
A Python library for writing distributed self-replicating programs - jedieaston
https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/
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thephyber
I'm curious: what's the use case for this?

Naïvely, it looks like a platform for a virus-like application.

Reading the GitHub issues and PRs, it looks like a procedural competitor for
Ansible (which is declarative).

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arthurcolle
Aside/philosophy: Do you think all life can be considered a virus?

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ShamelessC
Further aside: Viruses themselves may not even be life!

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arthurcolle
B can be A, without A being B ;)

I had this exact example in mind tho FWIW. It is an ongoing research topic
whether or not viruses are life, but the analogies/similarity are overall
worth noting.

Maybe on a biosphere level, or even on a more micro ecosphere level, all
sentient systems really exhibit the same properties as a virus in the local
context, for that system, even if entities in that system do not have the
consciousness to be able to make that determination. Certainly our effect on
the planet Earth since the Industrial Era should make it worth it to endeavour
this analysis!

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guramarx11
Can I interpret it like this?

human 'is' set; human set 'has' man | woman; man 'is' human but not human 'is'
man

virus 'is' set; virus set 'has' life; life 'is' virus but not virus 'is' life

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emmelaich
Mentioned a few times previously on HN. Most comments were for a mention 2
years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15355144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15355144)

Looks great!

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arthurcolle
This is how we’ll actually get AGI. Creating the necessary pre-conditions for
a quasi-simulacrum of life, and just letting it rip. Beautiful work, I’m
excited to dig into this further, a little later tonight.

This + incentives (hint hint, a little crypto-wallet with some cash) could
really set the stage to create “Agents” (agents in the sense of independent,
self running processes with their own cash balances, trading goods & services
for new incomes, much like corporations which only exist in the context of
humans managing day to day operations).

I’d write more but instead I’m going to dig into the docs + source code.

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icipiracy
How do you see this specifically creating AGI?

How would you calculate the loss on a reinforcement learning model that's
autonomous?

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arthurcolle
Allegory:

Running entity A performs action at time t_sub(0) that costs n_sub(t_sub(0))
currency. Response to this action by the counterparty creates a cascading tree
of potential new actions, each of which require individual “reconciliations”
(new actions, which each require a new response), defined by the probability
distribution of potential responses->new actions. We either know these
distributions a priori based on our initial conditions, or we can create them
based on an initialization function.

The net present value of the expected action to these new responses can be
evaluated with respect to the NPV of the current holdings of the running
entity’s portfolio, and that difference can be treated as the loss function.

I’m not an ML researcher, so I apologize if my lack of terminology makes this
sound stupid to you but that’s my initial thinking.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to discuss further, I’ve been tangentially
working in this area for a while but this really gets my sparkplugs going.

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uoaei
I don't think trying to shove this model into a gradient-descent framework
makes the most sense here. I'm an ML (industry) researcher and I highly doubt
that AGI will be achieved with gradient descent on neural networks alone.
Those may play a small role somewhere in the stack but the orchestration and
reasoning will be managed by something else entirely. Neural networks today
are fancy MLE machines -- nowhere close to reasoning machines, which require
an "understanding" (whatever that means in this context) of dynamics with
respect to the environment.

Seems more appropriate to start with a population of agents who reproduce at a
rate proportional to their recent rewards, and allow them to die off at a rate
inversely proportional to the same, a la a continuously-evolving genetic
algorithm setup. You may have to modify the reward function to disincentivize
behaviors which cause systemwide collapse, but that goes without saying.

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arthurcolle
> You may have to modify the reward function to disincentivize behaviors which
> cause systemwide collapse, but that goes without saying.

Hopefully humans will figure this out one day too.

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solotronics
I have a lot of network devices that have various python binaries. This could
be really cool for running agents on them.

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w1nst0nsm1th
It's basically a worm. It could be used to randomly try to brute force, thank
to an embeded dictionnary, ssh server allowing password connection, propagated
on the new host and start again, leaving behing it a message in new starting
terminal shell.

