9 ms·

The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance

The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".

baxtr 2y ago
SLAs are terrible. I agree. But at least there’s (usually) some exciting shows on while you are waiting!
tivert 2y ago
> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck". There's hope. If the carbon chauvinists can be prevented from messing things up, AI is on track to provide something with a better SLA, which will finally allow us to decommission and junk those troublesome legacy systems without disrupting the business.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
You've got it all wrong, and LLMs have it all correct. True brains, after 16hrs of actual work, need to hallucinate strongly for 8 hours or so, in order to continue their high level contributions to society.
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  Interesting. What if that is actually a beneficial part of our own development: comparing the nonsense in our dreams to waking life and building the ability to tell the difference?
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Get an LLM to dream, and to use the time effectively to purge those hallucinations, and reinforce the "valid and true" memories, and you might have something there ?
    - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
      Exactly, but that isValidAndTrue method is probably a little tricky to write...
      - jjk166 2y ago
        It helps to be able to pinch yourself.
      - loa_in_ 2y ago
        Write down the argument for later and test it's hypothesis during the day?
jpmattia 2y ago
And after a while, the system get bad enough that fsck starts failing regularly. Really poor design.
glenstein 2y ago
>The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability Taking this as a jumping off point for a way of thinking about those 'services'. It seems remarkable to me that we can initiate the attempt to think of an elephant, and then get there in one shot. We don't sort through, say, rhinos, hippos, cars, trucks. We don't seem to have to rummage. Of course when it comes to things on the edge of our memory or the edge of our understanding, there's a lot of rummaging. But it could have been the case that everything was that way (perhaps it is that way for some animals), instead, there are some things to which we have nearly automatic, seemingly instant recall.
- alaithea 2y ago
  This makes me think of how my dog reacts very quickly, of course, for hard-wired "dog" behavior things, but when I use human language and gestures to communicate something to him, such as "go find Daddy", I can figuratively see a loading spinner over his head for several seconds, until the recognition comes and he responds. I don't know what's going on in that head, but it definitely appears to be "rummaging" from the outside. Probably similar to how we feel when conversing in a foreign language we're not fluent in.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Or when my early-riser wife talks to me about anything before I've had my coffee.
nbenitezl 2y ago
On the other side, heart delivers a lifetime service without any maintaince, that's a truly wonder of nature.
- interludead 2y ago
  Its "maintenance" is built into its design
amai 2y ago
I believe it is not only garbage collecting. It is also doing backpropagation on the memories of the day before. After 8 hours you get an updated, more optimized service.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  This is the insight missing from everyone comparing LLM parameter counts to human neurons or synapses. The human model gets a new version every day, and the digital one costs $5B of energy and a year to do the same.
  - dinkumthinkum 2y ago
    I think this is the first time I've seen someone say something correct about AI on HN in years!
outworlder 2y ago
> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck". It's a trade-off. The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. It already uses a lot of energy(2% of body weight, 20% of energy consumption). We also need it to be working at peak performance when we are doing activities. A background 'scrub' task to keep it working 24/7 would probably use more energy (require more food and heat dissipation 24/7), possibly require a larger area (for redundancy, similar to how dolphins can sleep one hemisphere at a time and have really large brains). An alternative would be to slow down processes enough so that those tasks could happen constantly. And then our day/light cycles helped select for this approach. Until recently there wasn't much one could do (safely!) at night.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. I wonder if it had been beneficial to have larger brains, we'd have evolved to support that. Diminishing returns maybe or just a local maximum we didn't get out of?
  - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
    Beneficial kinda just means "leads to more procreation" right? So if bigger brains meant people reproducing more, our brains would get bigger to the point that most births are cesarean or something. I do wonder what happens when we eventually evolve to a point where we can't survive without more and more advanced technology. A lot of people who would have died off before reproducing 200 years ago now don't, which is of course incredible for us. But what are effects of that 100/1000 years down the line? Presumably we'll have plenty of more immediately pressing issues over that time frame.
    - wh0knows 2y ago
      It is interesting from a space-faring species perspective. By the time we can embark to other planets/asteroids our biology might require us to lug around significantly more technology just to survive.
perfmode 2y ago
Through formal meditation practice, you can train the brain to perform these as background tasks in the waking state.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  I'm not sure I buy this. Meditation can give you distance from the "I" part of the brain but it doesn't seem equivalent to an on-demand GC.
w10-1 2y ago
It's worse than that. At all times, every single one of the billions of participants acts like a bureaucrat, delaying response until it's unavoidable and then resting afterwards at least half the time. If only we could cut through the bureaucracy! Neuronal activities: - Action potential initiation: 0.2-0.5ms - Action potential duration: ~1-2ms - Relative refractory period: ~2-4ms - Total cycle time until fully ready: ~5-7ms
toasterlovin 2y ago
We don't actually know if 1/3rd downtime is a requirement. For most of our evolutionary history, it has not been economical to remain awake at night, so our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy (since energy has been a major engineering constraint for all of our evolutionary history minus the last several hundred years or so). If that's the case, then with other processes may have evolved to fit themselves into our sleeping time as an optimization, but perhaps those processes could happen while we're awake if our evolutionary constraints were different.
- euroderf 2y ago
  > our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy Or perhaps to keep us quiet and immobile, and harder to locate and eat ?
- kgeist 2y ago
  >it has not been economical to remain awake at night Why? If you can gather fruits or hunt pray while all your competitors (or predators!) are asleep, isn't it an advantage? What about nocturnality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality
  - adammarples 2y ago
    Well we can't see can we
  - jjk166 2y ago
    Why are your competitors and predators asleep? At night it is harder to see food. It is harder to see predators, some of whom are in fact nocturnal. It is harder to notice visual cues and gestures from allies/kin. It is harder to navigate, both due to difficulty seeing distant landmarks and nearby obstructions, so you are more likely to get lost and/or injured. It is colder so your body has to spend more calories to keep you warm. There are adaptations that can improve nocturnal capabilities, but these typically come with tradeoffs that make diurnal life harder. Evolution is a series of many baby steps - either you need to adapt to not sleeping while you're still at a disadvantage at night, or you need to adapt to being awake at night while you still need to sleep. Neither path seems like it would have been advantageous to our ancestors.
janalsncm 2y ago
I also wonder why cats sleep so much. Is it mainly because there’s nothing for them to do during the day, so why not sleep? Whereas humans can be active all day?
- biggestdummy 2y ago
  Carnivores tend to sleep longer than omnivores, who tend to sleep longer than herbivores. For a hunting carnivore, energy comes in big bursts, so it makes sense that they would be active for a short period of time, and hoard energy when they didn't need to be active. For a cud-chewing herbivore, time spent not chewing is time spent not creating energy. Obviously, this is a broad generalization - feeding habits, day/night cycles, predator/prey behaviors all factor into a particular animal. But it probably explains why your cat, like the panther at the zoo, spends most of its time asleep.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    Also, cats and panthers are crepuscular, active at dawn and dusk. Which leads to lots of waiting for that time of day.
incognition 2y ago
You aren’t overclocking your system?
moffkalast 2y ago
Dolphins have a much better system, they take half of it offline for maintenance while the other half stays on for 100% uptime. Fancy that.
interludead 2y ago
It even has random downtime during the day (hello, power naps)

