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Cogito ergo sum.

> the day we manage to run a full LLM on biological neurons, even if using conventional code under the hood

Doesn't make sense to me to use conventional code, shouldn't it be a matter of connecting the biological neurons in the same way as the simulated neurons of the NN implementing the LLM?


Love your pearl of wisdom. Don't know if this was the intent, but it made me laugh despite feeling a bit sad today.

Are the spam DMs advertisements or more generally something linked to a product or service? I wouldn't be surprised if X is more lenient towards bots that pay them for adverts.

Most of what I get seem to be advertisements or automated messages if you follow large(r) accounts.

One of the most interesting things that I've noticed is these advertisements will be triggered if you follow accounts that are positioned as influencers. I followed one out of curiosity and received a DM from that account advertising some cryptocurrency service.

It's a good way to filter out and block accounts that have almost certainly not grown organically.


But, no need to set a precedent: I'm quite confident that a US court would refund a person or company that overpaid due to a bug in Antropic's billing.

Well, with the Chinese AI divisions becoming a serious competitor more and more, they should start caring about their reputation. Otherwise people will go to the cheaper competitor.

Yea I am more or less done with these big providers. I'm running local primarily now. These constant screw ups, not caring about customers, political issues, it's just not worth it for me. I get some people are hooked on vibe coding but the latest wave of small models I'm good for my needs.

What do you use now? How much ram do you have? I am increasingly thinking of doing that

Well about 4 weeks ago I was mostly running small models. Some of my favorites were deepseek r1 8b and qwen 3.5 9b. Those are more or less good for boiler plate super fast responses(what I cared about most).

Now I am still trying out all the models that dropped this month. I am running qwen 3.6 35 a3b on a 16gb vram rtx 4060 ti.

I wish I sprung for a 24gb vram card but I never thought the price difference would matter. It seems like it does and I bet in the future there will be more models at this size because this is crazy.

It's not as good as opus if you are doing completely hands off programming but it's completely fine for me. I mostly use it for auto complete or templating a class. Other people are using it for agentic workflows with success.

Check out /r/localllama for more experiences. My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.


> My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.

I've got a local setup too but unless you consider hardware zero cost, there is really no way to save money. The class of model you can run on <$5k of hardware is dirt cheap to run in the cloud (generating tokens 24/7 non-stop is a few dollars a day at most, possibly even less than the cost of electricity to do it at home).


There's truth to that. But, I already had the card for other purposes. And I don't have to egress or ingress anything. I love having it all local to me. I also love how I can sell the card later. Funny thing, my GPU has gone up in price so I might even have made money

Also could run on a more generic cloud inference or gpu site. At least to see how well it works for your use-case before spending on hardware.

This reduction to the halting problem looks too handwawy to me. I don't see as a given that the possibility of the system taking into account the attack follows from the existence of the attack.


They might be trying to talk about Rice's theorem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

Formally, any non-trivial semantic property of a Turing machine is undecidable. Semantic here (roughly) means "behavioral" questions of the turing machine. E.g. if you only look at the "language" it defines (viewing it as a black box), then it is undecidable to answer any question about that language (including things like if it terminates on all inputs).

Practically though that isn't a complete no-go result. You can do various things, like

1. weaken the target you're looking for. if you're ok with admitting false positives or false negatives, Rice's theorem no longer applies, or 2. rephrase your question in terms of "syntatic properties", e.g. questions about how the code is implemented. Rust's borrow checker does this via lifetime annotations, for example.


Rice's theorem is a close corollary, but I did mean the halting problem. Pointing to the halting problem was a bit of a throwaway quip because the "general shape" of it is an easy smell test for whether something is likely to be possible:

If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.

When you have a detector for a given property, you can use that detector to alter behaviour to exclude that property.

And that is the abstract core of why the halting problem is unsolvable.

In this case, if you have access to a mechanism for poisoning data, you can use that to train a detector. Once you have a detector, you can either exclude poisoned data, or use it for adversarial training.

