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causal 14 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
dullcrisp 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah I don’t think it’s clear if the connectome is modeling real fruit fly behavior or is just being used as an entropy generator.
londons_explore 6 hours ago [-]
If the connectome could be wired to individual muscles, and then demonstrate the ability to walk and fly that would be amazing
ramraj07 13 hours ago [-]
I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
squibonpig 13 hours ago [-]
Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.
melagonster 10 hours ago [-]
We only know which neurons are connected, not the weights.
solid_fuel 9 hours ago [-]
More than that, real neurons don’t behave anything like the ones we model in neural networks - real ones signal with pulses, in a manner where the timing seems as significant as the magnitude of the impulse. Typically simulated neural networks use continuous analog values instead of pulses and a sigmoid function to shape the output.
Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is.
- - -
Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology.
I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.
jeffybefffy519 4 hours ago [-]
Isnt there also a theory and some evidence that the connectome is not enough to model a brain. Based on the fact that butterlies connectome dissolves during metamorphosis to butterfly but it still remembers things from before that stage of life.
inigyou 41 minutes ago [-]
Butterflies dissolving is an urban legend. They don't dissolve. Caterpillars have wing stubs inside them.
Someone probably cut open a chrysalis and saw goop come out, so they assumed it was just a bag of goop. But goop would also come out of a cut open caterpillar, or a cut open butterfly, or a cut open human.
melagonster 53 minutes ago [-]
We also have the connectome of Nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans), but researchers lack funding to determine the weights, too.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
That says the butterflies have a back up mechanism, it doesn't say that connectomes are insufficient for modelling running neural processes.
We don't actually know what is sufficient for modelling neural processes until we do it. But we can't really do that until we figure out how to read all the connection strengths.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
No, the nervous system is one of those things that don't fully dissolve. Partial info retention is perfectly consistent with partial connectome retention.
idiotsecant 9 hours ago [-]
I feel like probably a graph of sigmoid or whatever weights of sufficient size can probably model a network of biological neurons signaling frequency and phase and magnitude.
loa_in_ 9 hours ago [-]
It won't be confirmed until we record all the stimuli and outputs of a fruit fly's nervous system in normal environment.
13 hours ago [-]
andbberger 7 hours ago [-]
cursor input get scripted into loom input to the LC4s which are evidently simulated faithfully enough to drive giant fibers, which is actually how fly escape behavior works. what more could you want
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031
DaiPlusPlus 14 hours ago [-]
I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:
Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
jephs 13 hours ago [-]
If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, fuck no, we murdered so many of those guys to figure out how their tiny brains work.
If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?
yawpitch 8 hours ago [-]
If your circle of empathy doesn’t include fruit flies, endeavor to expand your circular of empathy until it does.
Goto 0.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, shrink and prune until it no longer does.
ludvigk 44 minutes ago [-]
How small should my circle of empathy be? Obviously humans are included, or ...?
inigyou 40 minutes ago [-]
Only shareholder bank accounts and your own.
ivell 7 hours ago [-]
With this code, the only things we can eat would be fruits where we diligently plant its seeds (plants are also living things and fruits are the offerings in return we should sow its seeds) :-)
yawpitch 6 hours ago [-]
Ever met a Jain?
ivell 3 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, Jains consume diary products.
yawpitch 1 hours ago [-]
You tell me where the consumption of dairy products must result in harm to the cow. I grew up around small-scale, subsistence-level dairy farming, it doesn’t inherently require any more suffering than either egg-harvesting or apple-growing inherently do.
A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer.
And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid onions and carrots because it causes death.
marliechiller 51 minutes ago [-]
1. Artificial insemination without consent
2. Birth and all of its pain and potential complications
3. Removal of offspring as early as possible to repeat steps 1 and 2 and so prolong lactation
4. Mastitis
All of these result in suffering much worse than egg harvesting imo. Reluctant dairy eater btw
ivell 1 hours ago [-]
If we are really into an ethics discussion, enslaving a species to drink milk meant for their newborns would be an issue.
sgt 7 hours ago [-]
Are you seriously suggesting that we should have empathy for ... fruit flies? Speechless
invalidusernam3 5 hours ago [-]
Why would you choose not to have empathy for a living creature?
shaky-carrousel 5 hours ago [-]
Because lice are also living creatures. And I have no empathy for them, and hopefully never will.
