posted on June 28, 2022 08:04 PM by
u/completely-ineffable
44
u/sexylaboratories114 pointsat 1656447610.000000
I suppose it’s possible that if you gave Einstein at his 1905-1917
peak a thousand years[… he] would simply generate a thousand times as
many tracts advocating world government
It would be kind of funny if the rationalists spent countless time
and money to revive a digital Einstein and he just berates them for not
doing socialism until they turn him off again.
> If nothing else, this AI could work by simulating Einstein’s brain neuron-by-neuron—provided we believe in the computational theory of mind, as I’m assuming we do. It’s true that we don’t know the detailed structure of Einstein’s brain in order to simulate it (we might have, had the pathologist who took it from the hospital used cold rather than warm formaldehyde). But that’s irrelevant to the argument.
This is so, so stupid.
Dennett and Hofstadter already wrote a better version of this Ship of Theseus thought-experiment in 1981, but what kind of debate would it be if the participants had read about the subject in advance
> I freely admit that I have no principled definition of “general intelligence,” let alone of “superintelligence.”
cool bye
That's a ridiculous comparison. Science is not cooking, and you don't always have the luxury of neat, universally acceptable definitions. Sometimes you just have to say "time is whatever the clock measures" in order to get on with your work.
That's true, but you can't round the error of doing that down to zero. When you're far off into speculative territory, those errors accumulate more than they do in a single experiment.
Pretty sure that’s not what computational theory of mind says, also “the” computational theory of mind, also I deeply deeply wish Jerry Fodor was alive to shout at this
Fodor shouting at Pinker is a very, very funny and welcome thing. i think we are referring especially to this book: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mind-doesnt-work-way](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mind-doesnt-work-way)
which is shouting at this book: [https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334777](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334777)
Fodor wins the shouting match ofc
If this is just the words 'computational' combined with the words 'theory of mind', they are using it wrong here right? Because theory of mind is a skill humans have, that we can understand others have rich inner lives. So they are saying 'we believe computers have mental states', while they are trying to say: 'we believe human minds can run in computers'. Right?
(This assumes 'the computational theory of mind' isn't a totally different concept of course, if it is ignore this statement (and that is also what he could be doing here, but I think it is a bad new term to introduce)).
He’s talking about cog sci / philosophy of mind, in which “computational theory of mind”, also known as computationalism, is the collective name for a number of competing theories in which minds are - wait for it - “computational”
But for computationalism, all this means is that the basic way a mind works is it manipulates units of meaning, or representation, or concepts etc. according to rules in the abstract the same way a computer does. It doesn’t mean - although some versions of computationalism cash out this way - that a mind is literally analogous to a computer, it just means that like a computer what matters is the manipulation of these units according to appropriate rules. Competing theories of mind have included e.g. connectionism, in which computations (call them “rule following decisions about symbols” perhaps) are swamped by more granular not-necessarily-logical relationships between individual nodes in a data network
>It doesn’t mean - although some versions of computationalism cash out this way - that a mind is literally analogous to a computer,
it's important to say that this is ambiguous in the literature, and critics and even former holders of the view (esp Putnam) often suggest that it does in fact mean this. a lot would depend on exactly what the phrase "literally analogous to a computer" turns out to mean.
it's also pretty clear that it was ideas about how computers work that drove the theory in the first place.
more background than anyone could want: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/)
Those are good points, welcomely received.
But I still want to push back slightly and point out that *even though* computationalism about mind gets it start by imagining minds as Turing machines, and *even if* it ultimately wants to say not much more than that the mind is a not-so-special kind of very complicated human-scale computer, one would like to remind the audience that computationalists certainly don’t all think that it’s *that kind of computer* - where “that kind of computer” is whatever the deeply irritating CS dude at the back of your philosophy class seems to be talking about
Edit: I’ll add that whenever Putnam disavows something he previously believed, I wind up disappointed with how perfunctorily he dismisses it.
>provided we believe in the computational theory of mind, as I’m assuming we do
as about 20% of working academics near this area do, while the rest think it's something between unproven, almost certainly false, and garbage.
one interesting "tell" is that it's held by very few academics whose area of expertise is either the biological (e.g. medical doctors, psychiatrists) or social-psychological aspects of the mind. it is mostly (but not exclusively) held by people whose primary area of interest is machines.
