Okay, one viewpoint is that it's broadly true, maybe with some exaggeration by the filmmakers and/or interviewees. It's very understandable that soldiers would want to stay anonymous in that version.
I don't think many people would buy your "more logical for them to just go on the record" claim -- in this situation, people are scared! And they have conflicted loyalties as well. They want to blow the whistle, but don't necessarily want to directly accuse their immediate colleagues to their faces.
Another viewpoint is that it's partly true but misleading -- the filmmakers and whistleblowers have blown things entirely out of proportion. That sounds entirely possible. But wouldn't the "logical" response then be more transparency, rather than accusations of treason and a witch-hunt for the collaborators?
And another viewpoint is that it's all completely fabricated, malicious lies. Possibly an extreme crackdown might be an appropriate response in that case? That seems very counter-productive to me, as an outsider, but again cold logic doesn't always apply.
Which of those viewpoints do you find yourself agreeing with?
To me, the broadly true one seems most likely from the available evidence; the hiding of evidence and the attempted crackdown support that one too. It also seems like some people genuinely believe (or pretend to themselves) that it's all malicious lies. To me that smacks of sheer paranoia. Understandable after the October 7 attack, sure, but not rational or productive.
Fully agree. If someone questions the film, one also has to question the Israeli government - which is proved, not suspected, to spread lies not only within its country but also internationally via social media (bots, paid influencer) and lobbying.
My sense given what I’ve read is that it’s partly true but misleading (and there’s probably some outright lies). But even the idea of “misleading” is very difficult to define because we’re talking about moral judgments about how to conduct war.
For example, apparently in the film they recount a NAZA that was done for strikes to assassinate Hamas leaders in Gaza (NAZA is an acronym in Hebrew that means “collateral damage assessment”, these are done before all strikes in order to assess potential civilian casualties). In this particular case, the strike was planned to kill the Hamas leaders in their homes at night which would likely also kill their families, as opposed to some other time to kill them which would have more or less or different civilian casualties.
So in my opinion there is no issue with killing Hamas leaders in Gaza in their homes even if their families would also die but this may offend western sensibilities for various reasons including perhaps blanket opposition to killing or military conduct at all. But then again Western sensibilities have produced Western societies which have below replacement birth rates and various other social ills which Israelis cannot even conceive of because those issues do not exist in Israel. Jewish teenagers do not go and shoot up their schools, that is something only Arab terrorists do and the reason they do that is very obvious, as are the ways of preventing that.
In the most charitable interpretation, the filmmakers chose to make this film as Western liberals trying to influence the Israeli government to adopt more Western liberal values and approaches to conducting warfare. This is still traitorous conduct since they are aligned with a foreign ideology and interests who seek to do harm against their own state and their own people.
You're hanging a lot of weight on birth rates to assert that they are wrong and therefore we are right. A birth rate above replacement isn't endlessly sustainable either, right?
And "the west" isn't really homogenous for these purposes. Most western countries don't have a school shootings problem, only the USA does. The parts of the west most heavily criticising Israel are not the USA, it's places like Spain and Ireland (both of which have interesting historical parallels!) I think the USA has a higher birth rate than the EU, so maybe you'd prefer them on that basis, but then you don't want school shootings, so maybe you prefer the EU. You can probably find a reason to dislike everyone if that's what you want to do.
In the most charitable interpretation, the filmmakers chose to make this film as Western liberals trying to influence the Israeli government to adopt more Western liberal values
That's hardly the most charitable interpretation! Maybe they're trying to influence Israeli citizens, or maybe they're trying to influence Zionists abroad? There's no need to assume some insidious outsider conspiracy.
Surely people are allowed to disagree non-violently with their current government! If that's the kind of "foreign ideology" that you're dismissing out of hand, well, that certainly clarifies things.
My point about the birth rates is that you need to treat all Western sensibilities as suspect given that they have led to non-viable societies. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every Western sensibility is wrong but that you have to essentially dismiss them all.
On one hand we have a functional society that is growing in wealth and also in population due to native born citizens meeting, getting married, having children.
On the other hand you have stagnant or declining societies (in real GDP terms) where people are not meeting, not getting married, not having children.
The school shootings is just one social ill I bring up, in Europe you have an issue with mass migration and Muslims engaging in mass sex crimes against children. I could go on about others (suicide rates, drug use rates, migration of young native people to other countries).
Does that make sense?
I never claimed there was an insidious outsider conspiracy although of course there is verified flows of foreign money from governments and NGOs to fund leftist causes and groups within Israel. You can look this up yourself, there are ongoing investigations in Congress as far as US moneys are concerned.
In this case I doubt that had much to do with it.