marliechiller 48 minutes ago [-]
Lice have no choice in their lot in the universe. Do you think if they had intelligence the ability to choose their lot that they would choose their current one again? I doubt it personally. You can detest their mode of existence whilst still having empathy for them I think
inigyou 39 minutes ago [-]
Counterexample: Humans are lice to the ecosystem of Earth, and we choose to be that way.
yawpitch 1 hours ago [-]
I do, and I hopefully will eventually get to leeches too.
agilemonkey 6 hours ago [-]
Why not ? Do you think that in the grand scheme of the universe you are more important than a fruit fly ?
sgt 6 hours ago [-]
I'd hope so! The way that a planet is more important than a snowball.
yawpitch 6 hours ago [-]
Depends a great deal on the planet and the snowball, doesn’t it?
But, that said, a mark of being more important than a lesser being would kind of be the virtue of still empathizing with that being, even if we assume there’s a hierarchy.
And considering you and I are really just elaborate transport vessels for E. Coli and a lot of fungal spores, I’m not sure we should assume there’s a hierarchy.
firtoz 6 hours ago [-]
Why?
yawpitch 6 hours ago [-]
Self-improvement, for one.
dsign 1 hours ago [-]
> if this software is ethical?
IMO, it absolutely is.
First, if fruit flies could suffer existential anguish the same way humans do, they would breathe in relief that digital upload is in sight.
Second, even if the fruit flies don't care, a lot of (awful) humans would love a resolution to the matter of souls in a way that results in a raised middle finger to a forever-hypothetical Creator, and if we can't yet escape cancer, heart disease, parkinson and all the other awfuls, now at least the fruit flies are on their way out. Which rejoices said (truly awful!) humans, which will take what they can :-)
janalsncm 13 hours ago [-]
> Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.
So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.
_def 13 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?
Virtue ethics, Deontology and Consequentialism are the "big three".
A very TLDR version is:
- Virtue ethics: instead of judging actions as good and bad, you should strive to become a good person (as defined by some specific set of virtues, like kindness, honesty, etc).
- Deontology: actions should be judged by a set of some fixed moral rules, for example "lying is always bad", even if you had good intentions.
- Consequentialism: actions should be judged by their consequences, for example by how much total happiness they create (utilitarianism). Doing something bad if it would make life of many people better is ethical, because the created happiness is more than the created harm.
In reality of course there are many other branches of them and the distinction is often not as obvious, and your personal views are probably somewhere in between. https://plato.stanford.edu is an amazing resource if you want more in depth explanation of philosophical theories.
jasonjayr 13 hours ago [-]
Not to drop any spoilers (hide this comment before reading further ....)
But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.
SamBam 11 hours ago [-]
Similarly, the story Lena by qntm.[1]
It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.
and both Black Mirror and Westworld explore these same ‘what-if’s’ in turn.
jamilton 10 hours ago [-]
It really does not "explore" the concept, it just features it as a plot element.
viccis 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.
vincnetas 8 hours ago [-]
Is ethics another tool in a power play game (religion being another) that people use to exert dominance over other people? No one expects of cat or pigeon to be ethical. But somehow humans sometimes get overloaded by external demand to think of gazillion things that might offend someone (sometimes unreasonable demands, or how it might get interpreted (sometimes incorrectly)) before acting.
Im not saying ethics is bad, but sometimes people bend to to extremes (same like spirituality or religion)
inigyou 37 minutes ago [-]
Ethics aren't created as a power play but are certainly manipulated as one. The origin of ethics is probably natural selection.
yawpitch 8 hours ago [-]
Ethics has nothing to do with how an action is perceived, rather its focus is on is the action moral.
One should never take any action without considering the ethical implications of that action. Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.
vincnetas 7 hours ago [-]
"Ethics has nothing to do with how an action is perceived"
"...considering the ethical implications of that action"
Are these two not contradictions?
And is it not the too big of a load on an actor to think about everything before acting? I would prefer to delegate this function to my empathy part of the brain...
At the end i think ethics is valid only for cases where empathy is functioning. You can not be ethical to a rock unless you feel empathy for it. Same probably would go for extra strange extraterrestrial life forms that you could not empathise with. Lets say hive of microbes that makes the hive sentient but no limbs, no shared communication signals, different size categories (planetary hive)
fluoridation 7 hours ago [-]
I think the question is valid. Why should a human have a moral responsibility towards non-humans, while a cat doesn't have a moral responsibility towards non-cats, just because the human is capable of making moral judgements? Is there any analogous situation where capacity engenders responsibility? Are gorillas more responsible for how they use their strength, since they're stronger than humans?
>Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.
That's a bit of an extreme hyperbole, don't you think?
darkwater 7 hours ago [-]
> Why should a human have a moral responsibility towards non-humans, while a cat doesn't have a moral responsibility towards non-cats, just because the human is capable of making moral judgements?
Because as a human you recognize patterns in other animals that are similar to ours - the deepest pattern being alive - so you can project your feelings over them. This is also called empathy, and some in our kind lack it completely, but I would dare to say that is globally one of the defining traits of the human species.
fluoridation 6 hours ago [-]
You're answering a different question, which is "why do humans empathize with non-humans?" Humans can empathize with inanimate objects and with fictional people. The question of the origin of empathy really has nothing to do with what I asked.
darkwater 6 hours ago [-]
I think I do answered your question but maybe it was too implicit, so let me be more explicit. A human should have moral responsibility towards non-humans because of empathy and recognizing the fact that other animals are alive as well.
fluoridation 5 hours ago [-]
Bacteria are alive too, and I'm going to guess you don't claim we have a moral responsibility to them. And as I said, humans can feel empathy for things that are not alive. The capacity to feel empathy rests entirely on the empathizer, and has nothing to do with any intrinsic properties of the empathizee. Is a psychopathic murderer morally in the right because he doesn't feel any empathy for his victims?
dudefeliciano 7 hours ago [-]
It would be a great starting point if human felt moral responsibility towards other humans, before we take on the matter of ethics towards non-humans, simulated fireflies or LLMs. Yet here we are.
randomImmigrant 9 hours ago [-]
Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.
A lot of people believe that this reality, in which we're conversing on HN, is also a simulation (thus making the fruit fly a simulation within a simulation).
lp4v4n 12 hours ago [-]
How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.
j16sdiz 11 hours ago [-]
When one truly believes:
0) Subjecting fruitfly life to this kind of treatment is unethical.
1) Life is just physics in action.
2) Physics are just algorithm (or our physical world is a simulation)
It is not hard to understand why they think it is unethical.
My question are
1) is all life equal?
2) is all suffering unethical?
3) is this world materialistic or are there something out there?
4) should a list of items begin with 0 or 1?
fluoridation 10 hours ago [-]
If life is physics and physics is an algorithm, it doesn't follow that an algorithm reproducing the physics of life contains life, even if we grant that it actually reproduces it completely and perfectly. That's just confusing the symbol for the thing.
idiotsecant 9 hours ago [-]
If it reproduces it perfectly it's not a symbolic representation of the thing, it is the thing, by any definition that makes sense.
fluoridation 9 hours ago [-]
It's not the thing, because the thing is made of substance, not electronic impulses. No matter how hard you compute, you will never compute the simulation into a real, tangible object. The simulation and the real object are extremely, obviously distinguishable, even though they're structurally analogous.
If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.
dainank 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree.
If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.
Sorry, I can't respond because I don't know which statement in particular you're disagreeing with. What I can say is that, unless you're using words in a surprising way, I agree with
>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.
and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.
dainank 1 hours ago [-]
Sorry, this is my mistake, I misread the following statement:
> If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.
I am glad we agree. Regarding this second statement, I also agree with you having reread it now. Even if the entity (simulated human) receiving signals is experiencing from their PoV the exact same data, from our perspective knowing this is a 'simulated human' and not a 'human' we indeed cannot assume it is subject to the same rules like you said.
Apologies for misreading your initial message.
peddling-brink 8 hours ago [-]
Yikes. So because it can’t hit you back, you’re ok with it suffering?
I just said it's not a given. It's not immediately obvious.
EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.
idiotsecant 1 hours ago [-]
If you could simulate a human perfectly how would it possibly not be'subject to the same rules of ethics' as humans? What you've created is a human. If a system takes the same inputs and creates the same output it's the same system on different substrate. You don't say a human stops being a human if you put them on a ventilator, do you? Part of that system is now in an external substrate. How much of the biological human can be outside the meat body before you stop recognizing them as human?
I believe that any simulation of consciousness is consciousness, so ethical implications apply. But I also don't believe fruit flies are conscious for any definition of that word.
