That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the wheels of bureaucracy greased.
This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.
There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.
When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.
In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.
The US elected government has no control over the unelected civil servants as congress over the past 150 years did everything they could to prevent the spoils system.
Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices.
The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.
I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.
Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.
I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That’s the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian “regimes” are constantly under threat of removal.
This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition have high public support, because they couldn't function at all if even a relatively small proportion of society went against them. The people who want to overthrow them are either out of the country or insignificant. Dictatorship is impossible without populism.
This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.
Any government that lacks public support collapses.
Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.
Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.
> The neurons serve as a biological filter: the training system translates screen pixels and ray-cast distances into electrical zaps, the living cells fire spikes, and those counts feed straight into a PyTorch decoder that maps them to Doom actions. The PPO agent, CNN encoder and entire reward loop run on ordinary silicon elsewhere. Cole’s ablation modes make the split testable, set decoder output to random or zero and the game still plays. The CL1 hardware interface works exactly as advertised. What remains unproven is whether 200,000 human neurons can ever carry the policy instead of just riding along.
Yeah… That’s quite the smoking gun.
So it’s quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn a half-decent policy for playing the game.
If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game inputs directly.
Besides, they are not streaming the video into the neurons at all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it’s barely more than pong isn’t it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is essentially that…
While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO or neurons.
EDIT: It seems like the readme does address these concerns, and the described setup differs significantly from the description in the critical blogpost. Still not entirely convincing to me, a lot of weights being trained in silicon around the neurons, but it sounds better. I don’t have time right now to look deeper into it. They outline some interesting details though.
No, this is precisely why there are ablations. The footage you see in the video was taken using a 0-bias full linear readout decoder, meaning that the action selected is a linear function of the output spikes from the CL1; the CL1 is doing the learning. There is a noticeable difference when using the ablation (both random and 0 spikes result in zero learning) versus actual CL1 spikes.
Isn't the encoder/PPO doing all the learning?
This question largely assumes that the cells are static, which is incorrect; it is not a memory-less feed X in get Y machine. Both the policy and the cells are dynamical systems; biological neurons have an internal state (membrane potential, synaptic weights, adaptation currents). The same stimulation delivered at different points in training will produce different spike patterns, because the neurons have been conditioned by prior feedback. During testing, we froze encoder weights and still observed improvements in the reward.
How is DOOM converted to electrical signals?
We train an encoder in our PPO policy that dictates the stimulation pattern (frequency, amplitude, pulses, and even which channels to stimulate). Because the CL1 spikes are non-differentiable, the encoder is trained through PPO policy gradients using the log-likelihood trick (REINFORCE-style), i.e., by including the encoder’s sampled stimulation log-probs in the PPO objective rather than backpropagating through spikes.
I believe you are looking at GPT 5.4 Pro. It's confusing in the context of subscription plan names, Gemini naming and such. But they've had the Pro version of the GPT 5 models (and I believe o3 and o1 too) for a while.
It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.
Not sure what it is exactly, I assume it's probably the non-quantized version of the model or something like that.
>It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.
The performance improvement isn't marginal if you're doing something particularly novel/difficult.
From what I've read online it's not necessarily a unquantized version, it seems to go through longer reasoning traces and runs multiple reasoning traces at once. Probably overkill for most tasks.
Not at all, one of the key features of that design system was that the boxes had no borders, and they were differentiated by their flat background fill color instead. There's borders galore here.
There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports.
There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take.
Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.
It'd be interested in seeing how exactly the lawyers figured out how to define AGI. It must be a fairly mundane set of KPIs that they just arbitrarily call AGI, the term will probably devalue significantly in the coming years.
The actual quote is this though:
> hitting an AGI milestone or pursuing an IPO
So it seems softer than actually achieving AGI or finalising an IPO.
I did upvote, it's witty, but it's a bit of a misrepresentation of how the economy works.
In practice, people don't tend to pay people to eat shit without gain. You are paying people to help you. Money gaslights everyone into helping each other, the most selfish people become the most selfless.
Of course, real capitalism is much more complex and much uglier than this fantasy. When certain people end up with long-term control of large piles of money, the whole thing gets distorted. They get to make lots of money on interest without doing anything, and making other people eat more shit for scraps. That's the "capital" part of capitalism.
But the toy world-model that this joke is making fun of, is actually the one core positive aspect of capitalism and brings all the prosperity we have: tricking people into helping each other.
I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution.
The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.
Well, considering that Galileo basically called Pope a fool, and the punishment he received was home arrest, this affair is not really the best evidence of Church prejudice, backwardness and cruelty.
And if we agree with Feyerabend, Galileo of today would probably has as much difficulty as the original one, for the initial evidence he provided wasn't strong enough to discard knowledge of that time.
> The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale
Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.
> There are always exceptions like Galileo
The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.
Just to correct my wording. I mean "persecution" not "opposition". there was plenty of opposition and people were arguing for multiple alternatives to the Ptolemaic model at the time.
Comapring the assassination of a president by a pro-slaver to a scholarly and political dispute that ended up with house arrest in a villa, where he wrote and published his most important work, is a bit wild. The Church has done much, much worse things than the dispute with Galileo.
Is it? I understood it to teach "behaviour" orthogonal to slavery, meaning you treat your fellow the same regardless if the heathen see him as a slave or as the emperor.
While the GP was making a complete non-sequitur, they were right about this. The Old Testament / the Hebrew Bible in particular sets down clear rules for how specifically slavery should be practiced, so that part is undeniable. It's also undeniable that slavery was a common practice both in Palestine and in the Roman Empire more broadly both long before and long after Jesus' lifetime, among Jewish people as well as Christians. To what extent the New Testament actually overrides the laws of the Old Testament is very contradictory, even in the text itself, but it certainly doesn't say anywhere to any extent that you must not own slaves (well, except the part where Jesus tells a follower to give up all worldly possessions, sell all of their holdings and donate them to charity, which would clearly include any slaves as well - but no one follows this part of the teachings anyway).
While I agree that the various versions of the Bible people are using have many immoral teachings, including slavery, what does that have to do with whether Galileo's trial is a damning example of anti-science work in the Catholic Church?
Quite a special scifi novel that starts like this. Quite grounded at the beginning, but it then evolves into body horror and later becomes quite abstract.
I always preferred Vitals... at some point after Blood Music, it must have occurred to him that if the cells could be programmed to be individually intelligent, then evolution might have already done that. The idea shows up again in Darwin's Radio.
This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.
There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.
When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.
In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.
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