> Since the introduction of this safeguard, we’ve seen some people go beyond using tape to sophisticated efforts to modify or destroy the capture LED. We are continuously improving our ability to detect tampering, and now we’re updating the glasses to disable the camera if they detect the LED was physically tampered with or destroyed. No other kind of camera has done this and we’re proud to lead the industry forward.
Yes it's true people have figured out how to disable the safeguard, but we all agree the important thing as we try to sell millions more of these is that we tried, right?
Seeing these reactionary Reddit-like takes on HN sucks. No, it's not easy for the average person to disable the camera on these glasses. They do continuously make it harder to do so. At this point anyone interested in spy glasses is better off buying one of the many other glasses with cameras in it.
Alternatively, sounds like you're a user of the glasses and don't like what these comments might reflect on you if more people agree with them?
Was my comment incorrect? You admit it's both possible to work around it, people are actually doing that, and the comment does indeed give themselves a little pat on the back for working hard to unsuccessfully solve a problem with the product they themselves choose to make and market? So what's the reactionary part?
Yes your comment is incorrect.
It’s completely free of the nuance and real moral debate that needs to be had and adds nothing interesting to the discussion.
How many people are working around the safeguards? How prevalent is harm caused by creeps secretly filming on these glasses vs doing other creepy things? Have these glasses tangibly changed the creeps doing creeping landscape?
If you can’t answer those questions, it’s reactionary. That’s that it means.
What exactly is your threat model? "It is possible to work around" every single security control that has ever existed. Saying it "is possible" to work around a control is an utterly meaningless statement. At what budget? With what skill level? With what frequency and likelihood?
If the intent is to deter the typical weirdos that would try to disable the blinking light, then yes, their mitigations have been extraordinarily effective and most of these weirdos now just buy other cheaper and more discreet camera glasses.
> Grothendieck was almost certainly wrong about his gifts here, and even if not, your mathematical ability and output isn't fully explained by your ability ceiling
lol, see, it's unfalsifiable. No true abstraction ceiling.
Find me the magical teaching method that can make anyone learn any kind of mathematics at nearly the same rate, and you have falsified the idea that anyone has mathematical limits.
Given we as a society can't even figure out how to do this for educating stuff involving simple fractions, my theory is far superior than whatever exactly it is you think.
> Making my complaint more general: I find modern math is exploring areas that are interesting to mathematicians, but increasingly irrelevant to society.
Is it, or is it only the parts you hear about/pay attention to?
> People spent over a hundred years arguing whether a continuum approximation of a particle system would behave oddly. In the mean time, other folks went ahead and completely revolutionized the world of computational fluid dynamics (with multi-billion $$$ impact on society) by just doing better numerics (Kahn-style numerical analysis).
Yes, maybe famous solving famous conjectures is just trivia and trophy collecting and the real value is the intuition and techniques you develop along the way to solving them which you can then bring to bear on things like CFD.
Mostly the parts I hear about. But I also communicate with mathematicians on a regular basis and I can see what they are working on, which is representative of the field. It's about 90% "cohomology of abstract Lie groups that morphize into string theory" and about 10% "practical thing that engineers can use to make my cell phone work better". (amusingly, although I literally made up that sentence, it turns out it's not far from something somebody worked on: "The cohomology of compact simple Lie groups and spin groups connects to string theory by providing the topological obstruction classes—specifically the first fractional Pontryagin class ...." OK, kind of emphasizing my point there.
No, the intuition and techniques that get developed to solve the NS conjecture have little or no bearing on the practical details of doing CFD. That's a common story/thread (and I hear the same story in quantitiative biology, my area of expertise), but often times, it's just a loose justification given to justify funding.
> This sounds a lot like you may have in fact succumbed to your abstraction ceiling
It sounds more like you're turning a vibes based theory into a tautology.
Hofstadter struggling with math for the first time in graduate school isn't a unique story, nor is his self introspection about this event a good basis for an apparently unfalsifiable theory about human cognition.
We have mountains of evidence that humans differ dramatically in cognitive potential, and more again that often effort / practice can only explain a small amount of the variance in performance in a wide variety of fields. We have basically zero evidence at all that anyone can just learn anything if they try hard enough under the right teacher, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Abstraction ceilings are about rates and difficulty of learning, so even if we assumed the (absurd) claim that no one has any fundamental cognitive limits, until we are immortal, being slow enough still creates an effective ceiling.
Intelligence denialism is the incoherent and indefensible position here.
That stuff always gives me such a eugenics 2.0 vibe — no, no, the hierarchy is based on innate cognitive ability now. Gives me the creeps that they're actually in academia pushing that stuff.
