they tell themselves a simple story they can believe rather than engage with the actual reason.
Both sides do it, but that's a prime example of one of the popular ones from one side.
It's Occam's Razor. In particular, nothing else explains why immigration became such a major issue for left-leaning parties around the western world only in the last 15 years: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/694804917/democrats-used-to-t.... As it became apparent that immigrants were a deep well of votes for people who wanted to expand the welfare state, immigration--which the left traditionally had viewed through the lens of economics and labor markets--became reframed as a civil rights and moral issue.
Sounds very similar to the "interpreter" or "virtual machine" pattern (can't recall the exact name).
But essentially a component receives a list of high level instructions / description of what the user wants done, and it translates that into descriptions of "lower level" commands that should be performed. And those commands then get executed separately.
Anythinf statefule / io is contained in the commands and can be tested easily with external dependencies. And the complex logic is all pure in decided what to do and how to do it based on what was asked for.
Its interpreters all the way down. Going up the stack is finding the right Domain Specific Language to describe the self modifying sociotechincal business process computer that is capitalism
And everyone remember when months back Anthropic said: You can use our tools, but don't use them for automated attacks - you have to keep a human in the loop because LLMs (including theirs) aren't reliable enough yet for solely making those decisions.
Remember that? And they were widely mocked by the right for it.
Yeah, well this is exactly what they foresaw, and they didnt want a hallucination to trigger a major power war. And somehow so many people were against them for it (including here on HN).
Yet again it seems like there are so many people who can't envision event the most obvious consequences of decisions until they actually see it happen. Why is this so common?
Same thing with the AI Safety and Hugging Face incident. Now all of a sudden many people are connecting "hmm if models get just a bit more capable, a poorly directed or poorly aligned model might do serious damage to critical systems - even as a side effect of some goal, let alone if done intentionally.
For something the the prior statement it is never a weird question to ask of there actually evidence of this or just it seems like it should be true so we believe it.
There are tons of things that seem like they would obviously be true, but it turns out they aren't.
System is more complex based on possible states it can have or inputs/outputs.
That is just maths here working. Two systems combined always will have more states and inputs/outputs.
There is nothing to check here as it can be proven purely by maths.
Complex systems having more attack surface are obviously less secure.
They might be less interesting for attackers if they have to scan huge attack surface like IPv6 vs IPv4 but no one is claiming IPv6 network is more secure.
Cyclomatic complexity is funny math, though. The article demonstrates how. They took a single function that makes state changes to an object, and scattered that logic across four different functions that make the same set of state changes. That’s all. This had adverse impact on the complexity of the system - the logic and behavior of the top level function are the same. It’s just as stateful and has just as many linearly independent code paths. They just got shuffled around to game the way that cyclomatic complexity treats function calls.
But in the process they created three additional functions to call. That means the overall system has more possible code paths, and introduces a need to think about what happens if they are ever called from somewhere other than the original entry point. Introducing ways to screw things up that did not previously exist is not reducing complexity and it is not increasing maintainability.
Your insistence that this somehow managed complexity is exactly why I wrote the top level comment cautioning people about how they interpret cyclomatic complexity. If you don’t understand what it’s actually measuring - not complexity, not really - then it will mislead you into bad decisions.
Regardless of my opinion on the greater subject, I find these arguments to be fairly weak.
Paraphrasing: "Just because and AI may exist that is capable of acting independenly of us and dangerously out strategizing us for resources doesn't mean it will. AIs up until now only follow human instructions."
So your safe bet is that of this AI is created that not one of the billions of people on the world will ask it to do that? That seems unlikely.
"Yes and AI may have an IQ of 1500 but that doesn't mean it's qualitative better than us like we are compared to monkeys. We have better tool use and society."
Yes that's true, but generally increasing IQ also seems to come with qualatative advantages, I don't see why that pattern would stop above human IQs.
Also, once you have IQ 1500, you can copy and improve the things that the IQ 100 species invented.
"Human dominance may depend heavily on language, accumulated culture, institutions and cooperation rather than merely individual cognitive horsepower."
Well, AIs can use language, too. They can start copying the human culture and gradually develop their own. The HuggingFace incident already demonstrated that they are quite capable of cooperation and inventing institutions on the spot.
"In reality there may be many checkpoints: developers can notice anomalous behavior, revoke credentials, shut down servers, change architectures, restrict networks, regulate deployment, physically seize data centers, and learn from less-catastrophic failures."
In theory, yeah. In practice, how much of this has actually happened during the HuggingFace incident? Just because humans could in theory notice something doesn't mean they will; and even if they will, doesn't mean they will actually do something about it.
No it's not. It's about 15% of the 2 trillion dollar defecit. Whoever told you that mislead you.
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