I think in this case Aaronson may just mean “the behavior of a human brain could be simulated by a sufficiently powerful computer” rather than more narrow meanings of “computational theory of mind”, in which case it basically would follow from the idea that all physical behavior is in principle derivable from the laws of physics (plus the assumption that the laws of physics can be simulated to arbitrary accuracy with big enough computers). Most academic scientists probably endorse this type of reductionism at least as a plausible working hypothesis.
I was privileged to be part of various email exchanges about those
same questions with Steven Pinker, Ernest Davis, Gary Marcus, Douglas
Hofstadter, and Scott Alexander
I haven't heard of Hofstadter having a [milkshake duck](https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2017-shortlist/) moment, but the first and last names on that list are enough to make it nightmarish, I'd say.
I never finished *GEB.* If I recall correctly (and we're talking about college here, so who knows), I think I read all the dialogues but not all the material in between.
he's bad. very full of himself, bit of a charlatan, and often cribbed and inaccurate representations of the work he's dealing with. not awful-bad, but one would be better off digging more deeply into that work than accepting what Hofstadter says.
lol as u/titotal says. I didn't intend it to be a humblebrag. I just liked the wordplay, the style, etc. I doubt I understood most of it, but it was enjoyable to read.
After all, in many areas Einstein was no Einstein. You above all
could speak of his not-so-superintelligence in quantum physics
Fuck you, asshole. Einstein understood quantum physics, not
like you with your “hurr
durr entropy means we don’t need to care about poor people” approach
to physics. Einstein won
his Nobel Prize for just one part of his work on quantum
physics. He knew that the theory was correct; he just didn’t
accept it as the final word, and even his thoughts about what might
replace it were subtle and carefully developed. The paper that presented
the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox is one of the most influential
physics articles ever published, and it just gave Podolsky’s
less sophisticated version of Einstein’s thinking. People have been
writing about this for years — no, decades
— so you’ve no excuse not to fucking get it now.
Ah pinker had another 'speaking outside of his field' moment.
E: lol https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/816676377273499648
This all does make me wonder a bit on how the Rationalists values of niceness make it impossible to call out people on simply being out of their expertise area, just as hero worshipping does obv, if you want to be invited to debate 'The Great Pink' you cant come out and go 'do your homework please'.
> As usual, I find Steve crystal-clear and precise
Doesn't surprise me. Unlike a lot of his bedfellows, he seems like a decent guy and I always appreciated that he didn't (as far as I've seen, hopefully I'm right) go down the same rabbit holes of misogyny and islamophobia as Dawkins et al. But it's still been many, many years since I felt compelled to fret that much about fundamentalist Christians.
No he is explicitly on the anti phobia and misogyny side. Iirc during, eurgh sorry if you know about this, elevatorgate he correctly picked the side of Rebecca Watson and called the other weirdos who made it into a controversy out on it.
Yup, dude nuked any grift potential to do the right thing and never looked back. Not that I think he'd go into grift, but he could very easily have if he wasn't at least a decent dude.
God Elevatorgate was so stupid. Some asshole made Rebecca Watson uncomfortable while stuck in a confined space with him, she *anonymously* called him out on it, and the typical Rational Misogynist Brigade was throwing around phrases like "ruined his life" even though she literally never even named him.
I remember PZ taking her side, and I always respected him for it.
The EPR paper was influential in calling attention to strange features of quantum mechanics, but aside from Bohmians, most physicists have not agreed with the main argument that these features suggest the information in the quantum state vector is incomplete.
Perhaps you have heard of a Bell inequality? That's a direct consequence of EPR which lays out a dilemma: non-locality or incompleteness.