Israelis are well known for disagreeing with their government. This obviously goes beyond disagreement and into traitorous activity and it’s being treated as such by the Israeli government and Israeli public.
And don’t feel you need to go straight to GEB, either. I think his collection of Scientific American columns, Metamagical Themas, is also great and much more accessible.
Microsoft certainly did throw Apple a $150MM lifeline that was sorely needed, else they were looking at bankruptcy within weeks. I would say that "saved" them.
Commodore, Acorn, Arm Holding, SGI, Sun, and Next were relatively small compared to the Wintel juggernaut, but this did not imply that the technology driving them was inferior. In fact, much of it was superior.
What likely saved Apple was the fact that despite undergoing three CEOs, they did not squander the $150 million settlement with Microsoft.
But they still had sufficient funds, equivalent to $2 billion at today’s value, to continue their operations. They also had a team of highly skilled individuals who went on to develop a new operating system, OSX, and build computers with G3, G4 processors. They have also released new iMacs, Mac laptops, and Mac desktop computers to the public.
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company? It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
In hindsight, it appears that Apple had some exceptionally talented individuals, certainty more talented than the group at Microsoft and Intel.
Because both Microsoft and Intel, in hindsight, sat on their laurels for the better part of two decades.
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this did not imply that the technology driving them was inferior
Does this imply that with $2 billion today, plus or minus $1 billion, one can achieve all these accomplishments and grow into a large technology company?
You're the only one implying those things!
It seems like an unlikely long-shot that Microsoft saved Apple.
Why unlikely? They got into financial trouble due to bad decisions. They needed a bail-out from a former arch-rival to dodge bankruptcy. They eventually achieved huge success due to better decisions. There's nothing contradictory there.
Do you distinguish between Penrose's argument and the older one by Lucas, invoking Gödel's proof that certain facts are non-computable?
I always felt it's basically the same argument, and Lucas's was never really convincing; Hofstadter rebutted it very convincingly in GEB long before Penrose's books came out.
To me, camp C's claim is possible but I don't buy the argument that says it's necessary. So I guess I'm camp A. (D is religion and B seems to me incoherent.)
I haven't read GEB (yet), but I'd say I do feel there's a difference between the original formulation of Lucas and the extensions that Penrose provide. At this stage I can't say whether I'd agree with Hofstadter or not on the rebuttal though.
As for the camps, I agree with you that B doesn't really make sense (at least to me). I can put myself in position to argue for A, C and D, but as mentioned in my original post so far I agree with C the most.
When you put it like that, I think there are actually three separate things we're arguing about:
- intelligence: ability to solve problems
- agency: ability to be self-directed, to choose what to do
- consciousness: ability to experience things; "having a self"
The "intelligence" part is largely solved now (that's a very big statement, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it!) Although really it's just moving the goalposts -- computational stuff like calculating trajectories or playing chess was solved long ago, this is just more and more things moving into the "solved" column.
That leaves agency and consciousness as the hot topics that nobody has really figured out. Do they always go together, does one require the other, does one create the other? Who knows?
"Free will", there's another one. That must surely connect with agency, with consciousness, or both, in some manner we haven't figured out.
To me, agency seems like a solvable problem via existing approaches and technology. I have no idea what that means for consciousness. It's tempting to conclude that consciousness is just a mirage, but then we all do feel like we have it, so it seems like it must be something. Maybe consciousness arises automatically once you have sufficient intelligence and agency; but how would you ever determine that?
Other people might think that true agency requires consciousness, and that consciousness requires some magical new ingredient that LLMs don't have yet. The problem with that approach is, you have to identify what it is that true agency can do that software can't do; and every time you do that, it turns out LLMs can do it, so you have to keep moving the goalposts. Trying to make your argument rigorous immediately makes it self-defeating; I think that's why so much of the philosophical discussion around this is impenetrably vague. All the arguments that aren't vague just turn out to be wrong.
Yes -- I can't remember the exact words, but there's a striking bit in GEB where he directly addresses the question of "will a machine ever create art?" His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The machine would have to have a self, which he argued arose from self-referentiality and "strange loops".
Oh, I guess there's a question of whether you can separate intelligence from consciousness. His writing was mostly done in the long period where things that are very easy for humans were still intractably difficult for machines -- identifying objects in pictures, following simple written instructions, etc. So I think it's clear that he saw "intelligence" as being able to solve those simple-yet-intractable common-sense problems; the kind of thing LLMs now excel at.
> His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on.
The thing about this is that we're always encouraging people to read, because it gives them access to experiences and exposure to ideas far beyond what they could just speaking to the people around them. But there's no human alive who has read as widely or esoterically as the current crop of frontier models.
Anthropic has Claude Code Web -- sorry, looks like the official name is "Claude Code on the web" -- which I think is basically this? I've been using it for a while and I really like it.
