People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
It's the novelty that you're chasing. Deeply consider what it is that you are enjoying, because it's not very different from doom scrolling or quickly stale bubble gum. Maybe AI produces pop music that supplants the long-standing music industry. I couldn't give a shit if it does. Pop music is nepotism and exploitation with the random artist who sneaks through.
I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy. I love live shows, and I love the passion that the artist brings to a live show. I will never get that from AI, so why would I listen to it? It's the same reason I will not read a book that AI makes. AI may understand the mechanisms of story telling, or what chords sound good to a human ear, but because AI cannot have a lived experience of the world it cannot create. Form without intent. Form without a nature of it's own.
I'm good. I'll pass. I think you see it too, by your commend about being the sort of sucker from 1984 and I hope that you come to realize what you are inviting in.
>I love music, but it is the feeling, experience, and emotion of the creator that comes through that I enjoy.
This belief is not true and I will fight to the bedrock of psychology and nature against this until the ridiculous sentiment is eradicated from humanity's lexicon.
There are fundamental aspects to our perception, across all senses, that lie underneath human creation. You enjoy the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, the sound of a running stream, the majesty of mountains and oceans, the power of storms. These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator. Believing that you care about the creator, and that it fundamentally underpins your enjoyment of sense perception is shallow thinking.
>You enjoy the warmth of the sun, the cool of a breeze, the sound of a running stream, the majesty of mountains and oceans, the power of storms. These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator.
I don't think this is true. I think that if you found out you were in a simulation and that all these things were just electrical pulses being sent to your brain in a jar it would vastly change your perception of the world. And I think that's a good analogy for AI
How will it change anything? Simulation is a pointless term that has no meaning here. It is completely real to you. In fact I don't even know whats the difference between a so called "real" universe and a "boltzmann" brain. This weird "analogy" seems to ignore information itself needs a certain amount of energy/matter/space, I doubt simulating our universe can be done with anything less than the universal size of complexity.
> These all evoke the sense and appreciation of beauty while being completely removed from a creator.
Why is it so black and white? There are things like warmth of the sun, that I enjoy without the creator.
There are also art and music that I didn't appreciate at first before knowing the story and the creator behind them. Then I understood where the piece of art came from and what were the emotions behind it when creating it.
I've seen proposals for Product Managers to define those conditions themselves by speaking with the LLM. A continuing architectural diagram is constructed and graph is updated until all cases are covered and then the LLM writes the code, writes the validations, pushes to CI environments, runs tests, schedules prod deploy (by looking at company event schedule), gets CAB approval, deploys code, tests in prod, and fixes regressions.
I'm not saying this is the correct thing, but companies are implementing it and it is "working". I don't think keeping our head in the sand is helping.
> I've seen proposals for Product Managers to define those conditions themselves by speaking with the LLM.
But the LLM is not aware of how the business works and why, so someone needs to work with the business to extract the information. Typically it's not well documented.
> someone needs to work with the business to extract the information. Typically it's not well documented.
LLM extraction of the information from the Product Owner is becoming the way to overcome poorly-documented business context.
Non-technical folk are using things like `/grill-me` [0] to seed the LLM with the long-tail complexities that they didn't know they didn't know they needed to put out.
They can ask, they can do a back and forth and they can write documentation to be used from that point onwards and write it in a common style and structure.
These are language models, being able to talk through something with them and have them extract some information is what they excel at. Given that you’d probably get a halfway decent result with a literal fixed set of questions (an Eliza level docbot) gpt 5.5 is going to nail that as a task.
is it working though? The main outcome we've seen with companies that drink the AI Kool aid en masse is buggy unstable systems. clearly there's a level of rigor that's being missed for ship velocity
The outcome of this is, in my opinion, the United States Government classifying and regulating LLMs as something akin to how the ATF classifies weapons, ie. requiring a license to operate an LLM (hosting), with different classifications and determinations on the relative "power" of a particular model and framework, and outright banning most open-source models, like how DIY machine guns or suppressors are banned.
