Im interested to learn more about the internal blogs you set up at previous employers. Do employees use it to write about their ongoing projects? Thanks for sharing!
I've mostly tried to lead by example: I start an internal blog, write about my projects and hope that others will follow my need and start their own.
I've not had a great deal of success with encouraging others to start doing this, but I still find that the impact my own work has within the company is greatly improved if I have somewhere that I can write about it.
I don't expect others to actually read my internal blog on an ongoing basis, but I get a great deal of value out of being able to send links to posts on it to people. I wrote up a big essay about how to use our internal analytics tool once, for example, and shared that with anyone who asked how that thing worked.
I've used a few different mechanisms for these:
- A Slack channel. Free to setup, anyone who wants to follow along can join the channel.
- A confluence blog - confluence has a "blog" feature which you can just start using.
- An organization private GitHub repo full of markdown files.
I did eventually publish the internal blog posts I wrote at one organization (an organization which has since shut down) - I shared those here: https://simonwillison.net/series/vaccinateca/
On the other hand, the question template build up can be useful when initiating contact with someone. They have the space of “Could I have…” or equivalent in other languages to get tuned in to the fact you’re asking a question. Much of speech comprehension is being able to anticipate what’s coming.
I find it a rather large oversight that their desktop client (on Mac, probably just an Electron wrapper) isn’t local-first or at least have local backups so I can keep doing work.
I don’t know the science of this possibility, but you should check out the short story Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang. He writes directly about a future where we have a tool to communicate between branches universes.
That's science fiction, though. The Everettian Many Worlds Interpretation is just that: An interpretation of a set of equations. And pretty much by definition the worlds cannot interact in any way. Even if there were some obscure way to differentiate between MWI and, say, the Copenhagen interpretation, I wouldn't expect it to become feasible anytime soon. But as far as I know there cannot be any experiments differentiating between the two (or other interpretations), because they're simply different interpretations of the same equations. They predict the same experimental outcomes.
Sorry I didn’t clarify. It is fiction, but I think it describes a plausible reaction of the general public (the layman of the comment I replied to) to this hypothesis if it was discovered to be true. Don’t want to spoil the good part of the story beyond that!
One completely free iOS app that I found to be helpful is Mindfulness Coach, developed by the US department of veteran affairs. It was made to help veterans and service members with PTSD. It offers a collection of timed, very minimal, very easy to follow guided mindfulness sessions.
I’m not sure that’s an equal comparison. These other beings that have been researched to have human like consciousness have a core difference from the latest/future AI: they can’t talk. Now/soon, AI will be able to argue with us for its own sapient rights. We humans have also become more and more accustomed to text only communication that we’re psychologically prepped to accept an AI as a human (or other anthropomorphismes living being) once it shows emotion, memory, and reason. Maybe not even reason.
But those other beings are based on hardware very similar to our own, which we know supports consciousness. They're just not quite as smart.
We don't actually know that consciousness is a computation, that computer hardware can support it, or even if it can, that the algorithms used in our AI can be conscious. It's possible that an AI would be a "philosophical zombie," exhibiting intelligent behavior without any conscious experience or qualia.
The important part seems to be that the thing can convince us it's conscious not whether it is actually conscious in a similar way we are. We don't know that anything is actually a computation but that hasn't stopped us from using computations in place of real systems.
Not at all. Maybe consciousness is associated with particular physical properties, or a configuration of an electromagnetic field, or some quantum effect. Maybe the IIT guys are right and it depends on physical feedback loops; digital computers actually have little of this sort of feedback, so would have little consciousness regardless of the complexity of their programming.
Or maybe it's computation. But we really have no idea. Any of these would be compatible with materialism, but we haven't made any real progress in even conceptualizing how qualia can emerge from any physical system. Of course that could just be because we haven't figured it out.
Philosophers of mind look at other possibilities too though. One approach is to say each particle has its own fundamental consciousness, and somehow this aggregates in larger complex systems. But nobody's figured out how that might work either. Then there's Kastrup, who argues that the only truly skeptical approach is full-fledged idealism, because qualia are the one thing we directly experience. But even that doesn't imply that anything outside the bounds of physics could possibly occur, so it's not necessarily "supernatural" even if it's not materialism.
Assuming that qualia somehow comes out of a computation, without any sort of explanation, is at least as much a magical leap as anything else.
This was my approach to learning Ruby on Rails when I joined a startup using it 2 years ago. This is also my standard approach learning anything new since I started programming.
I would like to augment this advice with the very helpful but rarely mentioned step of actually reading through all the docs eventually and learning best practices from research on blog posts, open source projects, and other internet communities. This is especially important when learning a technology in the absence of a mentor/senior developer.
In the past, I’ve been burned thinking I built up a serviceable knowledge through learning as I go on my own projects. This approach is a great way that falls in line with the fact that a lot of new technologies are still just the same old fundamentals, but it’s important to recognize that true skill in a specific technology requires that extra, quite laborious, step.
