StandardFuture

> Ironically enough, no discourse is so dogmatic and blind and unable to question its own values than the American one.

This speech seems rather ... hateful. Shall we fine you? Officers! This man is screaming hateful speech in the public arena!

Or maybe you disagree with that being hate speech? In an uncivilized society, if I have the power then it doesn't really matter. You still get fined or worse.

> You can question everything, just not your own values on speech

No, you can still question that in a free society if you so choose. But you may not necessarily be able to in an unfree one.

> You've turned freedom of speech into dogmatic faith.

This is entirely disingenuous. Supporting a philosophical position is not without reason, as you well know, and is not automatically dogmatic.

> It's all just platitudes about authoritarianism and slippery slopes and ironically enough unoriginal, replicated talking points.

Perhaps, you can better explain your dogmatic devotion to your belief that freedom of speech is not an important tenant of modern civility and sophistication?

> used to enforce current political orthodoxy.

Which is a nice way of saying that this is the beginnings of a new authoritarian and totalitarian age.

It should be very worrying to everyone to see speech be legally punished in the West.

Slippery slopes do exist and this is one.

> I agree that there's not enough to say definitively that Enigma definitely had a major impact

The parent comment wrote:

> which is demonstrably false

which demonstrably proves my comment perfectly valid and correct.

Try again later.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra

Quote:

> The exact influence of Ultra on the course of the war is debated

So, you provided a link that proves your own comment incorrect ...

> and by extension the author.

I love how idiots on HN are justifying blatant ad hominem attacks in their commentary as being perfectly valid.

WTF is HN becoming? Are people really getting this stupid?

You did not actually prove how exactly launching criticisms of the writing style over the content is not cheap. You can hate and critique the writing style all you want, but focusing on that in your HN comments is in fact the very notion of cheap commentary.

So, would you like to try again? Are you intellectually capable of providing a proper retort?

Attempting to discuss the well-documented statistical declines of testosterone in men is always and completely "Alex Jones"?

You need to get out more.

> class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative

It's a writing style. Like it or hate it.

Nonetheless, criticisms of writing style are far too cheap and shallow for HN. Be better.

> inability to concentrate, confusion, alertness, consciousness, memory, anxiety, social, and sleep problems

Has anyone every genuinely done any research to check if an increase in theses resulting symptoms from decreasing T levels across men over the past few decades is highly-correlated to our seeming decline in productivity and generally stagnating GDP growth?

Can it be affecting the contributions of 50% of the population? Can it be affecting scientific, industrial, cultural, community, and familial contributions from men across society more than we realize?

And what would we actually do if we did realize this?

> it's a useless debate

Not really. It's just too complicated of a "debate" (it's actually a non-debate) or discussion to dive into the differentiating factors that will assume different priorities for different people. Tradeoffs are everywhere and in everything and so is nuance.

Personally, I am growing tired of chasing Windows releases every few years so I will re-prioritize almost entirely around Linux's strengths.

Planned obsolescence strikes again. Time for everything to go completely to Linux. Including a non-Android mobile.

> But not dumbing down - skilling up

But, you cannot have Wall Street consolidated market winners if you do that! How dare you!

I saw this first hand growing up. The school system had a couple of programming courses a few years before I got into the high school, and then it got all new computers and magically reduced computer education to only a set of Microsoft Office courses offered.

Who needs programming? The school knew we would all only need Word and Excel at any "office job" we could possibly ever get ...

It's not grid based. But that seems like a rather pedantic differentiation to make. It does quite literally utilize the concept of "cells". [0]

I find it interesting that the project seems to have hard-coded emergence with the concept of "tokens".

So, I am much less intrigued by the simulation examples when most of what we are seeing is just a procedurally-generated video game with pre-defined game rules. Much of it is not truly emergent.

Again, it's a "oh, that's cool" kind of factor, but a far cry from contributing to anything in the way of "artificial life" research.

[0] https://alien-project.org/documentation/Basicnotion.html

But, we as a community should get better at calling these companies out publicly. Especially if they show up in a comment on the monthly hiring post. Don't let your fellow engineers get burnt. More community cooperation in this regard would go a long way.

> The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic

As with everything on the internet (it sadly seems), there is a necessity for nuanced position. Perhaps, economic and cultural factors are playing a self-reinforcing and thus compounding effect on our society?

There are also the non-cultural and non-economic factors such as declining testosterone levels. This could have profound emergent economic and cultural implications that we have not even begun to calculate.

> so it's very hard to simulate at scale.

But, this is a very unaddressed point. Why focus on "simulation" when mathematical formalisms & theories could be potentially even more useful? Especially when most "simulations" are running on some arbitrary set of hard-coded assumptions?

> What you see as a criticism of this line of research

To clarify, I was in no way criticizing ALife research. Quite the opposite. I am actually trying to help ensure it does not get stuck in a rut.

> https://avida.devosoft.org/

Thanks for the link!

> Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.

While I would like to believe you on that, one link does not seem sufficient to support the word "plenty" when the ratio of ALife projects built around CAs to not is extremely high.

> And what would be the point of this simulation that has been running for billions of years?

There is zero evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, so why would some random person on HN be able to have the answer to this question even if we are in a simulation or even if we simply assume that we are?

Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata? If you could supply the mathematical reasoning for this, I would be very interested in hearing the answer.

And preferably an answer that goes beyond just saying that Von Neumann used Cellular Automata in his ALife research.

Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these.

All in all, I find these procedurally generated art pieces to be rather underwhelming in any serious attempt or study of what artifical life is/can be.