14 hours ago [-]
ramraj07 14 hours ago [-]
Why do you think it wont be?
twothreeone 13 hours ago [-]
Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.
fluoridation 11 hours ago [-]
What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.
logicallee 10 hours ago [-]
I've ported it to the browser and connected a squash functionality behind an ethical guardrail (you have to lift a cover to engage this functionality). need to iterate on the ui but will share it soon. you can squash the bug and cause it real pain. it also sees you if you turn your camera on and reacts to your movements. this is all wired up and I'll post it shortly.
DaiPlusPlus 4 hours ago [-]
I can’t tell if you’re a talented comedian - or if you should be assessed for sociopathy.
hellohello2 11 hours ago [-]
Yes I can, no problem. First figure out how consciousness works and tell me, then I'll be able to explain if the software is ethical or not. Its simple really.
DaiPlusPlus 4 hours ago [-]
As we don’t know yet, it has to be determined by the balance of probabilities; but even if the weight of evidence leads us to conclude that-there’s-no-consciousness going on when you run this, there’s still going to be a chance of us being wrong, let’s say 10%… Is the utility (…or entertainment value) of this program worth a 10% chance that we confidently, yet unwittingly, create perhaps the most cruellest machine it’s ever possible to make, and then have to live with ourselves?
andbberger 7 hours ago [-]
unbelievable amount of coarse graining to get from a real fly to this. same leve of ethical quandary as giving your dog a stuffed bear to tear apart. besides, you should see the things we do to real flies...
a1o 14 hours ago [-]
> What's modeled vs. measured
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
_bent 51 minutes ago [-]
The other day the system prompts for Claude (chat not code) hit the frontpage and they included a bit that something along the lines of "Claude should avoid saying honestly, because Claude is always honest".
So how come that these Claudisms still are so frequent in LLM output?
Do the system prompts just not work?
Don't the postprocess the output to deal with such policy violations?
a1o 2 minutes ago [-]
Some other day here HN someone posted a blog post that was like a long nonsense text of claudisms like load bearing smoking gun and other things, it was beautiful. I wanted to have a link for it to show to others but it disappeared when I got back to look for it and I lost the link. :/
rossy 10 hours ago [-]
> Honesty section:
This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.
isoprophlex 6 hours ago [-]
Don't you ever add a few dishonest paragraphs to your docs to spice things up?
dag11 11 hours ago [-]
> runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation
That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements.
I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!
etienne89 8 hours ago [-]
To be fair, as a term it has always been written as "Integrate-and-Fire" neuron model. In this case correct would be "Leaky Integrate-and-Fire" but that is nitpicking.
Honestly? I don't even know how to write anymore. Generative text is unequivocally nice, polished and correct. And it so happens that I do write in the same style as well. I never use LLMs to write human content, but here we are: I cannot use "honestly" anymore. And the emdash. Thank God we got "delve" back, though.
vhantz 14 hours ago [-]
> live *spiking* simulation
aperrien 15 hours ago [-]
Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
Open to see what it was about, stayed for the banger soundtrack
tedd4u 13 hours ago [-]
FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.
asimovDev 7 hours ago [-]
it would've taken the similar amount of time for the OP to do a 10 second screen recording and paste it into the project root to be linkable from the README.md and it would avoid thousands of people having to waste compute cycles and electricity and 30 seconds of their lives cloning and building , wouldn't it?
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
If you have a mac. I don't.
qingcharles 13 hours ago [-]
At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"?
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
Leynos 12 hours ago [-]
To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s.
Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.
I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
fooker 11 hours ago [-]
We'd need analog solutions for this simulations, and slowly these solutions will start to resemble biology in a dystopian way.
lp4v4n 12 hours ago [-]
Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain?
Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
fooker 11 hours ago [-]
> bunch of matrices multiplications
What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations.
The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.
sgt 8 hours ago [-]
This has to be some of the coolest stuff I've seen on HN in a while. I'm running 3 flies on my desktop right now, all powered by realistic brains.
neuraldenis 5 hours ago [-]
Hi, im the author of this repo, thank you for posting here!
t00 5 hours ago [-]
Is there a chance for a Linux version?
ecto 11 hours ago [-]
Things like this are why I come to HN! Cool hack :)
jochak 4 hours ago [-]
quite interesting, very small neural nets mimicking the brain of a fruit fly
> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
ddlsmurf 12 hours ago [-]
are you ok ?
theodric 6 hours ago [-]
It's cool and all, but I have real ones in my kitchen, and I'd prefer to keep the computer room free of them if it's all the same to you.
actionfromafar 15 hours ago [-]
Now this is real AI.
bitwize 15 hours ago [-]
This is straight up ghost-dubbing.
naikrovek 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
DonHopkins 6 hours ago [-]
I made a housefly simulator on the Mac once, using a visual programming language called Bounce / Body Electric, developed by Chuck Blanchard at VPL Research, originally used for VR simulations with the DataGlove and Eyephone and a pair of SGI workstations to render each eye.
