> and no, there's no manifesto decrying the system written from a cabin in the woods

Is a bit unjustified considering you've just written an entire blog post decrying your old "meaningless" existence vs the fulfilment you have in your new life. It comes across a bit holier than thou. As if to imply you're "quietly just getting on with it", which is evidently not the case, as you still feel the need to write about it

Standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were

It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.

These two are so above everyone else in the mathematical world that most people would struggle for weeks or even months to understand something they did in a couple of minutes.

There's no "get down and dirty" shortcut with them =)

However, what I'm saying is not mere nitpicking either. It is precisely because of my belief in Einstein's extraordinary abilities that I find it unconvincing that an LLM being able to recombine the extant written physics-related building blocks of 1900, with its practically infinite reading speed, necessarily demonstrates comparable capabilities to Einstein.

The essence of the question is this: would Einstein, having been granted eternal youth and a neverending source of data on physical phenomena, be able to innovate forever? Would an LLM?

My position is that even if an LLM is able to synthesise special relativity given 1900 knowledge, this doesn't necessarily mean that a positive answer to the first question implies a positive answer to the second.

This would absolutely be very good evidence that models can actually come up with novel, paradigm-shifting ideas. It was absolutely not obvious at that time from the existing facts, and some crazy leap of faiths needed to be taken.

This is especially true for General Relativity, for which you had just a few mismatch in the mesurements like Mercury's precession, and where the theory almost entirely follows from thought experiments.

However, you could also argue that it's actually empirical evidence that general relativity and 19th century physics wasn't truly a paradigm shift -- you could have 'derived' it from previous data -- that the LLM has actually proven something about structurally similarities between those paradigms, not that it's demonstrating general intelligence...

For instance spectroscopy enables one to look at the spectra emitted by another 'thing', perhaps the sun, and it turns out that there's little streaks within the spectra the correspond directly to various elements. This is how we're able to determine the elemental composition of things like the sun.

That connection between elements and the patterns in their spectra was discovered in the early 1800s. And those patterns are caused by quantum mechanical interactions and so it was perhaps one of the first big hints of quantum mechanics, yet it'd still be a century before we got to relativity, let alone quantum mechanics.

But the whole question is whether or not something can do that synthesis!

And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.

Even me, using a speech synthesizer at ~700 WPM.

If it's true of everything, then surely having an LLM work iteratively on the pieces, along with being provided additional physical data, will lead to the discovery of everything?

If the answer is "no", then surely something is still missing.

> And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.

I agree with this. This is a definitive advantage of LLMs.

Excellence at any given task is not indicative of intelligence. I think we set these sort of false goalposts because we want something that sounds achievable but is just out of reach at one moment in time. For instance at one time it was believed that a computer playing chess at the level of a human would be proof of intelligence. Of course it sounds naive now, but it was genuinely believed. It ultimately not being so is not us moving the goalposts, so much as us setting artificially low goalposts to begin with.

So for instance what we're speaking of here is logical processing across natural language, yet human intelligence predates natural language. It poses a bit of a logical problem to then define intelligence as the logical processing of natural language.

I'm sure, without any uncertainty, that any generalist model able to do what Einstein did would be AGI, as in, that model would be able to perform any cognitive task that an intelligent human being could complete in a reasonable amount of time (here "reasonable" depends on the task at hand; it could be minutes, hours, days, years, etc).

(1) - A major part of the challenge is in not being directed towards something. There was no external guidance for Einstein - he wasn't even a formal researcher at the time of his breakthroughs. An LLM might be able to be handheld towards relativity, though I doubt it, but given the prompt of 'hey find something revolutionary' it's obviously never going to respond with anything relevant, even with substantially greater precision specifying field/subtopic/etc.

(2) - Logical processing of natural language remains one small aspect of intelligence. For example - humanity invented natural language from nothing. The concept of an LLM doing this is a nonstarter since they're dependent upon token prediction, yet we're speaking of starting with 0 tokens.

(3) - LLMs are, in many ways, very much like calculators. They can indeed achieve some quite impressive feats in specific domains, yet then they will completely hallucinate nonsense on relatively trivial queries, particularly on topics where there isn't extensive data to drive their token prediction. I don't entirely understand your extreme optimism towards LLMs given this proclivity for hallucination. Their ability to produce compelling nonsense makes them particularly tedious for using to do anything you don't already effectively know the answer to.