Either way: The existence of the poisoning mechanism can be directly used to derive the tools to create its own antidote.

And that's back to the core of the halting problem.


> If you have access to run a transform on data, you can use it to train a model that acts as a detector of whether that transform has been applied to the data.

This still seems too handwavy. For example, you're implying that the transform is one that can be learned by gradient descent. As a trivial counterexample, you can't train a model to detect valid (text, SHA) pairs.

This particular one doesn't seem to be a problem for your argument, but I still think your argument generally does not hold.


You can't train a model to detect arbitrary text to SHA, so yes, there are edge cases - this doesn't fully generalise. You can, however, trivially train a model to detect natural language to SHA. More specifically, for poisoning to work, the output needs to have qualities distinctly different in the poisoned or unpoisoned case, pretty much by definition, or we wouldn't notice the effect, and the reason the general case doesn't work for SHA is that you can feed in text that is likely statistically indistinguishable (you can feed SHA in as text) from the output, or "close enough".

This is why I pointed out that the only way poisoning has a chance of working other than over very short timelines is if the tools to do so remains private and inaccessible to the public.

It's a bit of a leap, but the halting problem can be generalized to:

It is impossible in the general case to produce a detector function f(x), that will decide if program x behaves according to rule y if x can include f(x) as part of the itself.

The reason is that if a program x can make use of the detector, it can effectively do if f(x) { do the opposite of what f(x) predicts}

The leap from that to poisoning might be a bit unintuitive, but it boils down to the poisoner having a mechanism that would alter model behaviour.

If you have access to that mechanism, you can produce a detector by using the mechanism to induce the unwanted behaviour, and train a model on that.

Once you have a detector, you can behave differently based on the signal from the detector, and by extension avoid the effects of the original mechanism.

And that is the core of the halting problem.


And even if it is provably possible to do, that doesn't mean it's easy. That's kind of the basis of encryption.


It doesn't need to be easy, but unlike with encryption it also doesn't need to be particularly precise. E.g. it's okay to exclude non-poisoned training data because you didn't manage to create a precise enough detector, as long as you don't exclude too much.

Basically any poisoning attack is also fundamentally limited because it needs to be non-invasive enough for humans not to be adversely affected, and that limits the problem space severely - the poisoning mechanism basically becomes reduced to a training mechanism to train out places where the models act different to humans.


This isn't my field, but I see a huge gap between what in the abstract they say it would be feasible for us and what we're currently capable of. I mean, we're able to send space probes around, but self-replicating space probes and Dyson spheres feel on another level. Am I the only one?


Life itself could arguably be a Von Neumann probe. It's so good at spreading that it's a problem, when we send probes to other bodies in our own solar system we often sanitize them because we worry life will hitch a ride and start colonizing.

Life on a planet is a lot like a continuous fire, fires often send out embers that start new fires elsewhere.

You send out little packets of life to new places, wait single-digit billions of years (a blink of an eye for the universe, really), boom: new intelligent species with potential to shoot more seeds out into the universe.


Do we have anything that self-replicates physically?

Software, sure. I know 3D printer folks will sometimes 3D print parts for new machines. But nothing that fully replicates itself, right? Especially autonomously.

Maybe we'll see what a moon base can bring us.


Basically all of life is self replicating, physically.


I guess the OP meant something that is more flatous for human vanity to feel like a demiurge when at most it would be a tool of cosmos in its experiment.


Yes, but this isn't what the paper is talking about.


Additionally, you also have to consider that a self-replicating space probe should be able to find, retrieve, and process the raw materials needed to build new probes on its own. A 3D printer can print some of its own parts, but with externally-provided material that it isn't able to produce on its own.


> what we're currently capable of.

What we're capable of != what we're doing / not doing because of political will. We are technically capable of reaching significant fractions of c with tech from the 1960s. We'll never do that because there's no will to do it, but the tech is there.

