Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@VeeRat They're trying to make converts because it validates their own use of the tools, which they feel insecure about. It's a quasi-religious evangelical impulse.

@gregeganSF *All* procedures that involve needles can be painful if they hit a pain nerve on the way in—but they're very much better at avoiding other causes of pain these days.

(Must admit that I'm not looking forward to be stabbed in the eye in (checks calendar) 15 days, even though I already had it done to the other eye and was painless-at-the-time (sore cornea afterwards).)

@krnlg @solitha Therac-25[1] predated most of the problems: the problem is that Therac-25 isn't universally taught in CS classes!

[1] the accidents happened from 1985, but the Therac-25 dates to 1975 and the software was written by one dude using PDP-11 assembler who may well not have understood race conditions.

@krnlg @solitha You seem to have forgotten that actual mature engineering disciplines have codes of conduct, oversight bodies, and ethics exams. A lot of what passes for engineering in silicon valley, though, ignores all that. Software engineering in particular simply isn't a serious discipline yet.

@krnlg @solitha That's not science: that's applied engineering. Different thing entirely.

@elduvelle Because back in 1997 I started writing a story that ended up as the opening of "Accelerando" which began by exploring *exactly* this sort of process and asking questions about what it would lead to.

I've been waiting for reality to catch up with my imagination for a third of a century, and I'm not happy.

@solitha @mwl If you want to keep up with the sciences in future you're going to have to get used to Indian English, or even learn Mandarin.

@zimzat You haven't read "Saturn's Children", have you? (Hint: I wrote it in 2007; it made the Hugo shortlist for best novel.)

@BoydStephenSmithJr If that's TV or film, I can't cope with TV or film. (Fucked eyeballs *and* a dose of what is probably AuDHD that means I don't have the attention span, either.)

@cyberlyra To be fair, that's where the billionaire game is *today*. Musk got into it around 2003 out of sheer spite because he tried to get Roscosmos to sell him a satellite launch slot (for sheer ego gratification) and they told him to fuck off. Ever since then he's been ad-libbing it on ever increasing doses of ketamine and transhumanism.

@rootwyrm I predict that you're going to love my next novel (the one my agent's looking at right now—a few months late due to writing with cataracts).

@Antiqueight Naah, the ice crystals forming in your synapses would mush them into un-digitizable soup.

@CGM Already noted!

@raymaccarthy Yes on the blood-replacement, which implies—awkwardly, for the human uploading fans—that doing this to a human would lay the experimenters open to murder charges.

@future_upbeat

I absolutely agree.

At best, what current LLMs are is evidence that linguistic processing follows statistically modelable rules.

@mwl Also very cool, the Indian sci/tech news website that ran that feature! (From the writing style I initially thought it might be AI slop, but no: Indian English is just a bit different.)

@robcornelius The Lobster stomatogastric ganglion sim happened in the 1990s. That's where I got the idea for "Lobsters" (written 1997/98) from.

But I'm REALLY HAPPY right now because this kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month (which involves serial reincarnation via destructive brain-slicing-and-imaging then imprinting onto an immature cortex, and then explores its disastrous societal failure modes).

... And it also hints that artificial consciousness might, eventually, be possible, if only via the hard path of doing it the same way we do it, only in simulation in silico.

/6 (ends)

... The next step on from Drosophila, the mouse brain, is 560 times larger—never mind a vastly more complex human brain. And to get the murine connectome we'll have to chop up *a lot* of brains: a human upload won't pass any kind of medical ethics review at this point!

But near-term, it's expected to yield "fundamentally new architectural principles for AI systems that are more sample-efficient, more robust, and more capable of behavioral generalization than current approaches"

/5

There is stuff missing, of course (alt text for screencap contains about 3 toots' worth of text explaining this): information about how the motor neurons connect to physical features of the body like the muscles, information on morphologically divergent neurons and fine detail on dendritic branching and synaptic inputs across dendritic compartments:

/4