I think you highlight one of the problems with users of LLMs: You can't tell anymore if it is BS or not.
I caught Claude the other day hallucinating code that was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, leading to tasks being failed and never recover.
But it certainly wasn't obvious.
I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency
and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.
I don’t have an answer. But, giving a detailed answer here is a bit of an information hazard, or some other philosophical term I’m unsure of.
If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.
However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.
I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.
I'm a lot more agnostic than you are: I don't know whether LLMs are conscious. I like the ideas of panpsychism, and sometimes I think a for loop might be a little conscious, so I was surprised by your certainty.
One thing that has happened is that "AI" has been an academic discipline since literally the 1950s. The term was originally used in the hope that we would soon be able to emulate human minds. This turned out to be hard, but the name stuck to the discipline.
Now, suddenly, this name has been broadcast to every human in the world more or less. To them, it's a new term, and it obviously means something human mind-like. But to people who work on AI, that's not generally what it means. (Which isn't to say that some of them don't think we're near to achieving that; they just use other terms like "AGI" for that goal). So the name, which has a long history, is deceptive to people who aren't familiar with computer science.
> Now, suddenly, this name has been broadcast to every human in the world more or less. To them, it's a new term, and it obviously means something human mind-like. But to people who work on AI, that's not generally what it means. (Which isn't to say that some of them don't think we're near to achieving that; they just use other terms like "AGI" for that goal). So the name, which has a long history, is deceptive to people who aren't familiar with computer science.
I think it's even worse than that: people were familiar with the term already, but from science fiction, where it referred to actually human-level intelligence. It's similar to the "hoverboard" thing from a while back, except this time with profoundly higher stakes and requires for more technical knowledge to be able to see that it is in fact touching the ground.
Two big ways in which human intelligence is different from LLM intelligence are:
1) human intelligence makes no sharp distinction between training and generation. Every time you ask a human a question it modifies its neural structure a little.
2) continuous operation: human intelligence deals with a continuous stream of multimedia data for sixteen hours a day and starts hallucinating when deprived of it.
There's also the fact that you can't branch or roll back human intelligence, but this is something most sci-fi novels tackle when discussing mind uploading first.
Are these two differences critical aspects of human intelligence or unfortunate limitations of its biological hardware? I do not know. If we somehow manage to simulate a human brain on silicon, we will get "computer" intelligence that learns like a human, but will we have to simulate the whole virtual world for it 16/7 and let it sleep for eight hours each day just to stop it from going mad?
Or will it be cheaper to fork and kill an uploaded math genius a billion times, pumping the same recycled sensory data into his or her mind, slipping a question into the auditory data, getting the answer and then switching the simulation off and trashing the copy? Will we consider this a bigger atrocity than doing the same to an LLM right now in 2026?
Structurally a transformer model is so unrelated to the shape of the brain there's no reason to think they'd have many similarities. It's also pretty well established that the brain doesn't do anything resembling wholesale SGD (which to spell it is evidence that it doesn't learn in the same way).
>Structurally a transformer model is so unrelated to the shape of the brain there's no reason to think they'd have many similarities.
Substrate dissimilarities will mask computational similarities. Attention surfaces affinities between nearby tokens; dendrites strengthen and weaken connections to surrounding neurons according to correlations in firing rates. Not all that dissimilar.
Given the large visible differences in behavior and construction, akin to the difference between a horse and a pickup truck, I would ask the reverse question: In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency?
Veering into the realm of conjecture and opinion, I tend to think a 1:1 computer simulation of human cognition is possible, and transformers being computationally universal are thus theoretically capable of running that workload. That being said, that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.
> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency?
Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this.
Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it.
Tokens are being fed back into the transformer.
> that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.
Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon.
These questions really vex me. The appearance of intelligence is almost orthogonal to "consciousness and agency." If a human has a stroke and forgets how to speak, or never learns, or has some severe form of learning disorder, they still have exactly the same rich inner life full of subjective qualititative experience known only to them as the rest of us. Similar to an array of GPUs. If you remove the text encodings from the rest of the computing system it is a part of, outputs will appear as gibberish to you and it will no longer appear to be intelligent at all, but whatever is happening at the level of electrons meeting silicon would still be exactly the same. If it's having conscious experience at all, it should be having it regardless of whether the outputs it computes are interpreted as text or as textures on a game background.