> Computation and computability is "the final frontier". Math is a "subset" of that.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you point, but I don't know how widely this would be held as true. Are you defining "math" as _only_ what can be proven under some particular formal system?
Well, I only know how to define computability in terms of Turing machines.
For math I don't have a fix definition, but it's surely a bit more specific than that (e.g. I wouldn't consider the computation that prints a 0 at the same place for infinity math) - but of course I do see the circularity in my argument: a Turing machine is a mathematical object in and of itself. Though being able to talk about something doesn't necessarily change which is "bigger".
As for the other direction, this gets a bit more into the philosophy behind math itself. Constructive math's territory is "easy" - but I am on the opinion that if humans (or any intelligent physical entity) are at most Turing-complete [1], then any non-constructive math "steps" or thoughts must also be at most computable. Well, unfortunately I can't prove whether math done by transcendent entities are also computable, though.
In any case, I am no mathematician, so whatever I think regarding this topic may not have much relevance to anyone, only done CS course with quite a bit of math, but that's obviously not the same.
[1] I believe religion is an escape hatch here from an argument perspective
> if humans (or any intelligent physical entity) are at most Turing-complete
This is a bit of a strange assumption to make. I do agree that a human, if it had infinite memory, would be an universal machine, i.e. capable of computing any given Turing machine [0]. But would that be the limits of its capabilities? It's far from certain.
You'll get into the philosophy of free will (funnily enough, a sort of inverted Turing test), i.e. for a given human with infinite memory, is there a Turing machine that exactly replicates the behavior of that human? Is our behavior governed entirely by rules? Would that imply that a human themselves is a kind of Chinese room [1]?
> any non-constructive math "steps" or thoughts must also be at most computable.
What does it mean for a "thought" to be computable? Compare to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Clearly the act of stating the thought, or writing down the theorem, is computable. But proving it to be true or false may very well be impossible.
> What does it mean for a "thought" to be computable?
Well, given our scientific knowledge it's a molecule-level (only important to disregard quantum physics to make the case easier) physical/chemical process, that we should in principle be able to simulate on any other medium, including a Turing machine.
Nonetheless, I can accept the definition of math where it's about "truths" and truths can obviously exist without being computable.
> any physical system can be evaluated to any degree of accuracy by a computer
That's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't know why you'd assume it to be true at face value. It's a bit unclear how you would even define "evaluated", given that we don't yet have a mathematical model of all of physics as we know it. [0] And then consider unknown unknowns.
> Do you agree that humans are physical systems?
Do you consider humans _with infinite memory_ as physical systems? Do you consider computers _with infinite memory_ as physical systems?
I agree that physics being simulated is not that easy to handwave away. That's why I mention that brains probably don't "depend" on some quantum-level behavior and a more macro view of physics could be enough. What I mean here is that while there are obviously quantum effects in play at the atomic/molecular levels, if we take the cells as a black box and replace them with statistical processes, we would probably still get a human intelligence as a result - but of course I can't prove it. As a hunch, the 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion connections, and of course their environment (glial cells are important)'s proper Simulation is enough.
As for the infinite memory, Turing machines have this nice property that they can only visit a finite amount of memory after finite steps, no matter what. A Turing machine running for a finite time (we got this) will surely use a finite space, so being "a bit short" on infinite space is not a problem, I believe.
Let me illustrate with an example. Are you familiar with with the Collatz conjecture? It's an example of a system with only one variable, and two simple rules. Are you certain that there exists a computer program that in finite time can compute where any given integer ends up?
Now consider throwing a ball in the air. Can you even write down the rules that each of the ball's subatomic particles obeys? How can you be certain there exists a computer program that in finite time can predict where any of the particles, for any ball, ends up?
> the chemistry of the brain is very well modeled
There are models, but the fact of those models is that they do not apply to "any degree of accuracy", as you claim.
Consider the ball thrown in the air again. Is the ball affected by what happened 100 years ago, inside of a black hole 100 light years away? Why would it not be affected by that? Or if you grant that it is affected by that, do we then need a model to predict those effects before we can "evaluate" them?
EDIT regarding the below linked blog post: Did you read the rest of my comment? Did you even read the blog post you linked to?
> We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness
Can you try to consider my central point before replying: Are the rules governing physical reality simpler or more complex than the Collatz conjecture? Does there exist a (theoretical) computer that can "evaluate the Collatz conjecture to any degree of accuracy"?
