Yep, if you were to watch what happens at a 996 shop, it's people literally living their at-home life with their fellow employees for most of the time.
It's societal. I don't really have a way I can translate it for someone raised in the Western culture.
Counter example:
While westerners would look at 996 with confusion, Chinese would look at Western "intellectual property" constructs with confusion. To them it's not "copying", it's they figured out a better way to do it and the rest is fair game.
This is great for skywatching but at 32GB it only takes brief photos, and rarely video.
A real setup needs multiple 4K cameras, some kind of LWIR, MWIR, etc. as well as SDR with proper antennae for each of their respective performance envelopes.
I think it's good, but it will not be good at picking up the "targets of opportunity".
It's not flying saucers, it's weird orbs / spheres. There is volume of footage, and sufficient quality. I think we're past the point of "is it real" and more at "okay so what is this really and what is it doing".
If we could take Tier 1 reports from NUFORC, have tons of metrics available with sensor data, we can make a better guess.
(Yes, there are almost certainly other intelligent lifeforms in the universe. No, they have not been here. In the 1950's my brother became very interested in UFO sightings and maintained files of 3x5 cards detailing them. Then he grew up.)
I'd love to believe you, but as a European who - for some reason - never get these sightings unlike Americans, I find it hard to do so. Either our mysterious alien friends really love USA or you guys have some condition that the entire Europe does not, e.g., permissions to test military equipment without having to announce it to the public, let alone the freedom to move around in a large area without it becoming a political drama.
Imagine if the German military started doing unannounced missions in neighboring countries... now imagine if a military base in the US send a couple of fighter jets from one state to another state and back. Only one of those situations would give a cluster f** of international drama, thus "odd sightings" i.e. covert military operations could be more common in the US than the rest of the world.
I'd love to believe... but it always only happens in USA.
Spaniard there; there used to be UFO's in the 70's... coincidentally near the US military bases ;)
There was an infamous one in the Canary Islands.
Also, weird events under Huelva. A few paranormal, but some of them not religion/spiritual based.
If the aliens were real, their technology for sure would look as magic for humans. No, forget flying saucers or whatever. These kind of civilizations would have totally different ways to travel thousands of kilometers across the galaxy.
Teleporting "magic" would just be mundane technology for them.
A simple AM radio receiver with a wire, a coil and a magnet would just be sorcery for even the upper elite from the medieval times. And today an Elementary kid can build a simple receiver with junk from a junkyard or scraps from a workbench.
EDIT:
BTW, I forgot: on paranormal stuff on Huelva, I meant something like this:
The related news was broadcasted in Spain on serious TV news at lunch, not
from some Alex Jones-lite kind of show with Reiki and the like.
On the laws of physics, we are like toddlers discovering an adult world. The quaterion concept it's almost from yesterday, and yet it drives real world stuff. Even networks, such as some
hypercubic topology, as the one I've seen from mycrovtif. Yes, it's bound to the Hamming code, too. You don't need to break physics, but understand them better. And the case it's
that there no intuition once you drive QM, where even 'particles' collide into themselves.
Said this, my point will serve as a slight hint in order to successfully understand the rest.
For an advanced civilization with huge Physics understanding, travel wouldn't be the correct word (moving through space with light speed bound limits).
For instance, when people talk about quantum entangling, information doesn't 'travel' faster than light. There's no transmission, in a similar way that here woudln't be any dx over t. There would be no actual move.
Asserting that physics knowledge purportedly incomprehensible to us would enable this or that is radical bad faith, exacerbated by dishonest word games. No transmission of information means no move, no travel, and so this advanced civilization can't get here, flatly contradicting previous claims. And as I said, our knowledge of physics is adequate to establish this. And that on top of nonsense about "paranormal" being authenticated because it was broadcast on "serious" Spanish television, not Alex Jones--which is a totally circular and bizarrely gullible argument from authority--TV and other mass media is rife with nonsense, especially in this area.
That's the dumbest crap I've ever read. If this was presented on Spanish TV then it's no better than Alex Jones, and no one with an IQ above room temperature believes this happened.