Edit: you don't need to buy the EPR incompleteness solution for it to have profoundly changed physics
The [EPR paper](https://cds.cern.ch/record/405662/files/PhysRev.47.777.pdf) did not actually show that QM implies non-locality, that was a novel innovation of Bell, who showed that any theory which respects "local realism" must satisfy certain inequalities which are violated in QM. The argument of the EPR paper was that QM in its current form is incomplete based on what later sources like [this IEP article](https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/epr-bell-pdf-2018.pdf) have called the "reality criterion", as expressed in the paper's statement *"If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of reality corresponding to that quantity."* However, they thought that by incorporating extra state variables beyond those in the quantum state vector, one might be able to create a new theory that does satisfy the reality criterion--at the end of the paper they said "While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible."
Einstein's hope was that this more complete description would be local rather than non-local ([Bohmian mechanics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/) shows that it is possible to satisfy the reality criterion with a non-local theory). So Bell was showing that the type of theory that Einstein had been hoping for is impossible--in his paper ["On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox"](https://cds.cern.ch/record/111654/files/vol1p195-200_001.pdf) he wrote *"The paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [1] was advanced as an argument that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory but should be supplemented by additional variables. These additional variables were to restore to the theory causality and locality [2]. In this note that idea will be formulated mathematically and shown to be incompatible with the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics."* Note [2] in the paper cites one of Einstein's own comments which presumed that a satisfactory theory would obey locality, where he said *"But on one supposition we should, in my opinion, absolutely hold fast: the real factual situation of the system S2 is independent of what is done with the system S1 , which is spatially separated from the former"*.
In general, I think Pinker is just expressing the common view among physicists that Einstein was losing his touch when it came to his opposition to QM in its current form and his hope for a theory that would satisfy principles he found "natural" like locality (I wonder what he would have made of the Everett interpretation, which advocates often argue [does restore locality and determinism](https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3827) without adding any additional variables, in a way that exploits a loophole in Bell's proof where he assumed that each pair of measurements yield a single definite pair of results as soon as both measurements are complete). For example, the paper ["(How) Did Einstein Understand the EPR Paradox?"](https://www.mprl-series.mpg.de/media/proceedings/3/6/Proc3ch5.pdf) says on p. 1 that "Einstein had turned, in the eyes of many working physicists, from revolutionary to reactionary, and his later views were considered curious at best." The section of Walter Isaacson's [Einstein: His Life and Universe](https://books.google.com/books?id=OzSJgdwk5esC&lpg=PP313&ots=BnfHuBNvRQ&dq=%22Once%20again%2C%20Einstein%20was%20both%20impressed%20and%20critical%22&pg=PP312#v=onepage&q=%22Once%20again,%20Einstein%20was%20both%20impressed%20and%20critical%22&f=false) quoted [here](https://erenow.net/biographies/einsteinhislifeanduniverse/16.php) also discusses Einstein's quest in the last part of his life to find a unified field theory that would unite electromagnetism and gravitation, and notes that unlike more recent attempts at something similar, Einstein was looking for a non-quantum theory, a goal most other physicists have found quixotic:
>In his follow-up articles that year, **Einstein made explicit that his goal was not merely unification but finding a way to overcome the uncertainties and probabilities in quantum theory.** The title of one 1923 paper stated the quest clearly: “Does the Field Theory Offer Possibilities for the Solution of Quanta Problems?”11
>The paper began by describing how electromagnetic and gravitational field theories provide causal determinations based on partial differential equations combined with initial conditions. In the realm of the quanta, it may not be possible to choose or apply the initial conditions freely. **Can we nevertheless have a causal theory based on field equations?**
>“Quite certainly,” Einstein answered himself optimistically. What was needed, he said, was a method to “overdetermine” the field variables in the appropriate equations. That path of overdetermination became yet another proposed tool that he would employ, to no avail, in **fixing what he persisted in calling the “problem” of quantum uncertainty.**
>...
>Undaunted, Einstein went back to work, this time trying an approach he called “distant parallelism.” It permitted vectors in different parts of curved space to be related, and from that sprang new forms of tensors. Most wondrously (so he thought), he was able to come up with equations that did not require that pesky Planck constant representing quanta.14
>“This looks old-fashioned, and my dear colleagues, and also you, will stick their tongues out because Planck’s constant is not in the equations,” he wrote Besso in January 1929. “But when they have reached the limit of their mania for the statistical fad, they will return full of repentance to the spacetime picture, and then these equations will form a starting point.”15
>What a wonderful dream! A unified theory without that rambunctious quantum. Statistical approaches turning out to be a passing mania. A return to the field theories of relativity. Tongue-sticking colleagues repenting!
