TelmoMenezes

This is very interesting work. Regarding:

"However, graphs are inherently combinatorial structures made of discrete parts like nodes and edges, while many common ML methods, like neural networks, favor continuous structures, in particular vector representations."

I apologize in advance for a bit of self-promotion, but I would like to point out my own approach, which instead favors discrete ML methods to discover symbolic generators of networks. That is to say, small programs that are capable of generating synthetic networks with similar topological and other characteristics to some empirically observed one. If you happen to be interested:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep06284

http://www.telmomenezes.net/2014/09/using-evolutionary-compu...

I am not saying that my approach is better, it depends on the goal. On the contrary, I am increasingly a believer in hybrid (symbolic-statistic) methods.

> The first thing I thought when I saw Elon Musk's writing AI was how powerful of a search marketing tool this is.

"Search marketing" is the current euphemism for spamming?

> oh yes, and about the ZX Spectrum... I can't imagine anyone willingly changing from something else to that rubber keyboard! Yuck.

The ZX Spectrum had tons of games (many of them quite creative, many weird), all kinds of software (limitied, of course, but even a Lisp) and several magazines dedicated to it. Many of my friends owned one, so it was much more fun than owning a more obscure computer, no matter how much better its keyboard was. Remember, there was no internet.

I still have nostalgic conversations with friends from that time about how magic the ZX Spectrum world was.

I highly doubt that you are just the "end user" you claim to be, otherwise you wouldn't be here, having this discussion. But let's assume that you are.

>Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.

What you are describing is the very common mix of "tragedy of the commons" + "pure utilitarianism". The future would be vastly better if everyone made a small sacrifice now, but each individual action counts for so little that you make the selfish but rational choice of letting others do the small sacrifice.

Maybe your page loads faster now, but this is happening by risking the destruction of the very environment that makes such pages worth reading (independent journalism, freedom from corporate control, etc.). In the long run, it means worse results for you, but your individual sacrifice is unlikely to have any effect. You feel selfish, so you rationalize a story where you are just the "common person" doing what makes sense.

The fact that we have a civilization is proof that there are ways out of this deadlock. For a long time, the answer was religion. We need something for the XXI century to play that role, i.e. making people think not only as individuals but also members of an entire species, ecosystem, etc.

Meanwhile, what you are saying amounts to: "fuck you, I got mine".

> You're following the narative trope of one person being immortal and watching as everything around them dies.

No, that is not the reason for my comment.

It seems clear to me, both by life experience and reading related research that humans require meaning to have lives worth living. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but I suspect that it is ultimately our mortality that gives our lives meaning. If there is nothing to strive for, then there is only pleasure seeking. Your life becomes an infinitely long hedonistic binge. Human beings were not designed to withstand hedonistic binges for too long without dark consequences (as in, dissolution of meaning, extreme depression, etc).

I guess you could argue that with infinite time, you could figure out how to redesign yourself until you are comfortable with immortality. But are you still yourself by then? Or is this problem also already solved by... just dying?

Ok, so you are assuming that you would be immortal and free to pursue intellectual endeavors forever. This implies that all of your problems would be solved.

You would be forever chasing the dopamine hit of understanding more of the fields that interest you. Or you could just shoot heroin. Without mortality or problems to confront, all meaning would be lost. Math, heroin, sex, all the same. Consider the dissolution of meaning, and the fact that infinity is a very very long time.

I wonder if you would enjoy it as much as you imagine.

> The vast majority of people in the world work in order to feed themselves and their families.

Yes, and this is an inane state-of-affairs given 2019 technology. We could keep the entire world population fed with minimal effort, if we stopped acting in insane ways.

> How could you compare someone voluntarily engaging in employment to slave labor?

Is it really voluntary if the alternative is to die of starvation?

> life was hardship and adversity

Life was certainly hard in ways that it is not now, but it was definitely hard in the precise ways that we evolved to cope with.

You had to worry a lot about obtaining food and shelter, and protecting yourself from predators and enemy tribes. You also had vast amounts of time for playing, contemplating, dancing, cooking, having sex, drinking some of the weird concoctions made by the local shaman that made you see things differently. All of this.

I am not sure I would be able to forego antibiotics, anesthesia and modern medicine in general, but for those not assuming this, I wonder how nice or lives of 24/7 stress and isolation would look like to our more primitive ancestors.

