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causal 3 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.
ramraj07 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.
3 hours ago [-]
DaiPlusPlus 3 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 3 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?
janalsncm 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?
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 8 minutes 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.
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.
lp4v4n 1 hours ago [-]
How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.
j16sdiz 18 minutes 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?
hellohello2 41 minutes 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.
3 hours ago [-]
ramraj07 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you think it wont be?
twothreeone 2 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 49 minutes 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.
a1o 3 hours ago [-]
> What's modeled vs. measured
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
dag11 5 minutes 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!
vhantz 3 hours ago [-]
> live *spiking* simulation
3 hours ago [-]
aperrien 4 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.
ecto 9 minutes ago [-]
Things like this are why I come to HN! Cool hack :)
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.
lp4v4n 1 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 8 minutes 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.
qingcharles 2 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 1 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.
> 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 1 hours ago [-]
are you ok ?
actionfromafar 4 hours ago [-]
Now this is real AI.
bitwize 4 hours ago [-]
This is straight up ghost-dubbing.
naikrovek 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
myshapeprotocol 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
logicallee 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dekhn 2 hours ago [-]
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
MBCook 32 minutes 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.
bigyabai 2 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.
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?
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.
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
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?
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
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!
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY
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.
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.
Why would I write it for anything else?
I assume that’s what the author did.