One of the affected passengers was a journalist. You know, you wouldn't want to toss your whole career to the dust bin with a shitty Alex-Jones/paranormal like comment you would find under UFO related magazines and the like. Even more today where you can find smartphones everywhere.
So, if Isabel Orta -she- lied, I would expect to be ridiculed down to the extreme in the media.
Because, let's get fair, people in Spain would just watch stuff like Cuarto Millenio (paranormal, UFO and conspiracies stuff) on Sundays for the laughs on crazy theories and 'discoveries'.
Yet the journalist told her story in prime time, in serious media, not under these kind of magazines turned into TV shows:
> Either our mysterious alien friends really love USA
The USA is the best, who'd blame them! Perhaps aliens love American cheeseburgers and milkshakes from their time in Roswell. ;P
> you guys have some condition that the entire Europe does not, e.g., permissions to test military equipment without having to announce it to the public, let alone the freedom to move around in a large area without it becoming a political drama.
That's an interesting take. Though surely Germany or others have some more remote areas. Scotland has lots of empty land and the UK airforce right?
Then again, the amount of empty space in the wester US is not to be underestimated. I live near Mountain Home Idaho. If you drive over the desert to Nevada you cross air force land with big signs warning about it being an active test grounds. Lots of people have had fighter jets fly up and do simulated bombing runs on them as they drive through.
Lights? Human aircraft have lights for a reason ... for safety, movement on runways, and to aid with tracking among others. If alien ... why lights, and why lights in our visible spectrum? Aircraft lights are placed at extremal positions to help work out the approximate size and extent of the wings, tail, nose. They are not decorated with lights like a Christmas tree.
I checked reports on linked site ... triangular shapes and lights are a common theme. It seems both vaguely human designed to be seen without function just the kind of ambiguity that doesnt help. I remain skeptical.
among many others. I think this comment from the marginalrevolution link is compelling:
"I write science fiction professionally, and I would cheerfully bet against these sightings being any alien technology. Why? Because zooming around in Earth's atmosphere and playing chicken with fighter planes doesn't fit any rational notion of why someone would go to the considerable trouble of sending a mission to the Solar System. (Jokes about alien teenagers aside.)
If the goal is to make contact, then there are much better ways of doing it than flitting around the atmosphere being coy.
If the goal is not to make contact, then contemporary human tech could already do a better job of observing while staying hidden. A big telescope on a near-Earth asteroid could watch us in considerable detail during close approaches. Small satellites could do the same. And small robotic probes disguised as -- say -- seagulls or cats could do all the sampling and exploring of the Earth's surface with nobody the wiser.
As it is, we have a phenomenon dating back at least 70 years and possibly thousands of years which never seems to DO anything.
My conclusion: it's probably a lot of different phenomena, mostly involving human perception. Maybe, if we're very lucky, there's some rare atmospheric phenomenon causing some of these sightings, and we might learn a little by studying it."
(It's also easy to make an argument that we have been visited by aliens, in the same way that it's easy to make an argument that the Earth is flat or that humans never landed on the moon ... easy if one doesn't adhere to basic principles of rational discourse.)
That wasn’t quite the point I was trying to make. Almost certainly we have not been visited in a shape or form that would resemble anything like the typical UFO sightings. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, we might have been visited in forms that are completely incomprehensible to us
It's the point I made--it is not at all difficult to make an argument that we have not been visited by aliens.
> we might have been visited in forms that are completely incomprehensible to us
So what? That's not an argument that we have been. It's not a rebuttal to the arguments that we haven't been. It's like saying that President Trump might be a shapeshifting reptile from Aldebaran. "It MIGHT be, so it's difficult to argue to the contrary"--wrong. It's like saying to someone who notes that there's no elephant in their dining room that there might be one that's invisible and very nimble so no one bumps into it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. It's a child's (or theist's) "anything is possible" logic. It's hypocritical because no one uses this sort of nonsense outside of such special pleading--imagine a lawyer for a mass murderer with hundreds of witnesses telling a jury that actually it was done by aliens with incomprehensible technology who created the illusion that it was their client who did it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. This sort of "might have been" garbage has no place in rational good faith discussion.