Same for self replicating stuff. We could build self-contained factories that build stuff from raw minerals, but we'll likely not do it until there's a will for it. Or need for it.


Political will is part of the Fermi paradox. So are technical reliability and cultural stability.

The idea that you can just build a thing and send out a swarm and (slow) boom - you've colonised the galaxy, and all the adjacent galaxies - is hopelessly naive. To the point I'd call it stupid and silly.

Let's say you have a replicator thing that works. You send them out in swarms.

And then what? Some die, some miss, some are destroyed by accidents.

Some work.

But "a replicator landed and made some more" is not colonisation. Colonisation implies there's some kind of to-and-fro traffic, maybe trade, some kind of information exchange at a minimum.

And that implies the source civilisation has political, technological, and cultural stability, which can survive an incredibly slow diaspora.

Colonisation worked on Earth because it didn't take long to cross the Atlantic by sailing ship. Successful colonisers landed where humans already existed and trade was easy.

It doesn't work on interstellar, never mind intergalactic time scales, because nothing stays stable for that long. Not hardware, software, politics, or culture.

Nor, on slightly longer periods, biology. On much longer periods, geology, and eventually astrophysics, because stars change, and planetary systems aren't unconditionally stable.

So a colonising wave from a unified culture is an incredibly unlikely thing, not at all an obvious necessity.


This would mean bootstrapping current advanced manufacturing technologies to a new planet. You would need so many different tools to do that that I seriously doubt we are currently capable of making it compact enough to be sent into deep space with current technologies. We're currently sending at most small capsules into deep space, my gut tells me that for self-contained factories we would need to send something in the size order of a skyscraper.


Yea, the paper discusses a probe with a mass between 50g and 500kg using a diamondoid data storage medium that holds ~6,250 exabytes per gram. Plenty of room for any blueprints you want to include, up to and including a planet full of humans. If not actually today’s tech, it is but a few years into the future. I’m sure my next computer will have a few hundred grams of that diamondoid storage.


Blueprints are the last of my concerns. What I think will be hard to do is to implement a full supply chain into a single space-travelling factory, including sourcing and refining of raw materials. But, regarding the blueprints, it now occurs to me that our "recipes" are made to work on our planet. Another one may lack some "ingredients" or have atmospheric conditions that could mess with the chemical reactions we use here. So we would need an advanced AI able to adapt production to the environment it finds.


Sourcing and refining materials are just blueprints. Adaptations for other environments are just different blueprints.

But honestly most of the work would be done in vacuum. Skip the planets, build the daughter probes out of asteroids. Most systems should have plenty of easily accessible material even if they don’t have a prominent asteroid belt, even if the probe has to scavenge the system’s oort cloud.


It would be interesting to hear back after this passes peer review.


They aren't targeting big companies for sure, but maybe a small or medium-sized office could make use of this.


I don't see it. Hobby projects can use a VPN tunnel to make a data center from local equipment. Real projects that choose colocation have uptime requirements that simply can't be met by random consumer hardware. The venn diagrams don't intersect.

There's no middle ground where you try to run a real business on old laptops. That's insane. You either keep things small/hobby and stay simple, or graduate to production-grade equipment once you have real requirements.

The middle ground, taking on production colocation problems plus the unreliability of random hardware, sounds like the worst of both worlds. There are both simpler and more robust options.


The problem with hosting locally is using residential internet.

In Australia, for example, we're capping out at 100Mbit/s upload speeds on plans that cost ~US$70/mo and regularly go down for maintenance.

In other countries with cheap symmetrical plans this may make more sense.


Initially I believe Google was known for getting unreliable hardware with good software to manage it (a single laptop probably won't cut it, but a bunch of laptops scattered around the globe could be interesting -- when you grow things fail all the time anyways).


They aren't targeting no one (and looks like they aren't at all).

Just do the math: for a measly €2000 a month, a salary of a cashier in Amsterdam, you already need to have 285 clients - and this is without taxes and revenue.


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