2,130 karma · joined August 29, 2016
In fact a single transistor is both a sensor and actuator.
In fact you can use them to do things they were not designed to do like trough row hammer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer
CPUs can also detect things like collisions with cosmic rays.
CPUs just can't produce macroscopic forces relevant on human scale.
But the question "Can a CPU experience qualia?" can not be answered by saying:
"no, because CPU computation exists on some platonic ideas plane".
Computation is physical both in brain and in silica.
Why would moving physical objects like electrons by micro meters not be good enough, but by meters it would?
Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ):
3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"
I personally prefer that meaning of the word.
Historically, the meaning of "rationalism" changed both trough time and cultures.
The way "rationalism" is being used by the lesswrong crowd is currently accepted for example by Polish dictionaries:
Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ):
3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"
Also from: Williams B., Rationalism, [w:] D.M. Borchert (red.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, t. VIII, Thomson Gale, 2006, s. 239-247, ISBN 0-02-866072-2.
Rationalism in the enlightenment
The term rationalism is often loosely used to describe an outlook allegedly characteristic of some eighteenth- century thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly in France, who held an optimistic view of the power of sci- entific inquiry and of education to increase the happiness of humankind and to provide the foundations of a free but harmonious social order. In this connection “ratio- nalistic” is often used as a term of criticism, to suggest a naive or superficial view of human nature that overesti- mates the influence of benevolence and of utilitarian cal- culation and underestimates both the force of destructive impulses in motivation and the importance of such non- rational factors as tradition and faith in the human econ- omy. Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Condorcet, among others, are often cited in this connec- tion. Although there is some truth in these criticisms, the naïveté of these and other Enlightenment writers has often been grossly exaggerated. Also, insofar as “reason” is contrasted with “feeling” or “sentiment,” it is somewhat misleading to describe the Enlightenment writers as rationalistic, for many of them (Denis Diderot, for exam- ple) characteristically emphasized the role of sentiment. Reason was praised in contrast with faith, traditional authority, fanaticism, and superstition. It chiefly repre- sented, therefore, an opposition to traditional Christian- ity.
Here there are two contrasts with the seventeenth- century rationalism of Descartes and others. First, this rationalism is not characteristically antireligious or non- religious; on the contrary, God in some sense, often in a traditional sense, plays a large role in rationalist systems (although Spinoza’s notion of God was extremely unorthodox, and it is notable that the opposition of rea- son and faith is important in his Tractatus Theologico- Politicus). Second, the view of science held by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire was different from that of rationalism, being much more empiricist. The central contrast embodied in the term rationalism as applied to the earlier systems is that of reason versus experience, a contrast that is certainly not present in the Enlightenment praise of the “rational.”
Find me another car executive that would have been bold enough to do something like Tesla Giga Castings before Elon decided to go for it.
There are 4 entities to date that delivered people to Earth orbit:
- Russia - USA - China - SpaceX
There is only one entity that made rocket reuability profitable: SpaceX
There is no person alive with better track record on delivering things that were believed by experts to be impossible.
Shareholders paid him tens of billions to stay after he wanted to step down as CEO after Model 3 push.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/21/elon-musk-s...
Elon Musk is golden goose for Tesla shareholders.
Also, alcohol is one of the worst drugs, but it is legal.
> In the early 2000s, the monetary cost of alcohol-related crime in the United States alone has been estimated at over $205 billion, more than twice the economic cost of all other drug-related crimes.
> Alcohol is implicated in one quarter of all homicides globally.
> A report released in 2001 showed that 80% of violent crime committed by young people in Estonia has been linked to alcohol abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol-related_crime
https://web.archive.org/web/20140504141105/http://www.who.in...
Exactly the same philosophy applies at Tesla.
Whatever it is that Elon does it works for his companies.
If you don't want the expectation to give 110% of what you can, don't work for Elon companies.
You can argue that factory workers don't have choice what job their are doing, so they need checks and balances.
But people who could work remotely certainly can change employer if they dislike Elon work ethics.
The societal costs of these diseases is bigger than any of the illegal drugs.
Handling of ill people should be the job of the health care system, not punitive system.
There is plenty of papers showing advance theory wise.
Some even show that big compute is necessary like "A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry":
> Classically, data interpolation with a parametrized model class is possible as long as the number of parameters is larger than the number of equations to be satisfied. A puzzling phenomenon in deep learning is that models are trained with many more parameters than what this classical theory would suggest. We propose a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. We prove that for a broad class of data distributions and model classes, overparametrization is necessary if one wants to interpolate the data smoothly. Namely we show that smooth interpolation requires d times more parameters than mere interpolation, where d is the ambient data dimension. We prove this universal law of robustness for any smoothly parametrized function class with polynomial size weights, and any covariate distribution verifying isoperimetry. In the case of two-layers neural networks and Gaussian covariates, this law was conjectured in prior work by Bubeck, Li and Nagaraj. We also give an interpretation of our result as an improved generalization bound for model classes consisting of smooth functions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.12806
I mean, you can be upset at the universe for the way it is, just what is the point?
Recently they released GPT-NeoX-20B. They mainly coordinate on Discord. They got compute from some company for free.
Another group called BigScience got a grant from France to use a public institution supercomputer to train large language model in open. They are 71% done training their 176 billion parameters open-source language model called "BLOOM".