baxtr 2y ago

SLAs are terrible. I agree. But at least there’s (usually) some exciting shows on while you are waiting!

tivert 2y ago

> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck". There's hope. If the carbon chauvinists can be prevented from messing things up, AI is on track to provide something with a better SLA, which will finally allow us to decommission and junk those troublesome legacy systems without disrupting the business.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

You've got it all wrong, and LLMs have it all correct. True brains, after 16hrs of actual work, need to hallucinate strongly for 8 hours or so, in order to continue their high level contributions to society.

ifyoubuildit 2y ago
Interesting. What if that is actually a beneficial part of our own development: comparing the nonsense in our dreams to waking life and building the ability to tell the difference?
- euroderf 2y ago
  Get an LLM to dream, and to use the time effectively to purge those hallucinations, and reinforce the "valid and true" memories, and you might have something there ?
  - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
    Exactly, but that isValidAndTrue method is probably a little tricky to write...
    - jjk166 2y ago
      It helps to be able to pinch yourself.
    - loa_in_ 2y ago
      Write down the argument for later and test it's hypothesis during the day?

jpmattia 2y ago

And after a while, the system get bad enough that fsck starts failing regularly. Really poor design.

glenstein 2y ago

>The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability Taking this as a jumping off point for a way of thinking about those 'services'. It seems remarkable to me that we can initiate the attempt to think of an elephant, and then get there in one shot. We don't sort through, say, rhinos, hippos, cars, trucks. We don't seem to have to rummage. Of course when it comes to things on the edge of our memory or the edge of our understanding, there's a lot of rummaging. But it could have been the case that everything was that way (perhaps it is that way for some animals), instead, there are some things to which we have nearly automatic, seemingly instant recall.

alaithea 2y ago
This makes me think of how my dog reacts very quickly, of course, for hard-wired "dog" behavior things, but when I use human language and gestures to communicate something to him, such as "go find Daddy", I can figuratively see a loading spinner over his head for several seconds, until the recognition comes and he responds. I don't know what's going on in that head, but it definitely appears to be "rummaging" from the outside. Probably similar to how we feel when conversing in a foreign language we're not fluent in.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Or when my early-riser wife talks to me about anything before I've had my coffee.

nbenitezl 2y ago

On the other side, heart delivers a lifetime service without any maintaince, that's a truly wonder of nature.

interludead 2y ago
Its "maintenance" is built into its design

amai 2y ago

I believe it is not only garbage collecting. It is also doing backpropagation on the memories of the day before. After 8 hours you get an updated, more optimized service.