There's a whole lot of undecidable (or effectively undecidable) edge cases that can be adequately covered. As a matter of fact, Decidability Logic is compatible with Prolog.
We would begin by having a Prolog server of some kind (I have no idea if Prolog is parallelized but it should very well be if we're dealing with Horn Clauses).
There would be MCP bindings to said server, which would be accessible upon request. The LLM would provide a message, it could even formulate Prolog statements per a structured prompt, and then await the result, and then continue.
Good. The world model is absolutely the right play in my opinion.
AI Agents like LLMs make great use of pre-computed information. Providing a comprehensive but efficient world model (one where more detail is available wherever one is paying more attention given a specific task) will definitely eke out new autonomous agents.
Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI.
I wish I could help, world models are something I am very passionate about.
One theory of how humans work is the so called predictive coding approach. Basically the theory assumes that human brains work similar to a kalman filter, that is, we have an internal model of the world that does a prediction of the world and then checks if the prediction is congruent with the observed changes in reality. Learning then comes down to minimizing the error between this internal model and the actual observations, this is sometimes called the free energy principle. Specifically when researchers are talking about world models they tend to refer to internal models that model the actual external world, that is they can predict what happens next based on input streams like vision.
Why is this idea of a world model helpful? Because it allows multiple interesting things, like predict what happens next, model counterfactuals (what would happen if I do X or don't do X) and many other things that tend to be needed for actual principled reasoning.
In this video we explore Predictive Coding – a biologically plausible alternative to the backpropagation algorithm, deriving it from first principles.
Predictive coding and Hebbian learning are interconnected learning mechanisms where Hebbian learning rules are used to implement the brain's predictive coding framework. Predictive coding models the brain as a hierarchical system that minimizes prediction errors by sending top-down predictions and bottom-up error signals, while Hebbian learning, often simplified as "neurons that fire together, wire together," provides a biologically plausible way to update the network's weights to improve predictions over time.
Only if you also provide it with a way for it to richly interact with the world (i.e. an embodiment). Otherwise, how do you train it? How does a world model verify the correctness of its model in novel situations?
Learning from the real world, including how it responds to your own actions, is the only way to achieve real-world competency, intelligence, reasoning and creativity, including going beyond human intelligence.
The capabilities of LLMs are limited by what's in their training data. You can use all the tricks in the book to squeeze the most out of that - RL, synthetic data, agentic loops, tools, etc, but at the end of the day their core intelligence and understanding is limited by that data and their auto-regressive training. They are built for mimicry, not creativity and intelligence.
Training on 2,500 hours of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, they produce a neural net world model of Minecraft. It is basically a learned Minecraft simulator. You can actually play Minecraft in it, in real time.
They then train a neural net agent to play Minecraft and achieve specific goals all the way up to obtaining diamonds. But the agent never plays the real game of Minecraft during training. It only plays in the world model. The agent is trained in its own imagination. Of course this is why it is called Dreamer.
The advantage of this is that once you have a world model, no extra real data is required to train agents. The only input to the system is a relatively small dataset of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, and the output is an agent that can achieve specific goals in the world. Traditionally this would require many orders of magnitude more real data to achieve, and the real data would need to be focused on the specific goals you want the agent to achieve. World models are a great way to cheaply amplify a small amount of undifferentiated real data into a large amount of goal-directed synthetic data.
Now, Minecraft itself is already a world model that is cheap to run, so a learned world model of Minecraft may not seem that useful. Minecraft is just a testbed. World models are very appealing for domains where it is expensive to gather real data, like robotics. I recommend listening to the interview above if you want to know more.
World models can also be useful in and of themselves, as games that you can play, or to generate videos. But I think their most important application will be in training agents.
He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He imagines none of that is the case and that if only he can build computers more like us then they will be in direct contact with the world and then he can (he thinks) make a model that is better at understanding the world
Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too?
I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is full of analogue TV-like distortion and other artefacts. Sometimes when it's bad I can see my brain constructing an image in real time rather than this perception happening instantaneously, particularly when I'm out walking. A deer becomes a bundle of sticks becomes a muddy pile of rocks (what it actually is) for example over the space of seconds. This to me is pretty strong evidence we do not experience reality directly, and instead construct our perceptions predictively from whatever is to hand.