Nothing to do with latency, I think, it's all about convenience and safety. I don't have to worry about running an agent on the computer that knows all my admin API tokens and SSH keys, and the agent isn't interrupted if I close my laptop.
The one thing that might be useful is the ability to run on a beefier machine when you need it, e.g. make sure it has direct access to a GPU. But then you're back to thinking about the host VM, not fully abstracting away from it.
The common mistake is to think “maybe if we use a blend of raw data and hand-crafted heuristics, we’ll get the best of both worlds!” But the bitter lesson says no, beyond a certain point it’s better just to use the data.
Thinking that an LLM might be able to improve on purely “big data” machine learning seems to me to be the same incorrect idea. Its “intelligence” is no more useful than human intelligence. The LLM is based on a massive data corpus, sure, but the amount of data specifically about chess in there pales in comparison to just playing billions of games of chess.
Also, training it on chess books is literally training it on human knowledge, and not the actual game, which is exactly what the bitter lesson says not to do.
The conclusion of the bitter lesson would be that a large language model trained on chess commentary as well as being trained on millions of chess games would outperform stockfish which is only trained on millions of chess games.
If you can draw any lessons from chess commentary, I think it’s very reasonable to call it “hand-crafted heuristics.”
Hand-crafted even if you're feeding in the raw commentary? That seems like a weird way to consider it. Wouldn't that make LLMs in general "hand-crafted"?
And raw games plus raw commentary is all the data you have. You can make more games but those can be fed to both stockfish and the LLM competitor. So it seems like a valid interpretation of the bitter lesson to me.
Yeah, "hand-crafted" is a bit of a stretch; I mean their value is in the human insight they contain.
The key point I was trying to get at is that the human insights don't contain anything that can't be mined from vast amounts of gameplay. Every human insight can eventually be rediscovered and made rigorous by data (in chess, at least!) In the short term, those insights are useful, but in the longer term, they add nothing at all.
Note also that "raw gameplay" here can mean new games -- you can generate as much data as you need, you don't need to rely on real recorded games.
> Every human insight can eventually be rediscovered and made rigorous by data (in chess, at least!) In the short term, those insights are useful, but in the longer term, they add nothing at all.
But isn't that the bulk of what we're shoving into LLMs, and it makes them much smarter? If it's useful there but not in a chess AI then that seems like a significant crack in the bitter lesson.
> Note also that "raw gameplay" here can mean new games -- you can generate as much data as you need, you don't need to rely on real recorded games.
Yeah I mentioned that, generated games are useful. But if we're being fair and letting both AIs use generated game data, does the more general LLM ever actually overtake the specialized stockfish like the bitter lesson suggests?
Another way to look at this is that giving the LLM the commentary is a way to avoid complaints of hiding data from the LLM, since it'll have strictly more info than stockfish. But if we cut that from the training data and only give it a basic description of chess and lots of raw game data then it's going to get even worse than it already is at chess. Meanwhile stockfish never had that commentary, just actual hand-crafted heuristics and training on game data, and it's very strong.
I think you’re talking somewhat at cross purposes to the original article.
The points I take away are:
- Good optimization is difficult and slow work, hence expensive, but LLMs can do it so we should be able to afford it more often now.
- There’s always a risk of over-fitting to your specific problem, but if everyone is now making bespoke optimizations maybe that isn’t actually a problem.
You said:
LLMs are terrible at optimizing memory utilization. There is just too little training code that does it well and far too much that doesn't.
There’s probably something in that, but it can be mitigated by testing against a local benchmark. LLMs are good at iterating tirelessly and finding incremental improvements. And as noted above, it doesn’t necessarily matter if your benchmark isn’t fully general.
I don't think many people would buy your "more logical for them to just go on the record" claim -- in this situation, people are scared! And they have conflicted loyalties as well. They want to blow the whistle, but don't necessarily want to directly accuse their immediate colleagues to their faces.
Another viewpoint is that it's partly true but misleading -- the filmmakers and whistleblowers have blown things entirely out of proportion. That sounds entirely possible. But wouldn't the "logical" response then be more transparency, rather than accusations of treason and a witch-hunt for the collaborators?
And another viewpoint is that it's all completely fabricated, malicious lies. Possibly an extreme crackdown might be an appropriate response in that case? That seems very counter-productive to me, as an outsider, but again cold logic doesn't always apply.
Which of those viewpoints do you find yourself agreeing with?
To me, the broadly true one seems most likely from the available evidence; the hiding of evidence and the attempted crackdown support that one too. It also seems like some people genuinely believe (or pretend to themselves) that it's all malicious lies. To me that smacks of sheer paranoia. Understandable after the October 7 attack, sure, but not rational or productive.
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