>**In the world of physics, where quantum mechanics was now accepted, Einstein and his fitful quest for a unified theory were beginning to be seen as quaint.**
>...
>Theologians and journalists may have been wowed, but physicists were not. Eddington, usually a fan, expressed doubts. Over the next year, Einstein kept refining his theory and insisting to friends that the equations were “beautiful.” **But he admitted to his dear sister that his work had elicited “the lively mistrust and passionate rejection of my colleagues.”21**
>Among those who were dismayed was Wolfgang Pauli. Einstein’s new approaches “betrayed” his general theory of relativity, Pauli sharply told him, and relied on mathematical formalism that had no relation to physical realities. He accused Einstein of “having gone over to the pure mathematicians,” and he predicted that “within a year, if not before, you will have abandoned that whole distant parallelism, just as earlier you gave up the affine theory.”22
>Pauli was right. Einstein gave up the theory within a year. But he did not give up the quest. Instead, he turned his attention to yet another revised approach that would make more headlines but not more headway in solving the great riddle he had set for himself.
Locality is an assumption of EPR. When experiments work out as EPR suggested there are two assumptions that can fail: locality or completeness. Bell specifically cites EPR as the reason he investigates locality. The reality criterion is isn't relevant to the failure of assumptions, it's analytic. I think Maudlin's 2014 arguments are really good here.
As an aside: the Everett interpretation doesn't necessarily avoid non-locality, only the inequality. No one has actually proved it local. I think Einstein would have viewed it as obvious nonsense though (the fact that the probabilities both still exist and can't be coherently derived is fatal). The Blaylock paper is interesting but the counter factual definiteness stuff is suspect as it is stronger than the necessary conditions from Bell (see the excellent SEP article on Bell's theorem).
Edit: wasn't paying attention to Pinker's argument, was only interested in EPR.
>Locality is an assumption of EPR.
Do you mean that the "reality criterion" implicitly assumes locality, or is there something else in the paper that you're saying implies an assumption of locality? I suppose one might argue that the phrasing of the reality criterion that talks about being able to predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity "without in any way disturbing a system" could only sensibly be applied to entangled systems if you assume that measuring one member of the pair doesn't immediately disturb the other which is considered as a separate "system" because it's at a different location. If that idea makes sense, maybe I was too hasty in saying that Bohmian mechanics satisfies the reality criterion, even though it does allow the particles to have well-defined positions and velocities at all times (and come to think of it I'm not sure if measurements of velocity/momentum in Bohmian mechanics give results that agree with the preexisting Bohmian velocity, maybe they always disturb the velocity of the particle that's being measured).
Would you agree, though, that EPR hadn't realized the basic point proved by Bell that QM statistics are inconsistent with the idea of a local theory with additional variables beyond those in the state vector? (leaving aside weird loopholes like superdeterminism or many-worlds type interpretations)
>As an aside: the Everett interpretation doesn't necessarily avoid non-locality, only the inequality. No one has actually proved it local. I think Einstein would have viewed it as obvious nonsense though (the fact that the probabilities both still exist and can't be coherently derived is fatal).
Yes, the fact that there's no agreed-upon way to derive probabilities also is what prevents it from showing that Bell inequality violations can be derived in a local way, even if measurement operators do evolve in a local way as [argued by Rubin](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0103079) (my intuition is that the most promising approaches are those that say the probability of events at one time depend on environmental records of some kind, pointer states, that persist indefinitely into the future as in [quantum Darwinism](https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.5082)). But one can at least show using [simplified toy models](https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/1/87/htm) with multiple "copies" of events at different locations that it is possible to violate Bell inequalities in a purely local theory where probabilities are defined in a straightforward way in terms of fractions of copies with different local measurement results. So this is a genuine loophole in Bell's proof, even if no one has come up with a model that exploits this loophole and also clearly reproduces all the probabilistic predictions of QM with the Born rule.