kridsdale3 2y ago
This is the insight missing from everyone comparing LLM parameter counts to human neurons or synapses. The human model gets a new version every day, and the digital one costs $5B of energy and a year to do the same.
- dinkumthinkum 2y ago
  I think this is the first time I've seen someone say something correct about AI on HN in years!

outworlder 2y ago

> The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck". It's a trade-off. The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. It already uses a lot of energy(2% of body weight, 20% of energy consumption). We also need it to be working at peak performance when we are doing activities. A background 'scrub' task to keep it working 24/7 would probably use more energy (require more food and heat dissipation 24/7), possibly require a larger area (for redundancy, similar to how dolphins can sleep one hemisphere at a time and have really large brains). An alternative would be to slow down processes enough so that those tasks could happen constantly. And then our day/light cycles helped select for this approach. Until recently there wasn't much one could do (safely!) at night.

barbazoo 2y ago
> The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. I wonder if it had been beneficial to have larger brains, we'd have evolved to support that. Diminishing returns maybe or just a local maximum we didn't get out of?
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  Beneficial kinda just means "leads to more procreation" right? So if bigger brains meant people reproducing more, our brains would get bigger to the point that most births are cesarean or something. I do wonder what happens when we eventually evolve to a point where we can't survive without more and more advanced technology. A lot of people who would have died off before reproducing 200 years ago now don't, which is of course incredible for us. But what are effects of that 100/1000 years down the line? Presumably we'll have plenty of more immediately pressing issues over that time frame.
  - wh0knows 2y ago
    It is interesting from a space-faring species perspective. By the time we can embark to other planets/asteroids our biology might require us to lug around significantly more technology just to survive.

perfmode 2y ago

Through formal meditation practice, you can train the brain to perform these as background tasks in the waking state.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
I'm not sure I buy this. Meditation can give you distance from the "I" part of the brain but it doesn't seem equivalent to an on-demand GC.

w10-1 2y ago

It's worse than that. At all times, every single one of the billions of participants acts like a bureaucrat, delaying response until it's unavoidable and then resting afterwards at least half the time. If only we could cut through the bureaucracy! Neuronal activities: - Action potential initiation: 0.2-0.5ms - Action potential duration: ~1-2ms - Relative refractory period: ~2-4ms - Total cycle time until fully ready: ~5-7ms

toasterlovin 2y ago

We don't actually know if 1/3rd downtime is a requirement. For most of our evolutionary history, it has not been economical to remain awake at night, so our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy (since energy has been a major engineering constraint for all of our evolutionary history minus the last several hundred years or so). If that's the case, then with other processes may have evolved to fit themselves into our sleeping time as an optimization, but perhaps those processes could happen while we're awake if our evolutionary constraints were different.

euroderf 2y ago
> our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by conservation of energy Or perhaps to keep us quiet and immobile, and harder to locate and eat ?
kgeist 2y ago
>it has not been economical to remain awake at night Why? If you can gather fruits or hunt pray while all your competitors (or predators!) are asleep, isn't it an advantage? What about nocturnality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality
- adammarples 2y ago
  Well we can't see can we
- jjk166 2y ago
  Why are your competitors and predators asleep? At night it is harder to see food. It is harder to see predators, some of whom are in fact nocturnal. It is harder to notice visual cues and gestures from allies/kin. It is harder to navigate, both due to difficulty seeing distant landmarks and nearby obstructions, so you are more likely to get lost and/or injured. It is colder so your body has to spend more calories to keep you warm. There are adaptations that can improve nocturnal capabilities, but these typically come with tradeoffs that make diurnal life harder. Evolution is a series of many baby steps - either you need to adapt to not sleeping while you're still at a disadvantage at night, or you need to adapt to being awake at night while you still need to sleep. Neither path seems like it would have been advantageous to our ancestors.

janalsncm 2y ago

I also wonder why cats sleep so much. Is it mainly because there’s nothing for them to do during the day, so why not sleep? Whereas humans can be active all day?

biggestdummy 2y ago
Carnivores tend to sleep longer than omnivores, who tend to sleep longer than herbivores. For a hunting carnivore, energy comes in big bursts, so it makes sense that they would be active for a short period of time, and hoard energy when they didn't need to be active. For a cud-chewing herbivore, time spent not chewing is time spent not creating energy. Obviously, this is a broad generalization - feeding habits, day/night cycles, predator/prey behaviors all factor into a particular animal. But it probably explains why your cat, like the panther at the zoo, spends most of its time asleep.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  Also, cats and panthers are crepuscular, active at dawn and dusk. Which leads to lots of waiting for that time of day.

incognition 2y ago

You aren’t overclocking your system?

moffkalast 2y ago

Dolphins have a much better system, they take half of it offline for maintenance while the other half stays on for 100% uptime. Fancy that.

interludead 2y ago

It even has random downtime during the day (hello, power naps)