I just don't see why "I can talk to it now" changes anything. We don't give humans less moral consideration when they're dreaming, hallucinating, tripping on LSD. The brain is just as conscious when it's having nothing but completely abstract nonsense thoughts as when it's writing The Republic.
I understand why it feels different to people. Shit, this thing can talk to me; maybe it's alive and I should treat it like such. But that's a conservative reaction to a black box known only by its behavior. The problem is these things are not actually black boxes. We don't understand the functions being computed or we'd just hard-code them and not need statistical learning techniques, but we do understand how computers work. We know process state is saved off and restored billions of times per second because of context switching. We know that state is simply a stored byte sequence that can be copied, backed up, restored endlessly. Servers and computing hardware can be destroyed but software cannot and LLMs are software. It's not at all like a brain. There are animals that go into various levels of reduced or suspended function that appear like dormancy, but there is no stream of personal subjective experience that can survive the complete destruction of its own physical body. The fact that it pays off evolutionarily to tacitly encode that reality into our instincts at an extremely deep, core level is why we have fear and pain in the first place, to nudge us toward predictive modeling of the world that keeps us alive, able to find food, and able to reproduce. Software needs none of that. There is no reason whatsoeve that, assuming a processor has subjective experience, that the subjective experience of having some gates fire versus others gets interpreted by humans programmers as "loss" and "training" and some is numerically approximating a PDE solution. Why should those feel different to the machine when the firing patterns are exactly the same and only the human interpretation of the output is different?
It just feels like a vast, vast category error for people to be speculating about machine consciousness and moralizing about how we "treat" software systems.
If platonic representation hypothesis holds across substrates, then it might matter very little, in the end. It holds across architectures in ML, empirically.
The crowd of "backpropagation and Hebbian learning + predictive coding are two facets of the very same gradient descent" also has a surprisingly good track record so far.
I don't know which direction you're going with this, but predictive coding has a pretty obvious advantage when it comes to continuous learning. Since predictive coding primarily encodes errors, it can distinguish between known and novel data and therefore reduce the damaging effects of catastrophic forgetting by having a very obvious regularisation scheme for avoiding forgetting.
It is hypothesized that the human brain uses predictive coding for obvious biological reasons such as energy efficiency (spiked error coding means only differences need to be transmitted) and biological plausibility (only local communication is permitted, meanwhile backpropagation is a global algorithm).
Transformers have a thing called a context window which doesn't really have a biological equivalent, since the brain has a fixed size and doesn't grow or shrink in response to the amount of information being processed.
LLMs consist of several layers that communicate at fixed points between the layers, whereas neurons can form feedback loops and communicate with any neighbour in any direction.
Humans do not consume or produce tokenized information. The brain controls the human body which is a biomechanical system. Spoken or written language is the result of controlling muscles via an internal model of the biomechanical system, not something that was designed via a software tokenizer that compresses character sequences.
The equivocation just doesn't seem appropriate. Try again in 2050.
For starters, natural brains have the innate ability to differentiate between things that it knows and things that it have no possibility of knowing...
Does it matter? Evolution is the brain's very own "pre-training". Hundreds of millions of years of priors hardwired.
We can do that for AIs too - pre-train on pure low Kolmogorov complexity synthetics. The AI then "knows things" before it sees any real data. Advantageous sometimes. Hard to pick compute efficient synthetics though.
AI is exactly the right term: the machines can do "intelligence", and they do so artificially.
Just like we have machines that can do "math", and they do so artificially.
Or "logic", and they do so artificially.
I assume we'll drop the "artificial" part in my lifetime, since there's nothing truly artificial about it (just like math and logic), since it's really just mechanical.
No one cares that transistors can do math or logic, and it shouldn't bother people that transistors can predict next tokens either.
> AI is exactly the right term: the machines can do "intelligence", and they do so artificially.
AI in pop culture doesn't mean that at all. Most people impression to AI pre-LLM craze was some form of media based on Asmiov laws of robotics. Now, that LLMs have taken over the world, they can define AI as anything they want.