Simply because I don't see hallucinations as a permanent problem. I see that models keep improving more and more in this regard, and I don't see why the hallucination rate can't be abirtrarily reduced with further improvements to the architecture. When I ask Claude about obscure topics, it correctly replies "I don't know", where past models would have hallucinated an answer. When I use GPT 5.2-thinking for my ML research job, I pretty much never encounter hallucinations.

THat's not how science works.

The LLM would have to propose experiments (which would have to be simulated), and then develop its theories from that.

Maybe there had been enough facts around to suggest a number of hypotheses, but the LLM in its curent form won't be able to confirm them.

I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.

It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.

Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years.

Einstein was smart and put several disjointed things together. It's amazing that one person could do so much, from explaining the Brownian motion to explaining the photoeffect.

But I think that all these would have happened within _years_ anyway.

Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there?

I personally doubt that this would work. I don't think these systems can achieve truly ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting work. The homeworld of these systems is the corpus of text on which it was trained, in the same way as ours is physical reality. Their access to this reality is always secondary, already distorted by the imperfections of human knowledge.

1. Not all of the arrests have been made at a "funeral" 2. It wasn't a funeral 3. If you're going to have a very public precession, parading a body through the streets with all the obedients lapping it up, surely you have to have a level of tolerance for dissenting voices? I imagine the disruption this event caused on Edinburgh was pretty large...

There's wall to wall coverage of this event happening worldwide right now, we need room for the dissenting voices too. Otherwise it's just outright sycophancy

What exactly is an "obedient"? Are you really deploying a disparaging tag on people who are mourning? That seems a bit crass to me.

"we need room for the dissenting voices too" - I saw on C4 (UK TV channel) this evening, some people in Scotland describing their disaffection with the Monarchy. That's fine and quite right.

I also find the sheer amount of coverage a bit overwhelming but in the end no one knows what is appropriate - it's not happened before like this - and let's face it, if you were running a TV channel or radio or whatever, you would probably err on the side of caution too unless you were decidedly commercially stupid!

No one really knows what is appropriate. A lot of the ceremonies are only now being televised.

I have to say that, whilst the sheer bulk of 'er Maj programmes is starting to feel a little excessive, I understand why. Some of them are pretty good too.

We will pop out of the other side of this event and the world will continue to turn but we must remember that a King and his bros and moes (sorry!) and their kids and grandkids and great-grandkids have lost a pretty decent human. As have we all.

They are an odd lot and they are our odd lot. If it helps, I understand that they are a net gain financially via tourism alone. Not sure how that is costed but I suspect it is probably true.

It's fine to imply you prefer a republic instead or perhaps something else but why not be positive about your preferred solution instead of sniping at the current situation.

What exactly do you want?

Scotland in particular has a long running loathing of the monarchy, so any superheated response is not remotely surprising.

Yeah, its a crass term I will agree with you there. The public has come out in droves to support the royal family and respect the ongoing proceedings and a small number have vocally voiced their opposition to the situation and are being condemned for doing so. So, I used this charged term rather cheaply to paint with broad strokes the kind of person I imagine to lap up this unique moment.

> I saw on C4 (UK TV channel) this evening, some people in Scotland describing their disaffection with the Monarchy. That's fine and quite right.

Here I also agree with you that its nice to hear that C4 was airing voices of people with dissenting perspectives, but I don't necessarily think it should be confined to the TV or the internet as the "appropriate place" to air such views. I think going out and publicly protesting it is much more impactful

> What exactly do you want?

For people to realise that this isn't just a private occasion for immediate family to pay their respects to the recently departed. That the Royal family, for better or worse, has and continues to play a significant role in the ongoing story of this country and in having such a prominent and public position should be tolerant (even understanding?) of those who oppose, rather than to have it simply be quashed and scrubbed away

I'm not too sure yet what on earth is going on here. It is unprecedented and I think the media are quite scarred by what happened when Diana died and the subsequent events. I remember those days quite well.