The simulated fly's purpose was to annoy the simulations of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson by landing on their heads, who were watching TV and arguing about the closed caption stream. I wrote to Jaron Lanier about it 27 years ago:
At 12:31 AM -0400 7/8/99, Hopkins, Don wrote:
Hi, Jaron. We've met briefly once or twice - I'm a friend of David
Levitt's.
What's this about Sun acquiring the rights to the VPL patents, and
Body Electric?
>VPL had problems maintaining quality in our hardware- though I still sometimes find our headmounts and gloves in use. But our software was really great and can still offer a lot. A challenge to VRML people: Don't you DARE turn out more VR tools that aren't at least as good as this old stuff!
Does Sun actually have the Body Electric source code? What version do
they have?
Does anybody at Sun even know how to compile a Mac program?
Last time I worked there (admittedly a long time ago), they were too
embarrassed to allow Macs in the building (which might make somebody
realize how bad Unix sucks in comparison).
Has anyone tried to rewrite it in Java?
When I was working with David at Levity and Interval, I totally
overhauled the source code to Bounce: porting it to the latest version
of CodeWarrior and the PowerPC, cleaning up C code translated from
Pascal, that no human had ever touched before, and just generally
re-indenting and adding white space so it was pretty to look at.
Then I implemented a new interface for plugging in DM's, based on
ActiveX (yes, ActiveX runs on the Mac). I added a new data type that
you can flow along blue wires: a COM object (aka a plug-in ActiveX
object in a shared library).
Then we made plug-ins modules that produced and consumed the new
plug-in data types, like strings and polymorphic dictionaries. With
these new data types, we were able to model very complex simulations
as nested trees of dictionaries, strings and numbers, treat
dictionaries as high level objects, pass them all around on wires,
reading and modifying them at will.
The thing that the original Body Electric was missing is a way to
dynamically model structured data like Lisp s-expressions and
association lists, which is now possible in Bounce, using
dictionaries. (The swivel3d trees just don't cut it for representing
"knowledge".)
Bounce still had the "M4" Director player rendering engine, but it
didn't do everything we needed, so I implemented my own graphics
library for drawing sprites, playing sounds, and stuff like that. We
used it to implement a simulation of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson
watching TV and arguing over the closed captioning stream.
A big fat housefly would skitter around the screen, land on their
faces, and tickle them into waving their hands around and
pontificating.
I just got a 400 mhz G3 powerbook, and fired up a 2 year old copy of
Bounce and the crazy Limbaugh/Jackson demo, and it still works,
actually like a bat out of hell! I ran into David and John Szinger
(another Bounce programmer from Interval) a few days ago at a 4th of
July party, and they really got a kick out of seeing the old demo that
we worked together on, still running!
I live in Oakland just south of Berkeley. Drop me a line if you're in
the bay area, and would like to see what Bounce has evolved into.
-Don
From: Jaron Lanier
To: Don Hopkins
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 6:13 AM
Subject: Re: Body Electric lives?
Hey there, and thanks for writing!
Yup, Sun owns VPL and Body Electric, and my guess is that if anyone
looked very closely it would turn out Interval doesn't have rights to
Bounce. But no one is likely to look very closely, so let's forget
about that. (I don't think Sun is aware of Bounce or the work at
Interval.)
I had never asked what was done with Bounce at Interval- it's
fascinating to hear what you were up to. I live in NYC for the most
part, but I'd love to see it sometime when I'm in the Bay Area. Also
Chuck Blanchard lives in SF and you and he might want to trade demos
sometime.
There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the
most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from
Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While
BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools,
especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep
interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late
date?
On the Body Electric side of things, there has also been some work
updating to CodeWarrior/PowerPC (shame we didn't share that work!), as
well as support for Quickdraw3D, OpenGL on the Mac, OMS, and some
other standards.
There have been some changes to the interface, but not as ambitious as
yours. The neatest thing is a debugger/tracer tool that is a pleasure
to use. Since BE is used mostly in 3D domain, there are also some
tools dealing with textures, lights, etc.