In 2018, ie “pre-LLM”, the label “AI” was already stamped to everything, so I highly doubt that most people thought that their washing machines are sentient in any way. I remember this starkly, because my team was responsible at Ericsson (that time, about 120k employees) for one of the crucial step to have models in production, and basically every single project wanted that stamp.
The shift in meaning has been slowly diluted more and more across decades.
> Just like we have machines that can do "math", and they do so artificially.
Nobody calls calculators "artificial mathemeticians", though; we refer to them by a unique word that defines what they can and can't do in a far less fanciful and ambiguous way.
My employer is trying to convince us to embrace spec-kit. But we are a Clojure shop: we iterate fast and produce results. We don't sit around and write specs and then hope working code plops out.
> We don't sit around and write specs and then hope working code plops out.
So what do you do then? Sit around hand-holding an AI agent while it implements code line-by-line? I'm being facetious, but my point is that if you're not doing some form of spec-driven development (that is, writing a plan and then letting an AI agent implement it mostly autonomously), then you might be operating at a slower pace than you think you are.
> Define the contract before writing a single line of implementation. Specs are the source of truth.
There is only one source of truth and that is the source code.
To define and change contracts written in an ambiguous language and then hope the right code will magically appear, is completely delusional.
Iteration is the only game in town that is fast and produces results.
As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.
The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)
For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines.
When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect.
ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.
The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control.
There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised.
We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.
As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.
In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.
Maybe we can, but it is A) a far bigger, older, and more difficult problem than how to structure a computer network, and B) fundamentally not solvable through technological means.
No matter how much technologists love the idea of technology as a liberating force, our worst instincts and dynamics always reassert themselves and soon figure out how to use that same technology to destroy liberty.
Technology is a force multiplier. When large, powerful, institutions adopt technology they can use the leverage to suppress liberty. (Though not all do to the same extent.)
However, large institutions are also slow to move, grow, and change. At the leading edge of technological adoption small groups and individuals can use the amplified power to resist supression.
The trick is to remain at the leading edge and to remind early adopters of the power they wield. If enough of us fight for liberty many institutions will follow.
The world has actually become worse over time - especially the Internet, when it comes to free speech, freedom, the ability for individuals to make a difference etc.
> We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.
Where does such informed political and economic interest and power exist? With whom do we construct such society? Do they have the power and will to fight for it?
Normies live with normie standards and with incresing social media exposure with more and more emotional animal-like manipulated world views. They are either ignorant or ambivalent.
Will tech people gather on a piece of land and declare independence? Most of my tech worker colleagues are also quite pro-social media and they heavily use it to boost their apparent social status. We cannot even trust our kind.
Similar examples of new technology being used to motivate and mobilize masses have always ended with devastating wars and genocides. Previously the speed of propagation of information gave advantages to statespeople like FDR to put an end to increasing racism/Nazism/violent tendencies (of course not everywhere, when let to its own devices new technology almost perfect for constructing dictatorships). Now everybody has equal access to misinformation.
Kumbaya is also a form of self-interest. We're still very much self-interested, it's just that we can see a tiny bit further into the future and realize that we need to better our surroundings in order to live the life we want.
> it's just that we can see a tiny bit further into the future and realize that we need to better our surroundings in order to live the life we want.
except we cant agree exactly HOW the new utopia should be and we end up splintering into two groups at loggerheads, fighting each other and back to square one, talking about how if we just followed someone else idea of a utopia we would have to fight all the time. dream on
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Capitalism is not the only way of life (and fwiw, I'm not a fan)—but it is the primary way of life for nearly the entire world. Sweden, Norway, Brazil, France, Egypt, Iraq, and India are capitalist. Even China is effectively capitalist, although they like to call themselves "socialist with Chinese characteristics."
Even in our fabulously wealthy societies, people are mostly worried about paying their bills, taking care of their families, and putting food on the table, not in getting together in a quixotic enterprise and paying for thousands of kilometers of communal fiber. Also like in most communist utopias what would probably happen is that the control infrastructure would be captured by special interest groups and now you’ve traded one evil for another, but in addition you’re left holding the capex bag and you’re poorer for it.