I think that we are still learning how to grieve as a nation. I lost my mum 25 odd years back (about a year after Diana passed away) and have buried quite a lot of family since and come to terms with some of the seamier sides of life. It is the way of things but I don't think that Britain, let alone any other country has worked out how to deal with death properly.

It sometimes looks quite bizarre but I think that the UK has the basics laid for a pretty good mechanism for dealing with grief. It will work itself out somehow.

That said, I understand that not everyone is a fan of the royals and would prefer a republic. For now, why not recognise a loss of a person who has been here for 90+ years and tomorrow we'll debate the future.

Anyone obsequious enough to happily sing "God Save the Queen\King" and tolerate being ruled by elitists assholes called Royalty in 2022

If that "pretty decent human" saw you were on fire, she wouldn't have deigned to put you out with her piss, and neither would any of her "odd lot." She wasn't your doddering, sweet old grandma, she was literally draped in blood-jewels stolen from two subjugated and enslaved continents.

Well... that's what the monarchy practice is all about. God-like status for some god-forsaken reason. Blind sycophancy.

Surely we should resist our less productive qualities, like sycophancy. Not try to channel it to some "worthy cause".

I don’t see how your view isn’t personally exhausting. And I don’t see what’s so bad about trying to channel our less productive qualities to better ends than letting them run wild and wishing they didn’t exist.

And if we must channel some unavoidable desires then must it be to adore people who won life's lottery? (Or must we heap praise upon someone who appears to have done little to move the needle forward?)

Solving this problem requires solving coordination problems. Solving coordination problems requires creating a sense of community where people are motivated to act beyond their self interest. Collective motivation at that level requires symbolism and ceremony tapping into the deepest familial affections of the human heart.

The royal family will beat you at that game. You might choose to play a different one.

Citation needed.

> The royal family will beat you at that game. You might choose to play a different one.

Monarchs are born into unearned power, wealth, and privilege. They are the last people I'd consider successful at coordinating humanity for the better. Great Britain's own history is drenched in enough innocent blood. Whatever gains originated there appear largely attributable to luck and or non-royal endeavors.

Others will do otherwise.

You might kick one demon out of the house and get seven in return.

I agree with you on the monarchy, and I'm an atheist as well, and I still can't help but read your comment as divisive and distracting from your earlier argument for a sarcastic barb at the bible.

You haven't even argued against the metaphor at all, you've only stated you think the bible is illogical. For what it's worth there are secular equivalents of this sort of risk analysis metaphor; the bird in the hand, a stitch in time, one today is worth two tomorrows, etc.

How?

> Might as well channel all those destructive qualities into adoring and obeying those born into wealth and prestige.

We've more or less gotten rid of royalty, and now we have celebrities shamelessly shilling just about anything - what an improvement! I would prefer neither, but I don't think that's ever going to happen without people being forced to take responsibility for themselves.

To be fair, when you consider that the Queen lived for 96 years and there hasn't been an event like this since 1953, the cost spread out over that much time really isn't that much.

Long live the King!! (to keep costs down)

Did you miss the whole Platinum Jubilee celebration two months ago for the Queen? [1] The scope of that was also over the top and costs 10's of millions of pounds. There was also the Saphire Jubilee 5 years ago, the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Golden Jubilee in 2002, there's at least a few others as well.

What are the Crown Estate assets worth? How many billions? And the public are not only expected to foot the bill for this over the top pageantry but they are supposed to do so with unwavering fealty? And at a time when the average person is worried about skyrocketing inflation and energy costs?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_Jubilee_of_Elizabeth_...

See: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sovereign-grant-a...

"In exchange for this public support, The Queen surrenders the revenue from The Crown Estate to the government. Over the last ten years, the revenue paid to the Exchequer is £3 billion for public spending."

Basically by allowing the monarchy a fund to be used to carry out their public (and private) duties, the surplus of royal holdings revenue goes into public spending. I don't know the exact numbers but the situation is a LOT more complex than "the taxpayer pays for the monarchs, reeee".

See: https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-57559653

and

Here are some of the key figures from the royal accounts for 2020-2021:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-29/how-much-...

The RF owns the Crown Estate. Of this estate the UK government sits on/uses part of that estate. Therefore they're essentially paying "rent" for what they're using.

