“We’ll take our ball and go home, and you’ll all miss out on our fabulous AI products!”

“No. Wait. Don’t.”

Thanks, I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I got this current phone before I knew about grapheneos and the compatibility issue. Now all I need is to fully switch my main email and I’ll be significantly de-googled.

I was writing a comment that my device is unsupported and all the supported pixel phones are flagship priced. Then I decided to check my work and look it up.

Long story short I have a refurbished pixel 6 on the way, it was cheaper than my current phone was.

Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.

So I’m not surprised to hear this. They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.

They are obviously not in a reasoning place. I wouldn’t try logic, but they are susceptible to emotional manipulation. That’s how they fell for fascist propaganda in the first place. I would go for emotional truth.

You have to judge if you’re safe to do this, but the next time they’re screaming about their absurd conspiracies, I would get a really sad look on my face, make direct eye contact, shake my head and say, “You’re so full of hate, and it’s really sad.” Just go full sincerity and show them how you see them.

You can even set them up for it. Next time you try telling them some fact that they’re going to have this hateful response to, you can have this in your back pocket. You start with a simple fact, they respond with hate, you reply by telling them they’re being hateful.

This is a modification of this strategy: https://youtu.be/tZzwO2B9b64

Basically, don’t waste time arguing with fascists, just point out that they’re being assholes.

Now, I say you need to judge how safe you feel doing this, because you might be surprised how ballistic they go. People stuck in abusive behaviour patterns hate nothing more than having that behaviour simply described to them. But when they do lose their shit, you can just describe it again.

Sometimes they will just short-circuit and try to ignore you, or chastise you for speaking out of turn. The authoritarian personality is deeply connected to authoritarian parenting attitudes. Just persist over time, and maybe they will notice that they can’t stop you from reflecting their ugly selves back at them.

I don’t know how old you are, how physically big you are, how prone they are to serious outbursts, but again, pay attention to your body and how much you’re feeling your flight instinct. Only if you feel safe.

I do this with my parents sometimes. Like if my mum is fussing over my kids in some way that I think is invasive, - this was a sore point in my upbringing, she has no filter and no boundaries - I don’t engage on the facts of what she’s saying. I don’t tell her, “That tiny red spot you’ve noticed isn’t a big problem,” because that’s also being invasive and speaking on their behalf. I say “People don’t like to be scrutinised like that. If that’s a real problem they can tell us.”

It’s honestly astonishing how fast this resolves some situations. That might have been a perennial argument about some fussy detail of my child’s appearance, all the time adding to the boundary-crossing scrutiny they experience, but shutting it down by pointing out her behaviour really makes her stop, and it communicates to my kids that they don’t have to put up with it. It teaches them that they have autonomy.

It’s taken many years of demonstrating to her that I won’t be pushed around or intimidated for me to get to this point though. It’s not an easy road, and often the way to know the tactic is working is by watching how unpleasant someone gets when you do it, at least at first.

Again: only if you feel safe.

Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.

Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.

We don’t have the same problems LLMs have.

LLMs have zero fidelity. They have no - none - zero - model of the world to compare their output to.

Humans have biases and problems in our thinking, sure, but we’re capable of at least making corrections and working with meaning in context. We can recognise our model of the world and how it relates to the things we are saying.

LLMs cannot do that job, at all, and they won’t be able to until they have a model of the world. A model of the world would necessarily include themselves, which is self-awareness, which is AGI. That’s a meaning-understander. Developing a world model is the same problem as consciousness.

What I’m saying is that you cannot develop fidelity at all without AGI, so no, LLMs don’t have the same problems we do. That is an entirely different class of problem.

Some moon rockets fail, but they don’t have that in common with moon cannons. One of those can in theory achieve a moon landing and the other cannot, ever, in any iteration.

If all you’re saying is that neural networks could develop consciousness one day,, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. Our brains are neural networks, so it stands to reason they could do what our brains can do. But the technical hurdles are huge.

You need at least two things to get there:

1. Enough computing power to support it.
2. Insight into how consciousness is structured.

1 is hard because a single brain alone is about as powerful as a significant chunk of worldwide computing, the gulf between our current power and what we would need is about… 100% of what we would need. We are so woefully under resourced for that. You also need to solve how to power the computers without cooking the planet, which is not something we’re even close to solving currently.

2 means that we can’t just throw more power or training at the problem. Modern NN modules have an underlying theory that makes them work. They’re essentially statistical curve-fitting machines. We don’t currently have a good theoretical model that would allow us to structure the NN to create a consciousness. It’s not even on the horizon yet.

Those are two enormous hurdles. I think saying modern NN design can create consciousness is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we can get to the Moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made in the last few years”.

Moon rockets are essentially artillery science in many ways, yes, but Jules Verne was still a century away in terms of supporting technologies, raw power, and essential insights into how to do it.

You’re definitely overselling how AI works and underselling how human brains work here, but there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.

Neural networks are a biomimicry technology. They explicitly work by mimicking how our own neurons work, and surprise surprise, they create eerily humanlike responses.

The thing is, LLMs don’t have anything close to reasoning the way human brains reason. We are actually capable of understanding and creating meaning, LLMs are not.

So how are they human-like? Our brains are made up of many subsystems, each doing extremely focussed, specific tasks.

We have so many, including sound recognition, speech recognition, language recognition. Then on the flipside we have language planning, then speech planning and motor centres dedicated to creating the speech sounds we’ve planned to make. The first three get sound into your brain and turn it into ideas, the last three take ideas and turn them into speech.

We have made neural network versions of each of these systems, and even tied them together. An LLM is analogous to our brain’s language planning centre. That’s the part that decides how to put words in sequence.

That’s why LLMs sound like us, they sequence words in a very similar way.

However, each of these subsystems in our brains can loop-back on themselves to check the output. I can get my language planner to say “mary sat on the hill”, then loop that through my language recognition centre to see how my conscious brain likes it. My consciousness might notice that “the hill” is wrong, and request new words until it gets “a hill” which it believes is more fitting. It might even notice that “mary” is the wrong name, and look for others, it might cycle through martha, marge, maths, maple, may, yes, that one. Okay, “may sat on a hill”, then send that to the speech planning centres to eventually come out of my mouth.

Your brain does this so much you generally don’t notice it happening.

In the 80s there was a craze around so called “automatic writing”, which was essentially zoning out and just writing whatever popped into your head without editing. You’d get fragments of ideas and really strange things, often very emotionally charged, they seemed like they were coming from some mysterious place, maybe ghosts, demons, past lives, who knows? It was just our internal LLM being given free rein, but people got spooked into believing it was a real person, just like people think LLMs are people today.

In reality we have no idea how to even start constructing a consciousness. It’s such a complex task and requires so much more linking and understanding than just a probabilistic connection between words. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more than a century away from AGI.

Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people’s lives.

It’s legislated that only “secure” hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.

Just a glimpse of where all this “trusted”, “secure” computing might lead.

As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: “trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?”

Edit: holy shit, it’s 15 years old, and “anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over” (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:

https://www.lafkon.net/work/trustedcomputing/

Faster to apply and much harder to remove.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.