Think of a standard for classifying and regulating the self-hosting of open-source models similar to how an FFL works. You can do it, but you must have all your paperwork lined up, with background checks, a valid business license, and if you forget to dot an "i" or cross a "t" the Cyber version of the ATF shows up and shoots your fucking dog.
So, I don't know if this is AI generated or whether the author is actually unaware, but Atari cartridges and floppies commonly had copy protections. My uncle was active in the scene at the time, and as an electrical engineer came up with a solution. When I inherited his Atari 800 in the 90s there was a physical button wired into the floppy drive which would force a bad sector onto the disk as it was being written. He had notebooks about the timing for these bad sectors per game.
So, yeah. The "article" is incorrect from nearly the get-go about the "wild west" Atari age.
No, it is not AI generated. It was based on my research.
I think there is a mix-up here between Atari home consoles and Atari home computers.
In that section I was talking about early console platforms such as the Atari 2600, where the cartridge interface itself had no lockout/authentication mechanism comparable to what Nintendo later did with the 10NES. That is why third-party cartridges could exist and Atari’s main response was legal rather than technical.
What you describe for the Atari 800 is real, but it belongs to a different context: the Atari 8-bit computer line, especially floppy-disk software, where copy-protection tricks such as intentional bad sectors and timing-based checks were indeed common.
So I agree that Atari computer software often used copy protection, but that does not contradict the point I was making about the early console era.
Hi, quick note on "For modern Xbox platforms, public 2024 work exposed SystemOS kernel exploitation on both Xbox One and Xbox Series"
I'm a former Xbox hacker, then former Microsoft employee, and (long after) leaving Microsoft helped with the Collateral Damage post-exploitation payload.
The design of the Xbox One security predates me, but Microsoft has always known that SystemOS would be a weak link that would almost guaranteed to be compromised and shoved most of their attack surface that can be trivially attacked in there. The system shell, 3rd-party apps, guide, etc. all run in SystemOS.
The key things they focused on though were:
1. Extremely strong defense-in-depth
2. Making full or partial exploitation not economical
3rd party apps and the web browser were seen as being obviously untrusted _and_ needed JIT because they'd mostly be based on .NET or the JS VM. But practically speaking there should be nothing interesting in that VM: its compromise shouldn't enable piracy/cheating and ideally shouldn't leak game plaintext.
What some others found though was that for some reason plaintext was actually visible to SystemOS, but didn't enable piracy on console. You can take those games though and run them on PC using XWine1: https://github.com/xwine1
Technically speaking there's no reason why Collateral Damage couldn't have happened waayyyyy earlier in the Xbox One's lifecycle except for motivation. Even still you could probably take some Hyper-V N-day and compromise HostOS through.
Over there years there have been other "exploits" too: some folks have managed to tamper with gamesaves via cloud connected storage and other shenanigans, XSS in the system shell (some of these apps are JS), etc., but most of this was relatively benign and easily patchable. And there has been a very, very small group of people with similar but less capable exploits to Collat.
I find it interesting that all the way back in 1985, in Atari vs NES, we had proof that consumers preferred walled gardens. The walled garden exploded from a completely dead market, while the already-existing open system killed itself. Apple proceeded to make a killing of their own on this reality, Microsoft invented a pseudo-walled garden that has become a technical dead end, while FOSS communities are still in denial about how things shouldn't be that way rather than accepting reality and inventing their own curated experience with enforced rules.
I disagree, it wasn't about consumers, but rather other businesses. The walled garden approach Nintendo took in America was needed to convince retailers to stock video games on store shelves again. And of course the Famicom didn't have that same approach, and while Nintendo hated the fact third parties could easily make Famicom carts, the open nature of the system certainly didn't hurt it in Japan.
I think consumers chose quality and convenience. It just so happens that the walled garden is the easiest way to accomplish this. Electronics, especially computers, were extremely expensive back then. I can't blame people for buying a console that just works. Compatibility was an issue well into the late 90s because so many people didn't know how computers worked.
Windows is an open platform for developers... if you ignore all of the security checks and Windows Defender and the stagnant platform which is about 2 decades behind everyone else, across the board, in terms of native tooling (e.g. which UI framework should I use and is it good?).