I had always thought the swivel tree was ridiculous, of course, but on
the other hand I liked the idea that the virtual world and the
knowledge base were the same thing- that unity encourages the
visibility and grabbability of the underlying concepts. I think the
brain works that way- there isn't some barrier behind which everything
gets abstract- instead, it's user interface all the way to the bottom!
What I think would be the coolest long-term destination of BE would be
extending the scenegraph so that it was as powerful a knowledge base
as you'd want...
I'd LOVE to see a fancy BE release, in JAVA, or at least spitting JAVA
out. The question, of course, is where the money would come from.
I've tried to talk Sun into an open source release so the community
could hack on it voluntarily (the source was included in the patents
that were granted, so it's actually already released by the US
government anyway, though only on paper). Unfortunately, Sun doesn't
want to do that. What they've said instead is that I can choose up to
six sites with free hacking privileges at a given time. Bizarre!
With so few sites, I think there'd need to be money to make sure the
sites stayed focused on it... You'd have thought Sun would know
better by now.
The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment
oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are
people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations,
simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to
model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids.
You should know there was some tension about BE/Bounce at one point.
The problem was that Chuck Blanchard wasn't credited as the lead
designer/programmer of BE/Bounce when David brought the program to
Interval. Chuck's name was reduced in stature in the "about" and he
was not mentioned in some important semi-public demos at Interval. He
was also offered a pseudo-position to help with Bounce at Interval,
but without health benefits - and Chuck has MS and absolutely NEEDS
health insurance. I at one point yelled at the guy who runs Interval
(forgot his name..) about their treatment of Chuck- and David is
STILL mad at me for making a fuss about it. But I felt I had to.
So that's the scoop! Both sides of the mystery revealed!
All the best,
Jaron
This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan!
I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything.
Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted.
I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.
Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.
What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.
logicallee 10 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine why people hate my comment so much (4 downvotes), when I linked an existing fruitfly project I already did, and Claude is working on what I wrote now, just as I wrote. Maybe people thought I was being sarcastic when I wrote "A connectome is like a full brain scan!" but I wrote that since maybe not everyone knows what a connectome means.
mapontosevenths 9 hours ago [-]
I'm only guessing, but I think it was because you seem optimistic about technology. Especially AI.
An increasing percentage of people view optimism, hope, or excitement as childish or worse. Anytime you focus on anything positive they leap from the shadows to dance on your joy. It must feel nice squishing between their miserable toes or something.
Still, I appreciate your enthusiasm and hope to see you build something really cool. The future will be made by the enthusiastic, and if they don't want to come along they can wait in the car. I bet they wear blue jeans to the beach.
spuz 5 hours ago [-]
I didn't downvote it but I imagine it's because your comment comes across as manic rambling. You managed to say "it will run in the browser" three times - once is enough. I'd recommend writing out your entire comment then deleting it an rewriting it to be more concise. No we don't expect literature in HN comments but good writing is a courtesy to your readers.
inigyou 35 minutes ago [-]
Just send me the prompt
dekhn 13 hours ago [-]
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
asimovDev 7 hours ago [-]
do you mean they should've spent more time writing for other platforms or do you insinuate that they should've shipped a chromium browser instead of writing native software?
MBCook 11 hours ago [-]
Why? If I was writing this I would write it for my OS.
Why would I write it for anything else?
I assume that’s what the author did.
bashZorina_09 7 hours ago [-]
Is it?
I'm observing the largest tech companies in the world release macOS/iOS-first or only, and consequently supports said version the best in this era.
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
You've curiously left out which platform it's not weird to write software for.
Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform?
Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
The unstoppable "rewrite it in Swift!" vs the insurmountable "where's the Windows version?"
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is.
- - -
Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology.
I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.
Someone probably cut open a chrysalis and saw goop come out, so they assumed it was just a bag of goop. But goop would also come out of a cut open caterpillar, or a cut open butterfly, or a cut open human.
We don't actually know what is sufficient for modelling neural processes until we do it. But we can't really do that until we figure out how to read all the connection strengths.
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031
Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?
Goto 0.
A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer.
And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid onions and carrots because it causes death.
All of these result in suffering much worse than egg harvesting imo. Reluctant dairy eater btw
But, that said, a mark of being more important than a lesser being would kind of be the virtue of still empathizing with that being, even if we assume there’s a hierarchy.
