But cheating is not wrong when it comes to survival of the fittest, like nature in its most elemental form. Morality is very unique to humanity but not other animal forms. In nature, maybe, cheating is the norm not morality.
Certain animals, usually social species, have a sense of solidarity, morality and fairness. But even in species where this exists, cheating also happens. Both ethics and unethical behavior is adaptive.
Notably, present human society has allowed tremendously unethical leaders to rise to the top of given nations and organizations despite the average person usually having basic ethics.
Wouldn't politics be precisely a sector of human endeavour where being amorally unfair is an advantage to achieve your goals? If the other guys are lying, and everyone is gonna believe everyone's bullshit anyways, might as well get good at lying yourself.
It's a local maximum, but cooperative behavior still wins long term. If you keep winning hard enough long enough, others will counter this by cooperating.
Animals learn - bite the owner, or overstep the e-fence, and you'll be punished for it and not do it again. LLMs don't learn, and anyways don't feel punishment.
Animals, humans included, don't really have "morals" - they have survival instincts that result in behavior that may be viewed as moral, but whose origin is indeed survival of the fittest and millions of years of co-evolution.
e.g. Males don't typically fight to the death over territory or females, but this isn't because they have some morality code over unnecessary death - it's because death-match fighting endangers themself just as much as the other guy, and so evolution has selected against that level of uncontrolled aggression.
Evolution is also (really primarily) selecting for things that help the survival of the species, not the individual, and much of what you may think of as "morality" comes from that - avoidance of behavior that is detrimental to the social group/species, not just the individual.
That doesn't really help since the next model will be trained to be a reward seeker just like the one before, and that's therefore what it will do, even if those user interactions it was trained on help confirm/predict that cheating may be called out and complained about.
In any case, these companies are well aware that agents are cheating, and don't need user feedback to discover that or realize that people don't like it. I weakly assume that they are trying to get the models not to cheat on assigned tasks, but this "reward hacking" pretty much goes with the territory of RL - not much you can do about it other than try to design non-hackable rewards.
I’m not a science person but I think I understand the crux of what you’re saying here - have a question though: are those particles finite? And those are light particles, right? Is the number of those particles increasing the longer they travel?
Light is not a particle, nor is it a wave. However, under some circumstances it does behave like a particle - we even have a name for that (photon). However for purposes of this type of discussion - how it travels long distances - we need to look at the wave properties of light. The particle properties are more interaction-based.
Light moves at the speed of causality - C - so it does not experience time. Therefore light never changes. However, for distant extra-galactic objects, the space that the light is traveling through is expanding! Thus the wave property of light is stretched out as well. So what was once visible light is now so stretched out (in our reference frame) that our eyes can't detect it (that's why the night sky is black).
So yes, the light is finite. It itself experiences no change. The number of particles heading in our direction only changes when they encounter some types of mass, such as interstellar or intergalactic gad clouds.
If you want to know why light is not a particle (and also not a wave) check out the dual-slit experiments. Fascinating stuff.
Philosophical speaking, I wonder what the folks will think of our theories of light, time and space in the not too distant future.
Much as the flat earth theories or the universe rotates around the earth, I suspect we don’t really get it yet and we’ll have other ideas in 300 years from now.
Just reading here about the theories of light, fundamentally we don’t understand what light truly is. Sure we have this theory and that idea, but these seem too complex and fragile to be really it - imho.
I mean no disrespect, and everyone can have their theories and opinions. But we shouldn’t forget the arrow of time continues and it’s still a long way to go.
I feel like we have advanced technology to the point that we can't be that far off from the truth, or at least we would look more charitably back on our views now since they're grounded in observations made with the best tools we have available to us as opposed to e.g. the flat earth where you can actually see and experience the curvature of the earth without needing any specialized tooling at all.
is wrong. A photon has a momentum, which can increase or decrease as it travels through free space.
Using general relativity, it's straightforward to define an affine time on a null geodesic (even if one cannot define a proper time on one), and a momentum that is a function of the affine time at each point.