> During one-year, from May 2021 to May 2022, 900 researchers from 60 countries and more than 250 institutions are creating together a very large multilingual neural network language model and a very large multilingual text dataset on the 28 petaflops Jean Zay (IDRIS) supercomputer located near Paris, France.
https://bigscience.huggingface.co/
If there is a will there is a way.
BTW - People close to EleutherAI are looking for people wanting to play around with open-source machine learning for biology.
You just need to start contributing on their Discord: https://twitter.com/nc_znc/status/1530545001557643265
I live in Finland. No issue with charging next to my apartment block.
Before I lived 4 years in Netherlands. Also, zero issues. Plenty of people charging cars parked next to road side.
A battery may loose 40% capacity. That's bad for a car, but perfectly fine for stationary electricity storage.
Also, EU has "End of Life Vehicles Directive" since 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive
A man who awards medals to soldiers committing crimes against humanity.
Even Xi seems to be surprised at what is taking place.
How can you trust anything that Putin signs or says?
This man understand strength and strength only.
You can talk softly or harshly, but carry the biggest stick you can afford when talking to Putin.
And do not trust anything.
I think people really do no want to believe how absolutely evil Putin is.
As an example, Putin quoted a song during press conference with Emmanuel Macron in early February about Ukraine:
"Whether you like it or don't like it, bear with it, my beauty."
The full quote from "Sleeping beauty in a coffin" song by Red Mold would be:
> Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.
Putin just casually quotes songs about necrophilia with regard to Ukraine when planning a war.
And then awards soldiers who probably actually did carry out necrophilia in Ukraine.
> Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission. This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members. If he does not obtain the required majority, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall within one month propose a new candidate who shall be elected by the European Parliament following the same procedure.
Article 17(7) Treaty on European Union (TEU)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
To be honest, I don't even know what is the legal basis of the whole lead candidate idea. Do you know?
The main political power in EU resides with the member states.
Most of EU countries are parliamentary democracies where executives are not directly elected.
EU Commission is an executive body for the member states with regard to the competences granted to EU by the member states.
EU Commission is confirmed by EU Parliament and can be also dismissed by EU Parliament in vote of no confidence.
USA is a presidential democracy where a lot of power resides with a single person.
Supreme Court Judge in USA is appointed for life and is supposed to be independent from the rest of the power structures.
Are you from some BRICS country?
Russians with Austrians and Prussians have destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. They were forcing russification on us. After we regained independence we had to go trough another war with Soviet Russia in 1919. Fortunately, we stood our ground in 1920. But then we got attacked by Germans on 1st of September 1939 and backstabbed by Soviets on 17th of September.
Both Germans and Soviets proceeded to mass execute Poles. Both were attempting to destroy Poland. Under direct orders of Stalin Soviets mass executed Poles in Katyń Massacre. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Poles were send to Siberia to camps of long death.
My grandmother lived trough the second world war. She still remembers hiding as a small girl from Russian speaking soldiers who were raping children and women indiscriminately.
My grandmother managed to escape Poland before the martial law of 1981. The quality of life in the west was incomparably better than in the communist block.
If CIA was involved with Solidarność I can only be grateful to USA. I'm really grateful to my parents generation who decided to join EU and NATO right after they kicked out communist regime. My grandmother visited Poland for the first time some 6 years after we joined EU. She could not believe how much better life was in Poland at that time.
Today, I work in Belgium, I studied in Netherlands and live in Finland with my Finish girlfriend. I'm welcomed as a friend and equal everywhere. European Union is what Europeans for hundreds of years of unending wars could only dream about.
But Russia is bend on dragging us back. NO!
It's quite possible that without German appeasement of Putin this 2022 invasion would have not even happen.
France and Germany blocked Ukraine NATO membership.
Some of German leaders still hope to go to business like usual like Volkswagen CEO.
Germans still keep on saying that nobody could have foreseen this war.
Well, in 2008, 14 years ago, Polish president in Tbilisi during the Russian invasion of Georgia:
> We know very well. Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow – the Baltic States and later, perhaps, time will come for my country, Poland.
If I recall correctly they also delivered 2000 NLAWs before the start of the war. Ukrainian soldiers love NLAWs.
5000 helmets from Germany with a month of delay were really more of an insult than help to Ukraine.
France is still going around with "do not humiliate Putin". Well, I want to see him on a trial in Hague.
And the idea that Poland will grant Putin any say over our politics is ridiculous.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/hearings2019/commissi...
The EU Parliament elections by the direct citizens vote were on 23–26 May 2019.
Her election is really not much different than election of any other prime minister / executive in parliamentary democracies.
The only difference is that the president of the EU Commission is proposed by the member states.
Does it do something better than any other language?
Putin quoted a song during press conference with Emmanuel Macron in early February about Ukraine:
"Whether you like it or don't like it, bear with it, my beauty."
The full quote from "Sleeping beauty in a coffin" song by Red Mold would be:
Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.
That gives you the mindset of Putin with regard to Ukraine.
Also, some personal note - my grandmother as a little girl had to hide from Russian speaking soldiers who were raping women and girls in my home town during "liberation" of Poland from Germany at the end of WWII. The stories from Ukraine are exactly the same as what my grandmother lived trough.
Russia lost that war and had to settle borders with Poland in the Treaty of Riga.
> I agree that discussing who should and should not be in the government of an independent state is wrong.
But annexing a piece of land is just on a completely different level.
There is no equivalency and you should not be trying to create it.
USA talked, while Russia started a war. Both can be understood as interventions, but they are not equivalent.