However it used to be that the RF received all of the income from the Crown Estate. The SG was an agreement that they would forgo taking all of the income and only a portion of it; the rest goes to public spending.

Hell, they even had to invoke a provision to make up the amount should it fall: "A decrease in the Crown Estate's rental income during the COVID-19 pandemic led to the first use of the provision that prevents the value of the Sovereign Grant from falling, with the Treasury committing to make up the shortfall.".

It's a weird system for sure. The treasury pays out rent for all Royal Holdings that are being used by the goverment/public. Then 15%~ of that rent (plus income from other parts of the holdings) is available to the RF as a part of the SG. The rest goes back to the public.

There is a valid point made that security isn't included in these costs/returns, though. But at the end of the day, it's because the RF owns huge swathes of land and businesses, etc that they are paid. Sure they could be stripped of them but that sets a precedent.

This isn't a private funeral. Hell it's not even a funeral, it's a procession and a tax payer funded public event as well. I can _maybe_ get asking the person with the "fuck imperialism" sign to not use a sign with "fuck" on it (Don't mind myself but I know plenty of old folk will) but there's absolutely nothing wrong with someone declaring "Not my King".

On the plus side we now have viral examples of how Tory policies have in fact stepped on freedom of speech, contrary to their claims.

Thanks to the Internet, there is ample room for all kinds of voices.

This point is being made all over the thread and seems disingenuous. The extremely public memorial service for the reigning monarch is a deeply political event. If this was some private service being protested, even if it was the royal family, the point would stand. But this is not that. Not only is the transfer of power to the heir at the moment of death a huge part of the monarchy by design, the memorial service itself is used to affirm that same system in an extremely public and official way. If people can't protest that because it's a "memorial service" then when can they protest the monarchy? I'm sure protesting it when the queen was ill would also be in poor taste. And apparently protesting the new king right now as he is being declared king is also not possible. What's left?

If they want to avoid making a change, they use this to put us off. The objections seem so plausible. But I’ve learned to use it to gauge when they have no intention of ever listening to us.

Very similar to your monarchy in many respects.

A large portion of the life of the royal family is public, even funded by the taxpayer, so to me it makes sense to allow for opposing viewpoints to be heard. Perhaps you can argue that a memorial service isn't the most appropriate time (though, I don't really subscribe to this viewpoint given just how much this memorial is rammed down our throats) to protest, I do think its where its likely to generate the most coverage. There is never going to be a more appropriate time to get people to listen

Edit: Just to clarify the point further - Not all of the arrests being discussed were made in Edinburgh (where the procession took place). Its debatable how much impact a person holding a blank sign in Oxford has on the events in Edinburgh (though I would wager its infinitesimally small). Equally, holding a sign with a swearword on it doesn't really "disrupt" in any meaningful sense either. A lot of people defend the police action on the grounds that it "may" have lead to violence via provocation and the person was arrested for "their own safety", but in that case why follow through with the charge? Rather than "de-arresting" (whatever that means) afterwards

To respond only to your financial arguments: there are different ways of looking at the costs and benefits of the UK royals.

Firstly, taxation:

“the monarchy cost the taxpayer £102.4m”. Last tax year HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) “collected £716.0 billion in taxes”[0].

Let’s assume the “cost of living crisis” affects 10 million people. £100 million given to them would mean an extra 10 quid per person per annum. A worthwhile difference, but hardly solving the problem. There’s way more pounds of flesh or fat to cut elsewhere in the budget.

Secondly: costs and waste are easy to see, but gains are often not seen. Does the UK earn more from the royals than the royals cost?

“[The royals] contributed an estimated $2.7 billion annually to the U.K. economy prepandemic. The impact the royal family has on the U.K. economy is mostly through tourism, but Haigh notes there are other financial benefits, such as free media coverage of Britain (which was an estimated $400 million in 2017). There are also many valuable royal warrants granted by the monarch—essentially a stamp of approval on high-end consumer products like Barbour jackets and Johnnie Walker whisky. [snip] The economic advantages for companies and institutions in the royal family’s orbit far exceed the $550 million cost associated with the family’s massive operating expenses, according to Haigh.”[-1].

Of course, there are non-monetary costs and gains of the monarchy that are much harder to value.