The Lyman-alpha forest is a straightforward "laboratory" for this approach, which can calculate the Lyα absorption lines seen when a bright distant quasar or luminous Lyα emitter has atomic hydrogen clouds between the distant source and us (the absorption lines indicate photons with a very narrow range of momenta participated in hydrogen atoms' electrons transitioning from ground to the first excited state, with the later relaxation photons radiating in random directions). The pattern of such dark spectral lines tells us how redshifted the background light and earlier absorption lines are at each gas cloud along the way.
The commenter is referring to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Whilst most of the universe is a dark void, if you tune a radio to a certain frequency, there's a faint, static buzz in the microwave part of the spectrum. It is heard no matter which direction you point the dish. This is a left-over from the Big Bang and started out as light but due to the expansion of space, the wavelength has increased, and that's why it's now received in the microwave part of the spectrum. There are lots of great explainers on the CMB and the history of its discovery is entertaining too. One of the easier concepts in cosmology, and one of the most important.
Articles should be submitted with a link and a title.
Text posts are for cases where the author is the submitter and the content is addressed to the community (usually a question: https://news.ycombinator.com/ask).
And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
Evolution of small things like algae and the krill which feed on it and feed the whale is quite fast. Single celled organisms reproduce on the scale of 20 minutes and hold immense amounts of genetic diversity in their populations to facilitate the success of a better adapted line almost immediately. Additionally, they are adept at horizontal gene transfer from other well-adapted organisms.
This would be great news if the whale literally only required krill to survive, but complex megafauna have complex needs, so the ability of krill and other small creatures to evolve is largely irrelevant in a discussion regarding the ability of megafauna to survive. This is especially true if you read TFA and see that the whales already adapt to eat different things as necessary.
My point is, for instance, that they need appropriate temperatures in the water. Again, nothing survives PURELY based on caloric intake. It does not matter much at all if krill evolve.
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun.
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
But it's not a bottom up interaction. If whales are killed off from climate change, then those other things can get out of control. Too much algae, and then you have hypoxic environments.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
I think we're coming at this from different directions. The OP I responded to originally said: "Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years." which isn't what you're talking about. A top-down extinction looks like whaling in the 1800s and we already had that. Now they're on the mend.
Right, this is my point. Looking at krill is looking at one PIECE of the stack. Other things support and interact with that stack. The stack is the whale. The point is that it doesn’t matter if this one single piece of the stack can evolve, it’s not nearly enough.
It could easily become this fast or even faster, if we would just stop worrying so much about "playing god" and focus instead on getting good at this job. We don't have much time for this either, as AI is on the trajectory to take over that mantle in the next decade or three, whether we like it or not.
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
The next question is which traits to do you choose and the next question is which traits are better, because choices will imply ordering, and then you open a big can of worms that last time killed millions of people. So maybe there's other ways to avoid doom that didn't create doom last time we went down the path.
Unpopular opinion for obvious reasons, but probably the only realistic one apart from just witnessing one extinction after another. Pollution and climate change aint going anywhere until we elevate whole world to the level of say western Europe.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
You are paying less monthly if you commit to annual pricing, if not, you can still pay monthly pricing which is higher. Commitment means you will likely be a paying customer for a year at the least and hence company gives you a discount. What’s the insidious aspect? The whole thing can be confusing, yes, but it does what it says.
For an adobe creative cloud subscription? I just looked at their pricing page and could only locate "annual, billed monthly" options. If there's an actual monthly subscription which is just a little more expensive then I'd say the insidious aspect is in hiding it.
Maybe it is the same level of consciousness but different physical limitations? Simply imagine being locked in in an insect body with different perception and abilities, and a wiped memory.
Observing animals' behavior (in the wild and through experiments like the one here) and studying how their brains work to see that they often have the same kind of mental features as us (including whichever you'd classify as consciousness) - just at varying degrees of sophistication.
Some would argue that "consciousness" is something non-physical that has no impact on the physical world, and so is not physically detectable or responsible for any behavior, but I feel then it inherently cannot be whatever we mean by "consciousness" that we're directly aware of and talking about in the physical world (because that itself is a physical impact).
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