The technology is the easy part, the people are the hard part. The reality is that we simply don't have thought leaders in charge anymore, there's no innovations or anything that are coming to correct course, very few if any channels even exist anymore for good ideas to flow upwards that result in good & proper solution implementations that positively preserve/protect/harden what we want the web to be. I think a lot of bright minds who could be solutioning for some of these things understand the dynamics at play even if they've never taken a huge moment to think about it. Subconsciously they are aware that becoming a person to try and steer such a big ship would require a monumental exertion that is maybe not worth it anymore. The great leaders never actively seek out leadership positions, similarly I don't think the people who could be good decision makers and influence these types of ideals coming to fruition in society actively seek out such positions. The possible mental tax of getting there is probably enormous. It is not an economic win for anyone to take up the mantle of trying to steer ships this size, it is a massive sacrifice. People who would be fit for the task probably just want to sign off at the end of the day and... have a good life and exist/be a benefit in their communities. In some ways perhaps that makes them.. unfit for carrying this torch. Perhaps there are simply too few people out there that are adequately qualified to carry this torch, we are in dire need of competent people at the helm of many fronts and we simply don't have that, that's just the real life variables at play right now.
We plebs are just driftwood floating in massive waves of nation state decision making. I don't doubt there are people who literally work at ISPs who are depressed at the state of things, depressed that theyre not allowed to take action on certain things, depressed that they see first-hand what kind of control mechanisms they're forced to implement or disallowed from implementing and more. It's got to be a trove of BS in an age of misinformation which has always been an information systems problem that humanity has implemented checks notes zero solutions for. And at the end of the day they, probably like all of us, just want to live a good and meaningful life.
That's not to say just... give up on ideals. But instead to acknowledge the realities of ideals not being enough on their own. Have some real conversations on what it would actually take to embed these types of fundamentals into a society, get comfortable with the uncomfortable realities. So much work needs to be done before new ideals can even be shared. Outreach alone to spread ideals is a massive uphill battle at this point due to conglomerate control of broadcast media and concentrated ownership of social media apps. A lot of these particular ideals require a decent understanding/background of technology in general which most people don't even have, making these things an incredibly unlikely basis for a society where these things are well-enough understood. So the circus trick here is how do you make it a digestable topic that touches the souls of many and galvanizes them to take the correct stance so that these things become embodied in the set of ideals a society values, so that legislators and whatever other proxies that are tasked with decision making give these things the resourcing or policy making attention they deserve. That's the mega hard part, which is then additionally compounded in difficulty by ... most households in our societies just never having these types of discussions make it to their TV/computer screens. Hackernews types like to call these people "normies" and tack the blame on them, but they can't seem to wrap their mind around that not everyone could or should have a deep compsci background. We should be coexisting with people of a variety of backgrounds and instead we should be looking at their "normie"-ness as a thing to account for, not blame. It would be absurd to have a "normie" expect us to be exceptional at rebuilding car engines or any other broad subset of knowledge that we haven't ourselves committed our own lives/spare time to.
So that leaves the other route to take which is just... renegade fine-we'll-do-it-ourselves. Which can succeed, but has its own set of challenges. Fronting infrastructure for a lot of stuff is expensive, so donors are needed on sometimes vast scales. To another commenters point like... ain't none of us on the renegade front laying undersea cables any time soon which are multi-billion dollar projects to cross the Pacific. Often times we see these underground efforts fail in their infancy simply because the UX just flat out sucks and we're up against entities who can giga-scale all their infrastructure/resources & ultimately capitalize on making whatever app thing fast&pleasant for users. It feels like we're drowning against titans sometimes, it's overwhelming.
An alternative internet would be possible: maybe you could setup a kickstarter campaign and aim to ride on the back of Starlink, or Amazon's upcoming Leo.
One problem you face are high profile leaders apparently being "replaced" with ones that are a lot more "conformist." So yesteryear's Bezos might've said yes, today's Bezos: no. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqlEtPBNgLc (members only)
I think what would be cool is to have a device with all of Gemini's content available for offline browsing. Every few hours changes can be downloaded to keep it current.
This is similar to Bill Joy and his unlimited music device in about 2000.
