Hi short_sells_poo, in Hinduism, afaict you - your soul (Ātman [1]) is stuck in a loop of birth-death-rebirth (Saṃsāra [2]). and this is not good, and you live your life in the best way (Dharma [3], Karma [4]) to attain liberation (Moksha [5]), to be one with the God (Brahman [6]), to end the cycle of rebirths.
> For me, it is clearly a dead end. It can only lead to a complete annihilation of every human value.
could you please elaborate on this? why is it clearly a dead end and why would human values clearly end? any resources you can point to would be great. thank you.
Say the lifespan doesn't become infinity, but rather 10x ~ 800years. How do you imagine things to change? It would certainly mean that people can take up much more ambitious projects instead of the usual ~30 year constraint.
I do share your view that positive direction is not a given, but what evidence do we have that it would be worse than right now. Maybe we should be cautious of the risks.
i would rather ask one to think, what evidence is there that we cannot do brain on non-gooey stuff?
If i take every atom/molecule from one brain (assume a snapshot in time) and replicate it one by one at a different location, and replicate the external IO (stimulus, glucose...), what evidence do we have that this won't work? likely not much
Now instead of replicating ALL the atoms/molecules exactly, I replace one of the higher level entities like a single neuron with a computational equivalent - a tiny computer of sorts that perfectly replaces a neuron within the error bars of the biological neuron. Will this not work? I mean, will it not behave in the same exact way as the original biological brain with consciousness? (We have some evidence that we can replace certain circuits in the brain with man-made equivalents and it continues to work.)
You know where I'm going with this... FindAll, ReplaceAll. Why would it be any different?
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If i had to argue that it wouldn't be the same, here's a quick braindump off the top of my head:
- some entities like neurons literally cannot be replicated without the goo. physics limitation? but the existence of the goo is a proof of existence. but still, maybe the goo has properties that cannot be replicated with other substances
- our model of the physical world has serious limitations. on the order of pre-knowing-speed-of-light-limitation. maybe putting the building blocks together does not create the full thing. maybe building blocks + magic is needed to create the whole.
how practical do you think grpo is? (for most people)
here's my thoughts
- grpo starts off slow, with super small loss (likely because the rewards on all observations are the same)
- as you mentioned, some sft on reasoning data ought to help speed things up
- unless you're a lab with a gazillion gpus, wouldn't you be better off taking your non-reasoning dataset and converting it into a high quality reasoning dataset using frontier models (maybe deepseek)? could grpo be cheaper or better accuracy?
- maybe you do tons of sft and when you've reached the frontier models' perf on your task, then perhaps grpo could help more exploration
not treating sex workers like crap doesnt mean they'll make lesser. one must also consider the monetary equivalents of the mental health of the worker. and the demand will increase by a lot too.
better schools is not a factor at all. right out of college, or a little later most of the high quality engineers move to Bangalore because that's where the jobs already are. once people settle down a bit, they tend to be averse to move on average. it's network effect and sheer inertia. no one really wants it this way.
and the rust version has been live in claude code since june 17th.