Our lives are potentially longer, but are they more worth living? I'm not pretending to have an answer, but I do think the question is valid.

> If the industry was more competitive they wouldn't be able to turn away money.

This is the stupid libertarian answer for everything, not so different from communism in its arrogance and over-simplification of human motives and behaviors. If the XX century taught us anything, it's that there are no simple answers.

It the industry was perfectly competitive, nobody would be able to turn away money. We would have the perfect whip, making us all labor for all of our waking hours, no holidays, no weekends. Consumers would have perfect choice at the lowest possible prices. They would, however, have zero free time to exercise this "freedom".

Too much competition is cruel and wasteful, leading to a dystopia where, if you take 1 second of rest, someone else might not. Too little competition kills motivation to do the things that are hard but essential, leading to mass starvation and social system collapse.

The answer is democracy, which is not a simple answer nor a silver bullet. But it's the best game in town. When things go too far in one direction, it is the citizen's right and duty to push them in another one. Sometimes the government interferes too little, sometimes too much. Bureaucracies and technocrats might be unsexy, but they lead to a more pleasant and humane world than slogans.

Tech companies should not have the final say on what you can are not use markets for. In a democracy, rules of society > rules of companies.

It's worse. We can elect a new government.

If they were really smart they would see the bigger picture.

> We decided collectively

Who is "we"? I know it doesn't include me, because I was never consulted on the matter.

Congrats on overleaf. Me and my colleagues use it everyday and we love it!

Echo chambers are like Russian Dolls. Maybe you are satisfied with just opening the first one. It's up to you, no right answers!

But it is definitely not the same to move to another city in your own country or go somewhere else where social norms and language are fundamentally different.

In my experience, it is incredibly mind-expanding to live for some time in another country (or countries). Really live there, have a job, rent a house, make friends, etc. It is a process of detribalization, that can help you understand better who you are, what part of you is just an artifact of the culture you were brought up in, which parts you like to keep and which parts you would like to revise.

Not less importantly, it gives you empathy for "the other". It makes you understand how similar we all are at the core and, paradoxically, how diverse our behaviors and viewpoints can be. And it makes it harder and harder to believe that you, specifically, were born in the place with the correct behaviors and the correct viewpoint.

Tourism is a farce. I guess it gives you the social status points of going through a challenge, without actually facing any difficulties or learning anything. You can have your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or that cute Buddhist Temple, or whatever. Maybe use that super expensive camera you bought as a toy (god forbid you use it to do something different, something that hasn't been done before by one million people just that week).

Tourism itself is a paradox: its gaze destroys the very thing it wants to look at. The Ramones could no longer rent an apartment in Brooklyn. Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days, Montmartre or otherwise. Punk Rock in London? Only if you have a banking job on the side... The old ladies who sang fado from windows in old Lisbon neighborhoods had to move to the suburbs, because Madonna arrived with her entourage and every rich kid wants a piece of that "genuine" action on their Instragram.

Be a traveler, not a tourist!

> Discovering this made me pretty happy about the world. Most people are generally pretty friendly to one another (at least over email!).

Another possibility is that modern wage laborers are forced to wear a mask of positivity and say "yes, absolutely!" or "awesome!" to everything, because they are terrified of losing their jobs and not being able to keep their necks above water, in a world where fewer and fewer people own most of everything.

Perhaps you yourself are wearing this mask of positivity, when you come here and say that this makes you "pretty happy about the world".

The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and blindly following simplistic metrics).

It's healthy to say no sometimes.

Well, not really if you are just doing what the system wants.

"Hacking the system" now means being funded by the system? It used to mean something else when I was a kid...

> As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that these things show very openly how democracy is deeply flawed.

If you study a bit of History, or look beyond the western world, you will see how terrible the alternatives are. And you will see that democracy is something worth fighting for. Democracy is not flawed, it is hard. We have to fight for it, and the next generations will have to fight for it, and so on. It's real life.

I haven't resigned myself to living in a Black Mirror episode.

Exactly!

> If you just said "All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops", it's reasonable to expect that existing Chromebooks will be made Linux-ready as well.

Adding "going forward" does not remove this ambiguity. You just happen to know the correct answer. I still assumed that existing ones would also be Linux-ready, until I read your comment.