Having something local means superfast response times, even if there's a delay in freshness.
The key is moderation. I suppose it could end up like a magazine. Maybe charge micropayments to have content included with that fee changing according to a slop-scale?
It's a good idea to couple with something like the upcoming Linux handheld - Mecha. Need multi-TB SSDs - maybe AI can help navigate? Have different versions according to how much storage the user has available.
Maybe there's demand for something local that new AIs can train from. Something other than Internet Archive.
Are there any products that can minimize online-time by building a backlog of jobs to run when online, but also enabling a pause for offline-time?
Also, websites could queue requests, eliminate the AI thumping, and notify the client when their request is allowed? It's like queuing up for a niteclub and eventually getting passed the droid-hostile bouncer.
Stop paying attention to every little thing that happens. Pay enough attention that you're not totally ignorant, but don't give it so much air that you get overwhelmed to the point of inaction.
The "normies" aren't as dumb as people on here think they are. There are plenty of side channels to activate normies. The reason good leaders don't seem to seek out leadership positions anymore is because they have the Internet now. Don't underestimate the power of online discourse and how quickly its effects can propagate through society. Plenty are watching and steering from the comfort of their own homes, but the titans find this very unsettling, so they want to shut it down. They've been trying for years, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for them because nature is not on their side. Information just wants to spread out and be free.
The ISPs are a natural monopoly, or oligopoly at least, because it's expensive to lay cable for each home. Their business is quite profitable even when they don't get to control their customers traffic.
city wide municipal Internet service, which is admittedly last mile service, was so cheap it didn't even make a dent in the local tax rates. the cost was nominal. naturally the centralized providers fought to make municipal Internet illegal
If someone tells me we can build a shed, I'm going to ask who's land are we building it on, who's paying for it, what zoning/permitting laws apply, who's going to own it (form an LLC or a -corp with shares). The kind of wood and the type of nails aren't even worth wasting time discussing until we've answered those questions first.
But you don't necessarily need wood, nails or concrete to build a shed. Once we start specifying things like that we stop considering alternatives that could be legitimate options.
The assertion that an uncensored internet is a better world should probably require some motivation.
If everyone was a normal (as far as anyone is normal) law abiding citizen perhaps I would agree, but sadly that is far from the case. I think history has quite clearly shown that there is a minority of people out there that will take advantage and ruin things for everyone else. It's the same reason we have militaries, police forces, government checks and balances, etc. The internet is no exception to this.
I don't think the world is simple enough where anyone could be absolutist about freedom, it's all grey areas and complicated lines drawn.
There is hope. It's not only possible, but it is likely and is already underway. DNS can be replaced. IPv4/v6 can be replaced. We just need to build a layer on top that ignores the access controls of the underlying layer (the Internet), then replace the underlying layer altogether with new infrastructure.
Those who want control over other people's mouths and eyes and ears, and rely on it to maintain their undeserved authority and prosperity are going to have a bad time.
I think some of those barriers are going away ( in the UK it's now possible to get symmetric full fibre at a reasonable price ), static IPs, ISP's without filtering etc.
I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.
For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
> however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
I have seen those kinds of opinions on internet already few times. No it is not that complicated.
Yes you need to buy server.
Yes you need to setup the DNS.
Yes you need to maintain, and update server and its software.
But this is like that with everything you selfhost.
Beside that you need mostly 1 time operations like:
- setup domain entries
- setup SPF
- setup DKIM
- setup certs
- install server (of course)
- test if this works
- setup some Google Postmaster account because they do not like new domains sending them emails
I do not remember anything else beside some administrative tweaks here and there. But!
I never attempted to run postfix, dovecot combo myself. I was aiming to run whole thing on Docker and forget about configuring dozens of config files on Linux host.
With docker you can just migrate whole set of volumes to new machine and that is it. I am running Mailcow BTW.
I am not sure about other mailsevers but with Mailcow I occasionally (once per week maybe) get spam notification (release/delete call to action) that I just click and that is all. I have DMARC reports coming in but as far as I remember they are about my own server outgoing emails.
So no, I do not think so.