Pleased to meet someone else who suffers from "visual snow". I'm fortunate in that like my tinnitus, I'm only acutely aware of it when I'm reminded of it, or, less frequently, when it's more pronounced.
You're quite correct that our "reality" is in part constructed. The Flashed Face Distortion Effect [0][1] (wherein faces in the peripheral vision appear distorted due the the brain filling in the missing information with what was there previously) is just one example.
Only tangentially related but maybe interesting to someone here so linking anyways: Brian Kohberger is a visual snow sufferer. Reading about his background was my first exposure to this relatively underpublicized phenomenon.
Ah that's interesting, mine is omnipresent and occasionally bad enough I have to take days off work as I can't read my own code; it's like there's a baseline of it that occasionally flares up at random. Were you born with visual snow or did you acquire it later in life? I developed it as a teenager, and it was worsened significantly after a fever when I was a fresher.
Also do you get comorbid headaches with yours out of interest?
I developed it later in life. The tinnitus came earlier (and isn't as a result of excessive sound exposure as far as I know), but in my (unscientific) opinion they are different manifestations (symptoms) of the same underlying issue – a missing or faulty noise filter on sensory inputs to the brain.
Thankfully I don't get comorbid headaches – in fact I seldom get headaches at all. And even on the odd occasion that I do, they're mild and short-lived (like minutes). I don't recall ever having a headache that was severe, or that lasted any length of time.
Yours does sound much more extreme than mine, in that mine is in no way debilitating. It's more just frustrating that it exists at all, and that it isn't more widely recognised and researched. I have yet to meet an optician that seems entirely convinced that it's even a real phenomenon.
Interesting, definitely agree it likely shares an underlying cause with tinnitus. It's also linked to migraine and was sometimes conflated with unusual forms of migraine in the past, although it's since been found to be a distinct disorder. There's been a few studies done on visual snow patients, including a 2023 fMRI study which implicated regions rich in glutamate and 5HT2A receptors.
I actually suspected 5HT2A might be involved before that study came out, since my visual distortions sometimes resemble those caused by psychedelics. It's also known that both psychedelics and anecdotally from patient's groups SSRIs too can cause a similar symptoms to visual snow syndrome, I had a bad experience with SSRIs for example but serotonin antagonists actually fixed my vision temporarily - albeit with intolerable side-effects so I had to stop.
It's definitely a bit of a faff that people have never heard of it, I had to see a neuro-ophthalmologist and a migraine specialist to get a diagnosis. On the other hand being relatively unknown does mean doctors can be willing to experiment. My headaches at least are controlled well these days.
scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.
The default philosophical position for human biology and psychology is known as Representational Realism. That is, reality as we know it is mediated by changes and transformations made to sensory (and other) input data in a complex process, and is changed sufficiently to be something "different enough" from what we know to be actually real.
Direct Realism is the idea that reality is directly available to us and any intermediate transformations made by our brains is not enough to change the dial.
Direct Realism has long been refuted. There are a number of examples, e.g. the hot and cold bucket; the straw in a glass; rainbows and other epiphenomena, etc.
the fact that a not-so-direct experience of reality produces "good enough results" (eg. human intelligence) doesn't mean that a more-direct experience of reality won't produce much better results, and it clearly doesn't mean it can't produce these better results in AI
your whole reasoning is neither here not there, and attacking a straw man - YLC for sure knows that human experience of reality is heavily modified and distorted
but he also knows, and I'd bet he's very right on this, that we don't "sip reality through a narrow straw of tokens/words", and that we don't learn "just from our/approved written down notes", and only under very specific and expensive circumstances (training runs)
anything closer to more-direct-world-models (as LLMs are ofc at a very indirect level world models) has very high likelihood of yielding lots of benefits
But he seems to like pretending that we can’t reconfigure that straw of tokens into 4096 straws or a couple billion straws for that matter. LLMs are just barely getting started. That’s not to say there’s no other or better way, but yucking our yum he fails to acknowledge there’s a lot more that can be done with this stuff.