> "Going forward" means "from now on, but not including the past".

No, it just means "from now on". It has the exact same meaning as the future tense.

Your comment confirms something I suspected: unnecessary linguistic mannerisms and corporate clichés are a symptom of confused thinking.

Going forward, I will add this to my list of arguments. But not in my past discussions.

I apologize in advance for going a bit off-topic, but I would like to point out the following:

It is never necessary, and always inelegant, to write or say "going forward". Also, it stinks of corporate-speak.

The English language already has a future tense, and this bit of redundancy makes sentences sound more contrived and clunky. Simple rule of style for writing: if you can remove something and keep the meaning intact, remove it. No regrets. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".

> The difference is really about how you "recharge".

This is a very recent Internet cliché.

I believe that the terms were introduced by Carl Jung about one century ago, and they refer to the dominant focus of one's mental life. Introverts dominant focus is on their internal worlds, while extroverts dominant focus is on the external world.

I will assume below that soul = conscience = first person experience of reality

> No souls: you take a definition of "soul" as something supernatural and reject it's existence.

This position is technically called eliminative materialism, that consciousness or the first person experience of reality is an illusion. I find this to be the most absurd idea in the history of ideas, for the simple fact that I have direct experience of consciousness (my own). Or, to quote Descartes: I think, therefore I am.

> Continuous souls

This is a version of Panpsychism. I do not hold this view, but a lot of people that I respect do (for example, Ben Goertzel, the AGi researcher).

> Souls can be an emergent phenomenon out of certain kinds of complexity like consciousness.

This is known as emergentism. It is more or less the mainstream view nowadays with the scientifically literate. I consider it to be pseudoscience, because it uses the term "emergence" to hide a magic step. It is a complicated and technical discussion, but long story short, things emerge from building blocks. Markets emerge from individual transactions. Swarms emerge from certains behaviors of birds, and so on. What are the building blocks of consciousness in this model? I am not saying that they do not exist, but just saying "well it emerges somehow" is the same as believing in the supernatural, but hiding it in scientific language (aka scientsim).

The list above only contains hypothesis based on physicalism (a not super rigorous definition: the belief that matter is the fundamental stuff of reality). Physicalism seems obvious to the current status quo, but if you become more sophisticated with the mind-body problem you will see that it does not really rest on a sold foundation. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

What the list omits are the idealistic or neo-plationist hypothesis: that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of reality and matter is a second-order phenomenon. I am not defending any sort of supernatural or religious idea, I am simply pointing out that people assume too much out of a lack of philosophical sophistication. Idealism is perfectly compatible with all of modern science, and there is no particular reason to assume physicalism. The absolute belief in physicalism is akin to a modern religious dogma and it does violence to science and extends logical reasoning and empiricism beyond its current limits.

Sorry, I forgot about the mentality here for a second. I will spell out the point I was trying to make through provocation. It destroys the fun/joke, but whatever...

The Web was invented a few meters away from the EU, in a lab that literally sits in the border between the EU and a non-EU country that is mostly aligned with the EU, by a EU citizen, funded mostly by EU money, is the only reason why anyone cares about the rest of the technology stack and infrastructure that we call "Internet". It was a dream of creating an interconnected system of knowledge and communication, that transcended borders and would move humanity to a higher stage of civilization.

The Web matters because of what it allows one to do, the implementation details are only relevant in a narrow technical sense.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for many American achievements, and I grew up thinking that the USA and Europe were close friends and allies, fundamentally sharing the same values. NASA and its many achievements inspired my lifelong interest in Science.

I am not nationalistic, and I don't care how invented what. What I am fed up with, is this USA-centric view of the world, as if freedom emanates from the USA, without whom we would be condemned to vile authoritarianism. I am also fed up with the idea that invention comes from VC money, which is largely untrue. Even the Internet as you describe it was invented using government money.

All webs are splinter webs of the EU, since the web was invented here.

> Ever heard of win win relationship?

How could I not? It's one of the most repeated clichés in the history of clichés.

In any case, I am not denying mutual benefit or trying to forbid anyone from anything. I am just saying that if you are shouting "you ungrateful bastard" and the target of gratitude is a legal entity, you are just being silly.

He should get fired for saying "concurrency story".