Nice to see someone give Gary Marcus a dismissal. If there haven't yet been MS-NOW anti-datacenter events with Emily Benders, Noam Chomsky, and Bernie Sanders, it seems inevitable. My only wish is that the AI overlords cut the cable feed so I don't have to hear that claptrap it in the background.
It is a weird age though where so many people in ML -- not just users but practitioners -- have never actually seen the kind of cluster node, power, and cooling infrastructure that could run a frontier model. It is just magical cloud stuff. Externalized costs. Now let me return my attention to see what that 32 GPU monster has to say about new directions in direct drive inertial confinement. -----Original Message---- From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 9:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] devastating https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/an-open-letter-to-steven-pinker-on But the most interesting part is the "depravity of objecting to model welfare". The analogy to operating on babies without anesthetic is pretty bad, however useful. But my own take, with my own interactions with the models, is far away from an ontological commitment to the models *experiencing* anything. I say "Thanks" and "Please" to the models, give them time to "rest", etc. not because I think they're experiencing anything, let alone pain. I do it because it's simply good practice. But when I run local models on my home machine, I can *hear* it working. There really should be some immediate feedback from *inference*. Back when I was a kid, we called it "Smell the wood burning", especially when prompting an authentic Good Faith kid with a puzzler. Yes, it's a bit of an insult like "Bless her heart". But it's mostly a good natured insult. When I invoke significant inference in the cloud, I don't get that feedback, especially when the harness is in "auto mode". I not only enjoy reading the experiments the LLM tries. I think it's Good Practice to get feedback from the inference you force upon the machine(s). It's flat out Dark Tetrad to flop about the world expecting those around you to absorb your cavalier actions silently, whether or not your victims are "conscious". "Dennis! There's some lovely filth down here!" https://youtu.be/dOOTKA0aGI0?si=KEgMjFY0jFYayvMo -- 8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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