> digital organisms and evolution

This is a claim without definition of what a non-biological organism even is. Could we just claim that any CA, any program is "living" while it is running?

I would love to see some formality before claims are made in this area.

EDIT: After watching the "Planet Gaia" video [0], I feel even more like the excitement about this is no different than the excitement for a video game and not for actual scientific progress. Cool code and cool visuals. Very little in the way of understanding life better.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9R6zrdl6jM

I believe it was a video that the World Economic Forum put out on their YouTube in 2020. I am not sure if they took it down or not since then.

Related: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

Marx, is that you?

Did you even read my comment?

And if you did read my comment then did you actually understand it?

And if you actually understood it then can you actually address the points made in it instead of asking an entirely already answered question?

It sounds like "amortized" is close to mathematically meaningless in that case.

Why not use actual statistics jargon at that point?

Sometimes we need to realize that the reactions of people inside of the software community are almost purely due to their own personal (usually social) insecurities and are not worth addressing.

We have an entire thread giving credibility to someone who absolutely idiotically dismissed another person for not knowing the meaning of a single word.

The person who was temporarily ignorant of the meaning of that word is not the one I am thinking needs to be ignored here.

Classic HN, two downvotes and no one is capable of providing a counter-argument. The unintelligent flourish far too easily here. They should have more demanded of them. There are no clear incentives to not just throw a punch and run away like a coward on this site.

HN rules: apply the most gracious interpretation to my comment.

> you'd see the vast mmajority of tax revenue is spent on welfare

That is the point from the prior comment I am supporting. I am emphasizing that this is true because of the inevitability of bureaucracy inside of the very notion of "government".

Government was never capable of efficient utilization of taxes for maximizing benefits to society. It can never promise that due to basic incentive structures and the mathematics of game-theory. Of course, politicians can lie about it (and many do all the time).

It can only promise an attempt and some degree of benefits provided.

No, as has been pointed out to you - multiple times - reaching a deal is not equivalent to a deal being legal.

> The BBC is not lying

No, just the status quo BBC propaganda. Let's review some quotes.

> the arrival of the Biden administration in the US, created a moment of opportunity.

> A minimum corporation tax rate of 15% is rather low

> European finance ministers succeeded in including the phrase "at least 15%", which offers a path to get that number higher.

> Tech firms say they welcomed the move.

> A process has begun, a precedent has been set. It may or may not end up being transformative, but this moment is historic.

This last quote is the BBC admitting to painting this as if it was a contract being signed.

Let's continue.

> more tax revenue would be raised from large multinationals and would help pay for public services.

Only public services? Not military? Salaries? Government contracts? etc., etc.? Well, this IS historic!

> Ms Yellen said there was an understanding that national digital services taxes such as those levied by the UK and EU countries would be scrapped and replaced by the new agreement. Such taxes are regarded by the US as unfairly targeting American technology giants.

So, the tech giants get a new tax standard that benefits them over the existing standard?? Funny, this really does go along with the previous quote:

> Tech firms say they welcomed the move.

And here is another interesting quote to focus on:

> Paolo Gentiloni, the EU commissioner for the economy, described Saturday's agreement as a "big step... towards an unprecedented global agreement on tax reform"

It sets a precedence that nothing about what is being done could even be remotely criticized except for it possibly not being enough.

It's laughable. How anyone does not see this as North Korean Kim Dynasty style propaganda is beyond redemption and likely has a double digit IQ.

Then the article ends with three quotes from Amazon, FB, and Google.

Gee, I wonder who sponsored this article (and possibly helped coordinate this meeting).

It couldn't be techopolies trying to cozy up with existing government officials in the hopes of securing an agreement that is mutually beneficial for everyone.

But, paying more money is never beneficial for a company. So, game-theoretically, and thus purely mathematically-speaking: what benefit could these tech companies be receiving from this new arrangement?

Hmm ... surely, in our modern crony capitalist system, it wouldn't be anything corrupt in nature?

> you have to have $10M in profit

Sorry, I missed where this was mentioned in the article. Can you supply a link to the reference if it is not in the article?

I did see the following quote:

> The rules on making multinationals pay taxes where they operate - known as "pillar one" of the agreement - would apply to global companies with at least a 10% profit margin.

which is not equivalent to your comment.

Exactly Zero of anything you have just said negates the point that was made.

Let's reiterate:

> Here's what it says in the Constitution:

> "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"

> Crystal clear.

Anything that is not explicitly defined in the Constitution is certainly left up to the interpretation and decisions (within their constitutional authorizations) of the three branches of government.

However, anything that is explicit in the constitution cannot be overturned without a constitutional amendment.

Hopefully that clears things up for you.

> The money actually going for care is pretty minimal.

That is literally the point.

Welfare = Welfare bureaucracy + Welfare Benefits

This is true of everything the government does. Government = bureaucracy + benefits, with a larger percentage going to support the bureaucracy than in any other organization or context.

And even if you increase money for benefits, the same (or sometimes larger percentage) goes to supporting the bureaucracy of those benefits.

It's not hard.

You don't actually think that your comment negates my point, do you?

The point of the sarcasm is to emphasize that if you already cannot do it with trillions then you certainly are not going to get it done with billions.

It's a simple argument that stands entirely on it's own.

You first need to provide convincing evidence to the contrary rather than just saying things like "imagine if we gave even more money to something that we already give money too ..."

Is HN devolving into 3-year old logic? I swear the last couple of years have been bad.

Crumbling infrastructure and propaganda daycare seem pretty low cost to me. It certainly reflects a low IQ society for sure.