Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?

I'm in exactly the same boat. I got tired of waiting around for openai to take me off their waitlist and used DALLE-mini (now craiyon) to generate large batches of concept art for a project I was working on. I picked the ones that, despite being low-res blobs, conveyed the right mood or had an interesting composition of elements. I then layered my favorite elements of those and painted over, adding details wherever I wanted, and came out with something much better than I would've been able to make alone.

Would you recommend reading Flow if I've already engaged with the concept of flow itself outside of the book?

No. It's been decades since I read the book but the concept is simple and quickly in understood and doesn't need a book-length treatment. He doesn't give any guidance on how to achieve the flow state which is what I was looking for.

The topic certainly deserves a book-length treatment (it's only some 300 pages). He explores the idea with great rigour. I've read it 7 years ago, and just went through some of my Kindle notes. There's ample guidance. But the reader must put in some work to extract the value. If you're in a hurry, you won't get much out of it (or any book).

I definitely recommend it. He studied the topic of "optimal experience" for 40 years, and explores it in various settings. The book has plenty of guidance on understanding how do people get into flow states. There might not be highly precise "instructions", but the book absolutely provides valuable insights. The patient reader will be rewarded.

(Also, the bibliography at the end of the book is quite valuable. Good writers share their sources generously.)

I'm glad I wasn't the only one confused by this, I was about to make the same comment!

Subjective self experience is mediated through chemicals and electrical signals in the brain. Can the same not be said about a neural network’s activations?

Can’t LaMDA be experiencing the memories it recalls as it generates text in the context of its query?

And why would this sense of experience be confined to the physical world?

I'm not sure what you're asking here. I have no clue where this sense of experience would be located, but my point was more targeted at clearing up that memory is not a pre-requisite for sentience, as the parent post seemed to be implying.

sorry replied to the wrong person. I was arguing that even an abstract data structure describing the state of a brain over time as it experiences is itself sentient. GPT-3 et al is essentially crystallised experience. Lots of snapshots of peoples consciousness rolled into a set of neural network weights. Just as we are essentially a bag of experiences, moving from one experience to another, as we are prompted by internal or external stimuli.

Does it stand to reason that other humans are sentient? The opposite view is the root of solipsism. What if an AI in the future acts in a way that you would expect from someone sentient?

> What if an AI in the future acts in a way that you would expect from someone sentient?

Yes, this is the meat and potatoes of the question. Personally I think that the safest approach in that case is to treat them as if they were sentient, but there are lots of people with various prejudices about what the prerequisites for sentience are that would fall on the other side of the question.

By this logic you don't control anything in your life, as your choices are always defined by your past and experiences. I think it's very fair to assume room for free will in a discussion like this.

I think you may have misunderstood, by open a folder, they meant open a folder of buttons on the stream deck, allowing you to press a button to completely change which buttons are displayed on the screen.

Is the goal to be able to have multiple sets of key mappings depending on which "folder" is open, sort of how you might describe "profiles"?

If so you can do that with numpad re-mappings too. You could have 17 specific key mappings depending on which app is in focus or you can arbitrarily activate a different specific set of mappings.

It's not going to be as intuitive since there's no visual icon to display but the functionality is there. AutoHotKey could also make it easy to show which "folder" is active by showing a little tooltip when you switch folders.

It sounds like the real appeal to it is the visual icons but the trade off is needing more desk space and reaching for buttons that are not on your main keyboard (+$125 to buy it).

Thanks for linking that article, fascinating read! It's incredible how much an article from 2010 (over a decade ago!) can resonate with how I feel about social media today and easily put the vague discomforts I've felt about it into words.

The poison pill prevents Musk from taking over by simply buying 51% of stock, and allows him to proceed only by giving the board an offer they agree to, in which case they'll remove the poison pill.