And considering you and I are really just elaborate transport vessels for E. Coli and a lot of fungal spores, I’m not sure we should assume there’s a hierarchy.
IMO, it absolutely is.
First, if fruit flies could suffer existential anguish the same way humans do, they would breathe in relief that digital upload is in sight.
Second, even if the fruit flies don't care, a lot of (awful) humans would love a resolution to the matter of souls in a way that results in a raised middle finger to a forever-hypothetical Creator, and if we can't yet escape cancer, heart disease, parkinson and all the other awfuls, now at least the fruit flies are on their way out. Which rejoices said (truly awful!) humans, which will take what they can :-)
Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.
So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.
A very TLDR version is:
- Virtue ethics: instead of judging actions as good and bad, you should strive to become a good person (as defined by some specific set of virtues, like kindness, honesty, etc).
- Deontology: actions should be judged by a set of some fixed moral rules, for example "lying is always bad", even if you had good intentions.
- Consequentialism: actions should be judged by their consequences, for example by how much total happiness they create (utilitarianism). Doing something bad if it would make life of many people better is ethical, because the created happiness is more than the created harm.
In reality of course there are many other branches of them and the distinction is often not as obvious, and your personal views are probably somewhere in between. https://plato.stanford.edu is an amazing resource if you want more in depth explanation of philosophical theories.
But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.
It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.
1. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Im not saying ethics is bad, but sometimes people bend to to extremes (same like spirituality or religion)
One should never take any action without considering the ethical implications of that action. Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.
Are these two not contradictions?
And is it not the too big of a load on an actor to think about everything before acting? I would prefer to delegate this function to my empathy part of the brain...
At the end i think ethics is valid only for cases where empathy is functioning. You can not be ethical to a rock unless you feel empathy for it. Same probably would go for extra strange extraterrestrial life forms that you could not empathise with. Lets say hive of microbes that makes the hive sentient but no limbs, no shared communication signals, different size categories (planetary hive)
>Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.
That's a bit of an extreme hyperbole, don't you think?
Because as a human you recognize patterns in other animals that are similar to ours - the deepest pattern being alive - so you can project your feelings over them. This is also called empathy, and some in our kind lack it completely, but I would dare to say that is globally one of the defining traits of the human species.
0) Subjecting fruitfly life to this kind of treatment is unethical.
1) Life is just physics in action.
2) Physics are just algorithm (or our physical world is a simulation)
It is not hard to understand why they think it is unethical.
My question are
1) is all life equal?
2) is all suffering unethical?
3) is this world materialistic or are there something out there?
4) should a list of items begin with 0 or 1?
If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.
If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175140#48177554
>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.
and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.
> If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.
I am glad we agree. Regarding this second statement, I also agree with you having reread it now. Even if the entity (simulated human) receiving signals is experiencing from their PoV the exact same data, from our perspective knowing this is a 'simulated human' and not a 'human' we indeed cannot assume it is subject to the same rules like you said.
Apologies for misreading your initial message.
Also relevant short story: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.
That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements.
I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!
Resources that outdate ChatGPT: - W. Gerstner "Neuronal Dynamics" (2014): https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html - E. Izhikevich "Which model to use for cortical spiking neurons?" (2004): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071
https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.
I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations.
The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/
> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
The simulated fly's purpose was to annoy the simulations of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson by landing on their heads, who were watching TV and arguing about the closed caption stream. I wrote to Jaron Lanier about it 27 years ago:
Jaron Lanier's VPL and Body Electric page:https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanc...
>VPL had problems maintaining quality in our hardware- though I still sometimes find our headmounts and gloves in use. But our software was really great and can still offer a lot. A challenge to VRML people: Don't you DARE turn out more VR tools that aren't at least as good as this old stuff!
Homepage of Jaron Lanier:https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanc...
Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023893
I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything.
Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted.
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long...
I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.
Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.
What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.
An increasing percentage of people view optimism, hope, or excitement as childish or worse. Anytime you focus on anything positive they leap from the shadows to dance on your joy. It must feel nice squishing between their miserable toes or something.
Still, I appreciate your enthusiasm and hope to see you build something really cool. The future will be made by the enthusiastic, and if they don't want to come along they can wait in the car. I bet they wear blue jeans to the beach.
Why would I write it for anything else?
I assume that’s what the author did.
I'm observing the largest tech companies in the world release macOS/iOS-first or only, and consequently supports said version the best in this era.
Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform?
Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.