Pure ownership in dollars “How The Royal Family’s $28 Billion Money Machine Really Works”[-1³] can be compared against the wealth of other dynastic wealth families. It doesn’t make the top 10 in the world[π]. And probably not #1 in the UK[§] with the first royal family showing at #12 (although there are non-$ benefits such as status of being royalty, and non-$ costs/risks).

Even in New Zealand we are all paying a few dollars a year for costs related to the monarchy[1].

[-1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielshapiro/2021/03/10/inside-...

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmrc-tax-and-nics-r...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_New_Zealand

[π] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052416/top-10...

[§] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/sunday-times-rich-list

Edits: added details.

But the reason I did so was to underline the point that the public have a right to attend, whatever their point of view, since its likely that a % of the cost for the proceedings will fall on the taxpayer

I merely did some googling because I was sceptical! Disclaimer: I am not a royal apologist: born and live in the “colonies”, and I am not a fan of the remaining encumbrances that New Zealand has with any royalty.

Take a look at "the official web site of the British Royal Family. Written and managed by the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace, the site aims to provide an authoritative resource of information about the Monarchy and Royal Family, past and present." [1]

That website has a webpage devoted to the "Royal Finances" [2] that says, "There are three sources of funding for The Queen, or officials of the Royal Household acting on Her Majesty’s behalf, in both a public and private capacity. These are: the Sovereign Grant, the Privy Purse and The Queen’s personal wealth and income."

"The Sovereign Grant: This is the amount of money provided by Government to the Royal Household in support of The Queen’s official duties, including the maintenance of the Occupied Royal Palaces: Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, Clarence House, Marlborough House Mews, the residential and office areas of Kensington Palace, Windsor Castle and the buildings in the Home and Great Parks at Windsor, and Hampton Court Mews and Paddocks."

[1] https://www.royal.uk/about-site

[2] https://www.royal.uk/royal-finances-0

Ultimately the origins of most property is tied up in violence, not just that of the royal family.

In the sense that that arrangement could be reversed without massive upcry, a constitutional crisis, and the dissolution of the monarchy? Not realistically. The government has de facto control of the Estate, and the monarchy receives a de facto taxpayer-funded income (plus their private ownership through other property.)

https://britishheritage.com/royals/royal-family-cost-british...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57559653

I agree with other comments here that your "revolutionary" music IDE gets spammed into every discussion related to music - but the actual website you link to doesn't really give any hint as to what it really is either, just a bunch of vague sounding marketing friendly hype words.

I hope what you make truly is revolutionary & unique and I will take a look at it when it launches out of curiosity (so your relentlessness in plugging it has, it would seem, worked). But please can you explain how it is relevant to the article / discussion here?

I don't know why (maybe just years of the same pattern repeating with these types of articles) but as soon as I read the word "stormly" in the URL, despite having never heard about it before, I knew this would basically be a pitch for some other junk

So what is it then? Brazil does make interesting points about encroaching bureaucracy (and therefore the parents post is justified)? I think you took the point about Brazil a bit too literally, the poster was never suggesting that the world is suddenly exactly that way, more highlighting the parallels. I think you need to allow yourself to suspend disbelief a little more and realise the very deliberate allegorical nature of these movies...

I mean, judging by the greyed out appearance of all your posts on this topic I would say it seems you're in the minority with this kind of opinion.

No one is saying its a 1:1 guide to reality, but as a nightmare vision of a dystopia gripped by unnecessary administrative apparatus, silly or not, it is a work of fiction that takes its root from reality and then makes a farce of it.

There are reasons works like kafkaesque, orwellian, ballardian become part of the lexicon despite all dealing with fictional universes of their own making...

Have you seen the Jerk? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jerk

Its absolute nonsense to shoot someone down on the basis that they draw parallels to movies or other artforms. Especially if those works of fiction are intended as warnings / cautionary tales.

As it is i thought the parent comments comparison to Brazil was fairly apt in this situation...

Now I see the movie has been implemented into life almost precisely and the AI with mass surveillance has been introduced to make it even worse.

To make it more fun and looking realistic today they even portrayed people kinda watching Netflix on their office computers when the boss doesn't look (AFAIK computers were not actually capable of streaming videos over the network during the days the movie was filmed).