However, Windows also has many, many, walled garden things bolted onto it. You aren't distributing your own drivers without Microsoft's approval. You aren't running Microsoft Office on Wine. You aren't connecting to Active Directory without Microsoft's blessing. You aren't making group policies that work on Linux for MDM. You aren't manufacturing Windows devices, at all, unless they meet Microsoft's system requirements and mandates (e.g. a Windows icon on the keyboard). Your BIOS must follow strict rules about where the activation key is fused. Etc.
In that respect, Windows is only open from an end user perspective. In all other respects, it is closed, and it is closed tightly.
> You aren't distributing your own drivers without Microsoft's approval.
Only kernel drivers.
> You aren't connecting to Active Directory without Microsoft's blessing.
I think you're talking about EntraID. That is true enough. You can just spin up Windows Server and create a domain controller, no problem. You don't need Microsoft for domain services, though - you can use other domain controller types. (You don't get GPO and other things - that's not a 'walled garden' thing, that's a feature set which other systems don't have)
> In that respect, Windows is only open from an end user perspective. In all other respects, it is closed, and it is closed tightly.
Not so tight as you seem to think. And anyways, I was specifically referring to building windows apps - which you did not disagree with. You absolutely can pull down various free tools, build an app, package it up as a .zip or .msi and distribute it from a variety of places. The Windows app store is a walled garden, but you don't have to use it.
I've tried a few models and some are decent, including Qwens models. I've tried a few harnesses like Roo Code in VSCode to put things together that in theory emulate the experience I get from VSCode + Claude or Copilot, but I generally find the experience extremely limited and frustrating.
How have you set things up to have a good experience?
I have to disagree. LLMs have shown that the only way to participate in the new software ecosystem are through leveraging an extremely powerful position that is create, backed, and maintained through the exploitation of capital, labor, and power (political, legal, corpotate) at levels never really seen before. The model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar was not broken by LLMs but instead the entire ecosystem was changed.
Now the software doesn't matter. The code doesn't matter. The hardware doesn't matter. Anyone can generate anything for anything, as long as they pay the fee. I think it can likely be argued that participation is now gated more than ever and will require usage of an LLM to keep up and maintain some kind of competition or even meager parity. Open weight models are not really a means of crossing the moat; none of the open weight models come close to the functionality, and all of them come from the same types of corporations that are releasing their models for unspecified reasons. The fact remains that the moat created by LLMs for open source software has never been larger.
The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks.
I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardized the way our Rust services instantiated and utilized the metrics and tracing fundamentals that OpenTelemetry provides. I recently added OTLP logging (technically using tracing events) to allow for forwarding baggage / context / metadata with the log lines. The `tracing` crate in rust also has a macro called `instrument` that allows you to mostly auto-instrument your functions for tracing, allowing the tracing context to be extracted and propagated into your function so the trace / span can be added to subsequent HTTP / gRPC requests.
We did all kinds of other stuff too, like adding a method for attaching the trace-id to our kafka messages so we can see how long the entire lifetime of the request takes (including sitting on the queue). It's been extremely insightful.
Signoz is newer to the game. I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively. We originally talked to some of the big vendors and they were going to gladly accept OpenTelemetry, but they marked every metric as a "custom" metric and would charge out the wazoo for each of them, far in excess of whatever was instrumented natively with their APM plugin thingamabob.
The more the better. I love OpenTelemetry, and using it in Rust has been mostly great.
That library you built sounds great. The kind of things that I love to read the code of, if I'm using it in a project.
I was divided between adding instrument macro, but decided on manual instrumentation for the demonstration.
Regarding monitoring Kakfa execution times, absolutely agreed.
In my previous job, monitoring Celery had helped us understand consumer bottlenecks, because we couldn't see background job traces containing the celery consumer spans.
And when they did appear, they were hours late. So the entire trace took 8 hours instead of the expected couple minutes.
This is your opinion. I do not share your opinion. The occult is a wide range of topics and practices, generally split (but not cleanly) into theurgic and thaumaturgic activities. That is, manifestation of the three common desires (wealth, power, love / sex etc.), and then deification and approaching and sometimes joining with / uniting with God. Occult meaning, hidden.
If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.
Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?