YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The comment you're replying to was implying that some ciphers are sufficiently flexible that you could make up a key to make the cipher decrypt to a nearly arbitrary plaintext.

In this case, though, that seems unlikely from the fact that the key used was an actual key documented as being used for other messages.

That's what sidestepping means, no?

That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.

AI has made me wonder a lot lately about what it is that actually creates conscious experience, what is the actual physical mechanism that produces 'experience' (or is there a single valid mechanism, or rather just some property that can be expressed many ways). The more I think about it, the more I realize I have no fucking clue, and the more interested in the question I get.

I agree with you that it’s a core question.

People don’t like it, however, for a whole host of reasons.

I don’t like it either, to be honest - for there the abyss may also stare into you - but I also often find that the things which we don’t like thinking about are critically important things to think about.

I also reach the same conclusion as you: it does not matter. If I cannot discern whether I am responding to a human- or LLM-written response, then we are back to zombie cats in boxes - and therefore the answer as to whether this precious magical spark we call consciousness (which may or may not exist anyway) exists in our interlocutor becomes moot.

And as I say - I may or may not be conscious. I seem to myself to be conscious, based on my understanding of the term - but I cannot prove that what goes on behind my eyes is the same as what goes on behind yours, or even that anything much is going on at all. Perhaps there’s just a narrative layer that likes to use “I” that parasitically explains the universe and the actions of the host to itself, and spreads between hosts through neurolinguistic programming and coadaptation. Maybe that’s what “we” are. I don’t know.

That said, perhaps I am wrong, and that is no small part for me of why this question should be earnestly considered and discussed. How can we possibly seek to understand or define machine intelligence before we examine our own.

Can we stop using "brute force" for designating "tour de force"?

It obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.

Wait a minute. We've had AI that is as capable as a human and even more so since the 1950's.

I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says:

Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist

The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again:

An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results

And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996.

Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now.

It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.

I'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.

Most contemporary stories around AI include the implication that AI did something humans couldn't. This is because the big players have been shilling AGI hard for a while, and their valuations depend on maintaining the sentiment that serious progress in that direction is being made.

Is the ?4th a date?