EDIT 2: I'm not the one moving goalposts. On what grounds are you classifying the question whether a given number ends at 1 or not for the Collaz conjecture as an "inifite" computation? It's a simple boolean question, yes or no. All you have to do is build a computer that can answer yes or no for each integer. Isn't that simpler than answering the position of each atom in the ball after the throw? Each is just a function, what makes one more infinite than the other?
PLEASE just stop complaining about "moving the goalposts" when the issue is your own lack of clarity of both expression and reasoning. WHAT is the distinction between "simulate" and "predict"? You said neither by the way, you said "evaluate".
> ANY physical system can be evaluated to ANY DEGREE of accuracy by a computer
It's completely SENSELESS to claim that they are distinct, because in order to EVALUATE or SIMULATE the physical system you will need a FUNCTION which COMPUTES the STATE of the system at a given point in time. The only POSSIBLE distinction between SIMULATING and PREDICTING would be the time taken for the computation, but that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT as long as it is finite.
Again, your own source says:
> We CERTAINLY don’t have ANYTHING CLOSE to a complete UNDERSTANDING of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world
> You said neither by the way, you said "evaluate".
You are entirely correct. I was sloppy in my first comment. I should have said simulate. My sincere apologies if that's been the crux of our dispute.
> The only POSSIBLE distinction between SIMULATING and PREDICTING would be the time taken for the computation
No. The distinction is in determining which "you" is you. When simulating the wavefunction, every you is simulated.
> We CERTAINLY don’t have ANYTHING CLOSE to a complete UNDERSTANDING of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world
It's very understandable if you include his following sentence:
> But these are manifestations of the underlying laws, not signs that our understanding of the laws are incomplete
He's saying we don't understand emergent behavior produced by the laws - not that the laws themselves are incomplete. E.g. we don't know how/why a bag of neurons turns into a person.
Re: Collatz - you've moved the goalposts. Answering Collatz requires solving a halting problem. I didn't claim that I could find the end of an infinite computation. I claimed to be able to simulate a finite one.
And - you should reply to my comments rather than edit your old ones.
Does that mean that humans could produce mathematical proofs that are entirely logical and verifiable by other humans, but that cannot be formalised in any automatically verifiable language such as lean?
As they go on to explain, a human understandable proof is different than a human actually understanding the proof. That actual human understanding (like, in a brain of a human) is one of their stated goals.
Producing human understandable proofs is possibly a job best for humans today, but the author appears to agree with you that this is probably fleeting (and argues that even if you disagree, it should probably be treated as if it is fleeting when planning for the future):
> Right now AI systems arguably underperform us at theory-building, asking questions, exposition, … so we could prioritize and reward those skills. I think this is unwise: compare the speed at which the academy adapts to the speed at which model capabilities improve. We need to consider the endgame. If the models remain incapable in some domain, we can adjust later.
I mean they've boasted[1] about their generated code being so good that they add basically zero value and that they're riding out the rentseeking for as long as possible.
Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here.
They're not "adding no value", the SLA is the value. I have a business problem, and I pay you to solve it and support your solution for me, is a completely different proposition than standing up your own solution as a non-technical org and maintaining it.
> They're not "adding no value", the SLA is the value
The code their Astra+Fable setup, automatically generated from requests customers leave in voicemails, is apparently so good they never correct it. If the stories being woven are true, the SLA is literally just a middleman's 100k cut.
At the very least there might be some particulars here that aren't universally applicable.
The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though. We build LoB apps which are basically crud apps (they are not but most here would call it that).
We can have fun and make money right? Possibly at the same time but not in that case.
> The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though.
Which is fine, great even (I do the same thing!), but in trying different things outside your day job, it seems like you do understand why people working on different things than you might be "reporting all these negative AI experiences"?
It's a pretty bad sign when you need to resort to this kind of comment stalking to try to find ammunition for a general argument. This user could be a complete con man, and it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.
> you need to resort to this kind of comment stalking to try to find ammunition for a general argument
It's not a general argument, they made specific claims, but vague posted (and implying everyone else must be crazy) to the point that the conversation is derailed by a bunch of people trying to figure out what they meant.
> it still wouldn't invalidate the core thesis of LLMs providing business value.
lol, no, "providing business value" is not what was claimed:
>> What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences?
Strict liability literally is crimes that don't require a guilty mind.
That's different (sometimes) when, for example, you're found guilty of criminal negligence leading to someone being injured.
Prosecutors don't have to demonstrate that you intended for someone to get hurt for that, your mens rea is that you should have perceived the danger of what you were doing but didn't.
edit: reading your other comments in this thread, maybe I missed your point, in which case, whoosh.
Yes it's true people have figured out how to disable the safeguard, but we all agree the important thing as we try to sell millions more of these is that we tried, right?
reply