As for my own emails they were rejected maybe by just few times. But I do not use email much - just some personal communication. I am not running marketing campaigns that places my IP on some blacklist.
I think I just one time was on one of spam lists. I just emailed them or applied for removal via some webform and they removed the entry pretty much instantly. I do not remember other problems.
As far as I understand this article it talks about different IPs in SPF. This is just one machine with one IP. I do not send big quantities of emails from other servers. And even if I would need to I would just create mail box and send emails via that mailbox.
> We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors
In some countries that may be possible (if only for now). Where chips are produced makes that an impossibility for most. That is, you can have certain guarantees if you run the chip fab, although if you are downstream of that, it can be a tall order to guarantee your chips are sovereign. So, while I like the sentiment that you have some sort of control behind your router, I'm really unsure how true that is given the complexity of producing modern day chips. Disclaimer, not an expert, just an opinion.
I would even say unless you truly have full custody of the transportation of components as well, that is unlikely. Israel’s pager bombs in Lebanon were supplied via a third party, not the manufacturer.
This is just the "No True Scotsman" fallacy (with a dash of "appeal to tradition" fallacy). Yes, the internet has never been perfect, but it was really good for most users a long time and has only lost freedom for the majority of users recently with the rise of coordinated multi-state online censorship. Yes, there have been problems in the past, but if you can't compare now to then and see that things have radically shifted, I don't know what else to say to convince you.
>there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
I'd settle for a maximally private totally uncensored IPV4 like there used to be. Broadband turned out to be over-rated in some ways.
One of the good things about dial-up was the way it was built on a peer-to-peer network that "everybody" already had, their land-line telephone service.
Way before actual "networking", anybody with a modem could connect privately with anybody else who had one.
An ISP could be formed by taking incoming calls from all active digital users simultaneously, and that was where the networking was done, plus connection to other networks around the world.
You could still contact any one computer user privately if you wanted to, without going through an ISP, just like it was before the web.
Also connect one network with another distant one, such as one office building to another, without ISP.
If anybody wanted to form their own working ISP, they could do it privately anytime as an interested group and not even tell anybody about it if they didn't want to. It might not be a commercial ISP but there was no mainstream to begin with where it was assumed that an ISP must be commercial or make any money at all.
These connections were intended to be "totally" private by law, it was well-established that a court order was required to do a wiretap, and the penalty for violation was based on the concept that spying on Americans was one of the worst crimes, and needed to deter those who acted to compromise the privacy & freedom that America cherished so deeply. And preserve citizen rights the country was chartered to uphold, no differently than before the telephone was invented.
There's nothing like this any more, land-line copper is in miserable disuse so the only remaining wire if any is TV cable. But the only way to do peer-to-peer contact over cable is through an ISP, how private is that and why is there not a court order necessary before privacy can be compromised and very select Americans be subject to espionage?
Cell phones won't help you now, they can be tapped without wires.
The options are far fewer than the possibilities offered when dial-up first got popular.
> there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back.
What do you mean "back"? It was never free, as in zero-cost. It was also not very unlimited; I remember times when I had to pay not only for the modem time online, but also for the kilobytes transferred. Uncensored, yes, because basically nobody cared, and the number of users was relatively minuscule.
The utopia was never in the past, and it remains in the future. I still think that staying irrelevant for large crowds and big money is key.
> The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that stuff.
For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most of its infrastructure.
The most is owned by Big Telcos, previous national monopolies. Deutsche Telekom from Germany, NTT from Japan, AT&T and Level3 and Lucent from US, Vodafone from UK, some private lines for Big Tech. There are lots of privately owned companies for connecting all sorts of big and small companies' infrastructure (cables and routers) together in Internet Exchange Points all over the world. Some of them are again owned by big telcos, some of them are private independent companies, some of them are government owned, or any combination of the options.
"If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised."
Is that like owning a car and having some third-party (who?) remotely cut the brake cable because the manufacturer fitted that "feature" in stealth? Or maybe they did something more benign (ie disable car speakers) just as a reminder as to "who is the boss?"
>The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP.
We can have other protocols on top of TCP/IP and build a new Internet over the existing one, much like TOR/I2P/Hyphanet/Lokinet but without many of the disadvantages of those.
there is already so much “space stuff” that launching spacecraft is increasingly difficult.
