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MadcapJake

403 karma · joined August 24, 2013

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MadcapJake··on Gemini 4 Carbon
Could it be an alphabetic system like Ubuntu's?
MadcapJake··on Why I don't think AGI is imminent
> What if we built simulated environments where AIs could gather embodied experience? Would we be able to create learning scenarios where agents could learn some of these cognitive primitives, and could that generalize to improve LLMs? There are a few papers that I found that poke in this direction.

Simulation Theory boosted! We're all just models in training.

MadcapJake··on Why I don't think AGI is imminent
You did not ask the same thing. You framed the question such that readers are supposed to look at their current lives and realize nothing is different ergo AGI is lame. Your approach utilizes the availability bias and argument from consequences logical fallacies.

I think what you are trying to say is can we define AGI so that we can have an intelligent conversation about what that will mean for our daily lives?. But you oddly introduced your argument by stating you didn't want to explore this definition...

MadcapJake··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.
MadcapJake··on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
The Corporate religion demands unwavering profit orientation. "Ethics" is just barely maintained right above the limits of market research. All for the betterment of man, amirite?
MadcapJake··on Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
I went looking for more info on Libervia and noticed your site is down.
MadcapJake··on Knowledge and memory
Reconstructing from what?
MadcapJake··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
I'm all for ceremonial drumming but there's gotta be a specific pace that fits their definition of "progressively" and i feel like that detail is lacking. Maybe there's more in the paper proper but the appendix is quite vague.
MadcapJake··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
Should i have clarified "no music you can find online or otherwise make use of in any way"? I appreciate the honest effort to come up with things! I'll see if i can find that anywhere and of appropriate length.
MadcapJake··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
> encouraged by the tempo of the music progressively increasing to the end of HVB

How does this part work? No real music does this so did they make their own for the study? Or do they select songs that change tempo subtley from one to the next?

MadcapJake··on We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application
"native" here means using the same toolkit as the desktop environment.
MadcapJake··on Go 1.25 Release Notes
Where is it mentioned that the arena experiment has been dropped?
MadcapJake··on Human speech may have a universal transmission rate (2019)
I'm sorry, but this is essentially racism prettied up. The research is about language bitrate not about regional speaking rate variations within a language.

Tangentially, I'm relatively confident that what you're experience has provided you is simply confirmation bias. Unless French is not their first language.

MadcapJake··on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.
MadcapJake··on The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.

A well reasoned theory in any science should include and test for implications in the past and present. We can't just ignore time if we want a proper understanding of the universe.

MadcapJake··on Thoughts on thinking
> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You can't prompt engineer your own brain.

In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-289...

MadcapJake··on Writing that changed how I think about programming languages
What I've never understood about this argument is this:

How often are you passing around data that you don't fully understand?

Also, people use types and then end up reaching for reflection to perform pattern matching on types at which point you've just moved the typing from the user level to a type system. Not much gained imo.

MadcapJake··on The FTC puts off enforcing its 'click-to-cancel' rule
Elected officials should make the average salary from the year prior. If it's not enough to survive then they'll need to do something about it!
MadcapJake··on I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
They said that implicitly by choosing to debate a trivial sentence designed to impart the reader with the sense of importance that this principle holds for the OP. This kind of tone policing is a tactic designed to pull you away from the original argument.
MadcapJake··on How to win an argument with a toddler
As a parent, I often found that if I actually explained why instead of the usual "Because I told you so", then I got a lot further in making them rationally arrive at the right behavior themselves (as toddlers are wont to do). I suspect that the "I told you so", not only does it completely nullify their desire but it also forces them to accept not learning and hurts their pride (which is where the tantrum comes from). These are undesirable outcomes and since parents use this trick all the time, it leads to learned behavior. Disclaimer: This is just my own analysis and I know there are times when it's too challenging to do this but it's a principle you have to focus on.
MadcapJake··on The necessity of Nussbaum
You're making it sound like a "right" is something you "get". Political philosophy typically defines a "right" as something that you have before the social contract and a good government provides assurances that your rights are supplied within their contract with the people.

To address your ordered list, steps A and B are completely wrong, these things aren't "good" nor do we "want" them. They are innate qualities of humans and thus governments must respect and uphold them.

MadcapJake··on After 120 years, Yellowstone bison are a single breeding population
> The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#Government_inv...

MadcapJake··on Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion
From the article you posted:

> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.

I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.

MadcapJake··on The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind
Salvador Dali would hold an object like a spoon in his hand while sitting in front of his canvas and fall asleep. This would cause him to drop the spoon waking him back up and then he would draw what he saw.
MadcapJake··on Trump says he has directed Treasury to stop minting new pennies
All of the "more nickels" noise is being paid for by the penny copper supplier.
MadcapJake··on Google kills diversity hiring targets
> It's just they have to compete like everyone else

That's the whole point of DEI to ensure that *no one* is getting an unfair advantage because:

- their name is white https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res... - recruitment is only occurring at certain places - or any other ways that bias can filter out perfectly good candidates

DEI is not about picking lesser candidates to fill quotas, it's about ensuring the human recruiters don't get in the way of the best talent joining your company.

MadcapJake··on Why is zero plural? (2024)
This matches my intuition. Zero is synonymous with "the absence of any X".

The singular equivalent would be perhaps "non-" or "-less".

Hot take: zero is a math concept and math deals with multitudes only (even under one, you're dealing with a multitude of parts). The actual irregularity is the usage of singular noun form in a math context.

MadcapJake··on Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity
Let's look at another media: movies. Do you ever look at reviews or the advisory notices to see if a movie will be appropriate for someone you're watching it with? This is the exact same thing but since the story hasn't been written yet, you need to agree with all the story tellers (DM and players) what your story rating will be.

Do you skip this step when it's your closest pals who can handle a gory mature story? sure!

Is it good to have a system for others to use or in public settings? Definitely.

MadcapJake··on OpenAI o1 system card
As has been belabored, these AIs are just models, which also means they are only software. Would you be so fire-and-brimstone if startups were using software on healthcare diagnostic data?

> Very few are paying any attention to the 2-10% of safety problems when the AI probability goes off the correct path.

This isn't how it works. It goes on a less common but still correct path.

If anything, I agree with other commenters that model training curation may become necessary to truly make a generalized model that is also ethical but I think the generalized model is kind of like an "everything app" in that it's a jack of all trades, master of none.

MadcapJake··on Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media
Clearly the service is not designed for people to only engage with a few folks, it's meant to be a zeitgeist firehose. If you're only following a few people it's like using a spreadsheet for tracking household frozen pizza inventory.
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