Bohm definitely satisfies the reality criterion I think. The locality assumption in EPR is that no "influence" can propagate between the systems faster than c (explicitly assumed in the paper). Yes, this is perhaps the most simplistic form of locality. But the fact that you could explain why the EPR argument is valid, and yet QM isn't incomplete, is what leads to Bell's work in the first place. Notably, Bohr and his acolytes don't really believe QM could be non-local, but want to eat the completeness cake anyway (Maudlin 2014 for more details). So EPR is vital to introducing this possibility, despite the obscurantist dominance in QM thinking.
My suggestion about many worlds was that I thought Einstein would disapprove due to the theory being both convoluted and ineffective. Mainly because he seemed to view explanation as an important aspect of theories. Whereas, many worlds is really a non-explanation. Rather than try to understand the problems of QM interpretation, it simply conjectures an elaborate reason not to interpret it at all. It's just the insistence on preserving classical biases rather than earnestly reviewing what non-locality might mean. I see it as preserving the obscurantist tradition of Bohr.
Neuron by neuron eh? Good thing nothing outside the brain influences
cognition at all!
Isn’t this supposed to be pinkers area of expertise?
Edit- pinker does okay in the opening and is honest about
intelligence but holy shit Scott thinks super intelligence can
functionally be defined as Einstein but fast? These guys can’t even
conceive of a God capable of having deep thoughts.
Pinker's area of expertise is doing pro bono work for Alan Dershowitz to argue Jeffrey Epstein didn't run afoul of anti-trafficking laws based on a technicality.
> Edit- pinker does okay in the opening and is honest about intelligence but holy shit Scott thinks super intelligence can functionally be defined as Einstein but fast? These guys can't even conceive of a God capable of having deep thoughts.
Unless I really misread it, I think he's trying to give "Einstein but fast" as a lower bound because that is something we can concieve. "Deep thoughts" are more nebulous.
Isn't the advantage of AI that it does not adhere to the limits of human cognition? Isn't simulating a human mind (his explicit example) a huge waste of computation that could be used more efficiently in streamlined/artificial models?
There are too many thing wrong here. Mentally exchange AI for NNs in the following passages, because, let us be real, there is no working concept of AIs outside of the NNs that we have - real AGI or AI is still sci-fi.
No human is "superintelligent" in the way that AI/NN researchers talk about AI/NN; no not even "Einstein but a thousand times faster". That is a concept of superintelligence thought up by a four year old.
Aaronson writes about an AI/NN simulating a personality. This makes no sense; either you have a simulation of a mind in which the "intelligence" emerges from the content of the simulation, from what is simulated, in which case the simulation has nothing to do with AI/NNs. This is what I was describing in the previous posts; running a simulation of something analog *on* an AI/NN would be a gigantic waste of processing power in the same way that simulating an analog synthesizer as a VST/by digital means takes a large amount of processing power.
Or - which I think Aaronson is trying to say - you have an AI/NN which *emulates* a human mind, i.e. is trained in a way that the network resembles those of a real person. That is something entirely different, but he conflates both.
Also what does simulating the personality of a human have to do with intelligence? Do you want to have a nice chat with Einstein about the weather? That is - even when, remind you, only theoretically possible - a matter of raw computing power, not intelligence. Imitating Einstein by generating theories about relativity or quantum mechanics is one matter, but Aaronson writes:
> Give the AI a year, and it would think … well, whatever thoughts Einstein would’ve thought, if he’d had a millennium in peak mental condition to think them.
He is under the impression that human thinking is pure computation; from a psychological and biological perspective, that is bollocks. ExampleOk7440 said it better than me in this thread:
> one interesting "tell" is that [the computational theory of mind] is held by very few academics whose area of expertise is either the biological (e.g. medical doctors, psychiatrists) or social-psychological aspects of the mind. it is mostly (but not exclusively) held by people whose primary area of interest is machines.
Not even mentioning that the brain is a complex organ in relationship with all the hormones, peptides and so on of the organs, receiving feedback from the whole body, not to mention an environment etc. Good luck with your insane Einstein brain-in-a-jar simulation.