The next comment will be “but they can have short orbits” but that betrays the fact that they can collide with other objects and if its so cheap we will launch thousands for bandwidth.
As always: technical solutions to political problems is a band-aid and makes everything worse, lets beat our politicians to death (metaphorically) instead.
Or use WiFi and decentralized networks, Freifunk, Guifi and NYCMesh already demonstrated it's possible, and you can easily with consumer hardware setup 1km links with directed antennas, so as long as you have line of sight to another already connected node, you too can participate and help build another network that is separate from the internet :)
ISP is to only transfer IP packets. All the rest is up to you. And more: if suddenly many need a lot of upload speed, both marketing and lawmaking forces are in their favor. I think you overestimate this trouble.
Let me introduce you to the decentralized alternative to ISPs, connecting and collaborating with the new-ish wireless mesh networks that are still active and maintained. The three biggest AFAIK are Freifunk (Germany), Guifi (Spain) and NYCMesh (NYC/US?).
Basically, you can as a private individual set up a wireless node, talk with your nearest node that you have a visual line of sight to, and get connected to a completely separate network from the internet, where there is a ton of interesting stuff going on, and it's mostly volunteer run.
>The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)
I don't know - the rate of adoption of MeshCore and similar technologies is quite astonishing.
The upstream bandwidth sure improved but ISPs are still hostile to self-hosting by limiting ports, resetting connections every x days and not providing an ipv4 for a reasonable charge.
There's also no hope of creating a web that is resistant to enshittification and power consolidation as long as it can technically support any form of economic transaction.
It's sad how many people are falling for the narrative that there's more at play here than predict-next-token and some kind of emergent intelligence is happening.
No, that is just your interpretation of what you see as something that can't possibly be just token prediction.
And yet it is. It's the same algorithm noodling over incredible amounts of tokens.
And that's exactly the explanation: People regularly underestimate how much training data is being used for LLMs. They contain everything about writing a compiler, toy examples, full examples, recommended structure yadda yadda yadda.
I love working with Claude and it regularly surprises me but that doesn't mean I think it is intelligent.
When Codex goes off the rails and deletes files, it gets ashamed for fucking up and tries to hide its handiwork, and then it becomes apologetic and defensive when you call it out on it. It's linear algebra on a GPU, so I don't think it is capable of feeling those things like a human does, but it outputs tokens that approximate what a human would output when similarly faced, so I mean, sure, it's not actually intelligent in a way that philosophers can debate in armchairs about, but the computer has been said to be "thinking" when it takes three hours to render with ffmpeg since long before LLMs existed, so if that's the hill you wanna die on, be my guest. The hill I chose to die on is that downloadable models aren't open source, so we all have our battles. Policing other people saying LLMs are thinking/intelligent isn't mine, however.
You don't typically give the intern the task to review all company communication including the messages talking about firing the intern. People seem to have lost common sense about security.
The token prediction tries to simulate (textual) behaviour, which in this case includes blackmailing when threatened to be fired. In other words, SOMEONE has selected that it should exhibit that behaviour by selecting the training data. Sure that someone likely did it by accident, because reviewing such large data sets is just impossible, but maybe that is why such a thing is incredible risky and they should be held accountable for that decision.
This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that you can use for free is nauseating.
This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate.
If you don't like that, go elsewhere.
If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks.
Just look at the plethora of free services you get.
In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.
I do advocate for using other networks (specifically Nostr) that are not designed like this, but the network effect is big and most of my friends are on Blue Sky because they have been lured into a false sense of “it’s decentralised, I can just move! If something bad happens”.
The reason they are on Bluesky is that it just works, its client just works and the barrier of entry is low. Oh, and others they want to follow are on there. That's it.
No regular user cares about - oh my data, it is stored centrally, how evil!
That is just not a problem most people have. Like at all.
The light "beam" we perceive is the result of infinite circular waves. The points were the light is not are points where they cancel each other out. We had that as part of the school curriculum, do you not have that, or did you forget?
I caught Claude the other day hallucinating code that was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, leading to tasks being failed and never recover. But it certainly wasn't obvious.