The world model of a language model is a ... language model. Imagine the mind of a blind limbless person, locked in a cell their whole life, never having experienced anything different, who just listens all day to a piped in feed of randomized snippets of WikiPedia, 4chan and math olypiad problems.
The mental model this person has of this feed of words is what an LLM at best has (but human model likely much richer since they have a brain, not just a transformer). No real-world experience or grounding, therefore no real-world model. The only model they have is of the world they have experience with - a world of words.
Whatever idea yann has of JEPA and its supposed superiority compared to LLMs, he doesn't seem to have done a good job of "selling it" without resorting to strawmanning LLMs. From what little I gathered (which may be wrong), his objection to LLMs is something like the "predict next token" inductive bias is too weak for models to be able to meaningfully learn models of things like physics, sufficient to properly predict motion and do well on physical reasoning tasks.
And LLMs are trained on the humans trying to describe all of this through text. The point is not if humans have a true experience of reality, it’s that human writings are a poor descriptor of reality anyway, and so LLMs cannot be a stepping stone.
A world model is a persistent representation of the world (however compressed) that is available to an AI for accessing and compute. For example, a weather world model would likely include things like wind speed, surface temperature, various atmospheric layers, total precipitable water, etc. Now suppose we provide a real time live feed to an AI like an LLM, allowing the LLM to have constant, up to date weather knowledge that it loads into context for every new query. This LLM should have a leg up in predictive power.
Some world models can also be updated by their respective AI agents, e.g. "I, Mr. Bot, have moved the ice cream into the freezer from the car" (thereby updating the state of freezer and car, by transferring ice cream from one to the other, and making that the context for future interactions).
If your "world model" only models a small portion of the world, I think the more appropriate label is a time-series model. Once you truncate correlated data, the model you're left with isn't very worldly at all.
You don't need to load the entire world model in order to be effective at a task. LLM providers already do something similarly described with model routing.
The way I think of it (might be wrong) but basically a model that has similar sensors to humans (eyes, ears) and has action-oriented outputs with some objective function (a goal to optimize against). I think autopilot is the closest to world models in that they have eyes, they have ability to interact with the world (go different directions) and see the response.
> Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI.
There's absolutely no reason to think this. In fact, all of the evidence we have to this point suggests that scaling intelligence horizontally doesn't increase capabilities – you have to scale vertically.
Additionally, as it stands I'd argue there's foundational architectural advancements needed before artificial neutral networks can learn and reason at the same level (or better) than humans across a wide variety of tasks. I suspect when we solve this for LLMs the same techniques could be applied to world models. Fundamentally, the question to ask here is whether AGI is io dependant, and I see no reason to believe this to be the case – if someone removes your eyes and cuts off your hands they don't make you any less generally intelligent.
It really hasn't to the scale that you imply. Why hasn't ukraine and russia both used this to completely shut down each others infrastructure? Why isn't russia just hacking all the ukrainian COTS drones? Why hasn't anyone hacked a nuclear power plant?
There is power in restricting access and air gapping helps a lot. A drone (for example) can fall back to basic cryptography to limit access.
Air gapping is a baseline requirement in most safety critical systems. Nuclear power plants in particular have lots of redundant layers of safety. AFAIK Russia hasn't physically tried to cause a meltdown, presumably due to the political blow back (although they have attacked Chernobyl's sarcophagus). I assume this limits their digital espionage attacks too.
We do get glimpses of the use of such malware, like when Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos' phone. But we don't hear about most of it because there is a benefit to keeping a hack secret, so as to keep access.
Finally, it's usually cheaper to social engineer someone into loading a PowerPoint presentation and doing a local privilege escalation. They burn those for things as petty as getting embarrassing political information.
I doubt that most critical systems are air gapped. Even if there are, most part of Russians economy is not, but is still using IT based on COTS systems. Why wouldn't the Ukraine DoS or compromise the whole non air-gapped IT infrastructure of Russia to hit the economy if they could have easy access to RCE just because they are a government?
I mean, they do all the time. The value is generally in keeping access, however, and operational security and access control is helpful. You can knock a system out but then you just get kicked out and have to start over.
