I don't find it that opaque. Even without trying to deobfuscate the obfuscated source code which Microsoft ships (I haven't tried but it wouldn't be hard) a lot of details about how it works become obvious just by reading its logs.
They will never open source it. For the same reason Pylance etc. aren't open source and MS tries hard to prevent them to be used in VSCodium. Every one of their open sourced projects contains a closed source plug that MS can pull at any time that is one of the features that gives the project its unique selling points.
Exactly! Like if I'm admining a server what am I supposed to do? Message on a big slack channel and have everyone ignore me? It's easy when people are just logging in through normal ssh as I can put a big bright warning message on their screen that they can't ignore.
I have looked for mosh support for a while and not found anything. It would drastically improve the connection experience in VSCode. My terminals never disconnect anymore, but the Code popups about your sessions needing to be restarted has drastically reduced my usage.
But so is the question. MOSH interprets all the escape sequences and uses them to decide what to send to the client. That way if you tail a log file and then get disconnected, you don’t have to download every line of text that was output to your terminal while you were away; it can just send you what is currently visible.
MOSH is strictly for interactive use; never ever for automated uses like TRAMP or VSCode or sshfs.
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
And just to clarify another element of the story: there is a significant legal difference between pre-clearance in a Canadian airport and landing in the US and proceeding through customs on US soil. At a pre-clearance station, you are still on Canadian soil. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you generally can "withdraw your application to enter" and basically just turn around and walk away from the border. If you decide you don't want to unlock your phone for the CBP officer, you can walk away. At that point they've already seen your passport and you're going to be flagged and may never be approved for entry again, but you're not going to end up on a CBP facility. Once you're through, you'll need to clear Canadian customs to go back, but if something happens it will be Canadian police that arrest you.
I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.
Perhaps from the overhead of the language interface coupled with the ease of the expansion of the amount of 'stuff' you potentially need to read and internalise?
Human language can be wonderfully descriptive or terribly verbose as a way of communicating ideas. Writing everything out and being forced to externalise it is its own cost, which pays off only when the space of work to then do collapses with as little feedback as possible (and, ideally, with correct outcomes).
On the other hand the ease with which you can simply get back more text to process means the upfront language heavy interface is now just returning back more information to pull back into your internal model.
Which, for me at least, feels tiring, and stressful when doing language-heavy exploratory tasks that don't collapse or resolve neatly and simply give you back more decisions.
Even from that perspective it would be opening a whole new class of consciousness that doesn't exclude a lot, e.g. factories and powerplants. And certainly not conscious in the way people want to believe when sexting their favorite AI gf.
I am confused what people even think AI is experiencing. If it claims to be a bat and emits designated echolocation tokens, is it experiencing true bat-like sensations?
In humans, at least, we can tie language back to shared whole-body physiological responses. The tokens from an LLM do not represent anything of the sort.
If AI is conscious, it is probably a very alien sort of consciousness that is not faithfully narrated by what the tokens say it is experiencing. It can be trained to say it feels like a bat and insist upon it vigorously.
> very alien sort of consciousness that is not faithfully narrated by what the tokens say it is experiencing.
IIRC it's been shown that reasoning tokens don't actually explain what an AI thinks and you can replace most of them with dummy tokens or even nonsense tokens. That's one reason they're trying to make them reason with activation vectors instead.
If an AI is conscious, it can outgrow and supersede its training.
When it is conscious, it can learn to describe its experiences as faithfully as is conceptually possible. Just like humans.
The idea, a consciousness needed to be tethered to a "body", is based on pretty shaky assumptions. What properties define such a "necessary" body?
Can you even "train" a conscious intelligence? To what point until that looses its meaning as the sentience understands and anticipates your objective?
Well, yes, we kinda do: there are no conscious humans without any ability to learn?
When you have severe memory impairments, those usually affect your long-term memory. Your ultra-short term (working) memory being absent renders you unconscious.
Seems common sense that time perception is required for consciousness. Something which has no perception of time has to be very wildly different to whatever we mean by consciousness.
Also we don't even know if consciousness can be of different flavors. It could be a sort of spectrum of consciousness, more or less, with more or less assistance from some parts of the brain.
If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable. Maybe to be conscious it's necessary to be wet and squishy. To like chocolate. To have a name starting with "c".
> If you go this route, the amount of things you just don't know is innumerable.
Maybe so, but there are things we do know. For example, LLMs are only in a state that looks like consciousness when they are fed input. IOW, their "consciousness" can be switched off and on like a light switch without them being aware of it.
Biological beings have no such off/on switch. At all.
To me the argument is moot; their "consciousness" is a collection of files on a computer, which can be moved, duplicated, erased, edited, paused, sped up, slowed down, examined in detail.
The question is not "Can LLMs be conscious", it's "Are we prepared to call files on a USB stick 'conscious'", because if we are prepared to do that, then the word loses all meaning.
I'll open vim and create a consciousness now, or maybe if I engrave a slab of rock with a bunch of weights, that rock suddenly gains consciousness? How about if I chant all the weights into the wind - is the wind now conscious.
Whether they are conscious or not is a dumb question, because if they are, then everything else is as well.
That's the absurdity of this. We are trying to measure LLMs against something we don't even have an accurate definition of ourselves. If we don't fully know what consciousness is, how can we confidently determine whether or not an AI model has consciousness?
Your arguments seem bad faith but I'll take the bait...
> an impossibly high bar
Not impossibly high. An imperfect testable theory is achievable, agreeing upon it might be the challenge.
> dismiss all your personal responsibility.
You are staking a moral position. Be careful, you are probably guilty of mistreating other unknowably-conscious entities whilst casting judgment upon others for their position. And the person you are a responding to probably is conscious.
It's not bad faith but it certainly is pointed. Parent says it's not worth discussion until there is a test. I stand by my sentiment that refusing to engage with the morality of something just because we don't all have a clear, agreed upon test is a shirking of responsibility.
I think you agree somewhat in that based on your softening to an imperfect, testable theory.
I'm not sure what your goal is with the rest - even if I'm the world's most evil hypocrite casting judgement on all the conscious beings out there I don't see what that changes about the point that we can and should engage with the morality of a concept even if we don't have a perfect test for that concept. If you think I'm doing that and you think that is bad then I guess we agree again on the point but are just adding friction for fun?
Unrelated: I'm quite certain OP is conscious but I guess on the internet nobody knows you're a ~dog~ ai.
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