All of this only about a single short paragraph by Aaronson; and after that, I seriously cannot be arsed to read the rest. Also not interested in discussing this. Meh.
> What way do you suggest?
Nothing, but then I am not claiming to be at the top of the AI field.
If we can put human minds into computers that is also a way to become immortal, which is more the goal here [of the LW transhumanists] than preventing acausalrobotgod from torturing us forever. (And in both cases 'this is possible' is a precondition).
The goal is to live forever and spread the light of human consciousness (insert matrix clip of the antagonist saying 'me me me me' here) all over the universe.
> The goal is to live forever and spread the light of human consciousness all over the universe.
Well, as I believe consciousness to be existence itself, to me that is already true.
I freely admit that I have no principled definition of “general
intelligence,” let alone of “superintelligence.” To my mind, though,
there’s a simple proof-of-principle that there’s something an AI could
do that pretty much any of us would call “superintelligent.”
Namely, it could say whatever Albert Einstein would say in a
given situation, while thinking a thousand times faster.
Is this a joke? This is so stupid.
This is supposed to be a noteworthy person in the field of AI?
I think I finally 'get' Aaronson. He's intellectually vapid. Notice how shallow and cliched his responses are. They are what you might hear from a precocious adolescent desperate to prove how 'smart' he is, but completely devoid of any understanding of the conceptual depth of the topic. OMG! He sounds exactly like GPT-3! I can't believe we're sneering at a bloody chatbot...
What the hell is he on about making a superintelligent Jane Austin
that would create masterpieces by the thousands? Right there you realize
you are dealing with a silly schoolboy who has no understanding of
creativity or art. Great literature isn’t about silly word correlations,
but about the lived experience of the artist. He really has no argument
beyond superintelligence is a magic superpower that let you do
anything.
Eh.... I think defining what "great art" is complicated, but saying it's about "the lived experience of the artist" is just as simplistic as saying it's about silly word correlations: Both of these things can make for great art under different contexts.
oh dear, an Aaronson fanboy has come out to play. As usual we get the dimwitted "people's lives full of experience, hope, dreams, suffering, elation, empathy, joy... is just simplistic, and no different to silly word correlations..."
I am no Aaronson fanboy, but i am objecting to the idea that great art is just the authors lived experiences, and not a combination of a whole bunch of things.
Oh God... Derp derp derp... I am Supernerd... I have the power of pedantry... all comments sneering at nerds must be accompanied by clear sufficient and necessary conditions... derp derp derp...
It would be kind of funny if the rationalists spent countless time and money to revive a digital Einstein and he just berates them for not doing socialism until they turn him off again.
Nightmare blunt rotation
Pinker:
Fuck you, asshole. Einstein understood quantum physics, not like you with your “hurr durr entropy means we don’t need to care about poor people” approach to physics. Einstein won his Nobel Prize for just one part of his work on quantum physics. He knew that the theory was correct; he just didn’t accept it as the final word, and even his thoughts about what might replace it were subtle and carefully developed. The paper that presented the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox is one of the most influential physics articles ever published, and it just gave Podolsky’s less sophisticated version of Einstein’s thinking. People have been writing about this for years — no, decades — so you’ve no excuse not to fucking get it now.
Neuron by neuron eh? Good thing nothing outside the brain influences cognition at all!
Isn’t this supposed to be pinkers area of expertise?
Edit- pinker does okay in the opening and is honest about intelligence but holy shit Scott thinks super intelligence can functionally be defined as Einstein but fast? These guys can’t even conceive of a God capable of having deep thoughts.
Is this a joke? This is so stupid.
This is supposed to be a noteworthy person in the field of AI?
So much technobabble.
What the hell is he on about making a superintelligent Jane Austin that would create masterpieces by the thousands? Right there you realize you are dealing with a silly schoolboy who has no understanding of creativity or art. Great literature isn’t about silly word correlations, but about the lived experience of the artist. He really has no argument beyond superintelligence is a magic superpower that let you do anything.
Interesting! Perhaps Pinker can let us know what his pal Jeffrey Epstein thinks of AI scaling.
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