Xenograph

Not really - I think you missed the point of the original claim, it wasn't meant to be interpreted literally. In this case, "not enough work" does not translate to "not enough jobs". It translates to tons of useless jobs that employ people to count beans and create powerpoint presentations.

Perhaps the original claim would've been better phrased as "not enough real/useful/impactful work".

The real estate market (and well, most real markets) cannot be completely explained by simple supply/demand calculations covered in a high school economics course. Nor can they be entirely explained by a highly-trained economist. There are many factors at play that complicate matters.

> If you'd like ESLint to be set up for you, add --eslint to the command. Note: this will use 150mb of disk space.

This is insane. No wonder they were motivated to create a minimal development tool. How could a CLI linter require 150 MB of disk?

Sending 3,000+ LoC code reviews is not considered good engineering practice. In general it's important to keep code reviews small for the reasons you describe. If it's impossible to make incremental changes in smaller units, that's a sign of an unhealthy code base.

What exactly are they doing when they put your application in "administrative processing" for years with no explanation or time estimate? What could possibly take years to process on a standard visa application? Does anyone know?

Wine is an (imperfect) emulation layer. This runs Windows apps inside a VM, thus avoiding potential compatibility issues that are common with Wine. Downside is that running a VM requires more system resources, of course.

Shouldn't it be 250 - 100 ms (rather than plus)? The person who was talking is silent for that extra 100ms while they wait for their words to reach their peer.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I realize that I was misreading the whole time and so you answered a question that I actually didn't mean to ask. Apologies.

Instead of 'private member functions' my mind read 'member functions'.

For instance, I'd love to be able to create functions that operate on a Vector3 interface type in Typescript, but don't have the clunky syntax of

> AddVec3(AddVec3(v1, ScaleVec3(v2, DotVec3(v4, v5))), v4).

Classes in Typescript solve this just fine, so that I can do

> v1.add(v2.scale(v4.dot(v5))).add(v4)

But then I lose the benefits of structural typing. I still have yet to find a nice solution here.

> There are other ways to encapsulate besides private member functions.

Could you elaborate a bit here? I've searched for solutions in this area before without much success. I'd be interested to hear more.

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct, Koch says. “You can get one without the other.”

I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".

Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."

Your Larabar example is way off base:

1. The number of ingredients in something does not directly indicate how (un)healthy it is. The fact that Larabar contains 2-3 ingredients says nothing about its nutritional value.

2. In fact, many people would not consider Larabar to be a "processed" food to begin with because it literally is just 2-3 fruits and nuts mashed together. You could make something very similar in your own kitchen. The way you're speaking makes it sound like "processed" food is anything that is cooked or combined in some way. That is not how people use the word IME.

3. Have you looked at the sugar content of Larabar? It's not low, nor would I consider it healthy or wholesome. They likely chose dates specifically because of their extremely high sugar content so that they could pretend they are healthy while actually including unhealthy amounts of sugar in their product under the guise of dates.

You're right, I was a bit too harsh. You indeed mentioned that they make strong claims without solid evidence, which is a valid criticism.

However, from what I recall, they don't present the ideas in the book as facts or established theories like your critique seems to imply. They make it very clear that this is uncharted territory and that there is a lot of science to be done. In fact I think one of the main purposes of the book was to convince the reader that there is in fact tangible research to be done in the subject, and questions worth asking.

A large proportion of the book is indeed spent convincing the reader that panpsychism is a worthy theory, yes. And despite their lack of empirical data (which has proven hard to collect in this area), they make logically sound arguments that the theory is at least worth further consideration.

This is how many scientific theories start, as hypotheses that seem logically sound but lack specific empirical evidence. These hypotheses then guide how we design our experiments. The book argues that panpsychism is a worthy hypothesis, and it does not do so by referencing any woo or pseudoscience.

You just shot down the book/idea (panpsychism) without providing a single constructive reason. Instead, you applied a derogatory label ('woo'), and attacked the proponents instead of the idea itself, saying: "the proponents of this idea seem a little too convinced...".

> I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong?

Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia.

That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as:

1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia.

2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering).

If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering.

Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs?

It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.

You are conflating consciousness[1] with self-awareness[2]. They are two distinct ideas.

In fact the second/third sentence on the Wikipedia page for self-awareness is:

> It [self-awareness] is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness

Could someone explain the joke?

Keep in mind that CFR takes into account only those that are confirmed positive (which are mostly people who already have severe symptoms).

That said, parent comment's math is still way off (see my sibling comment).

> if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

Apologies if this was intended to be hyperbole, but it is not true according to our current knowledge. Estimated fatality rate for adults 20-30 is 0.03%, 30-40 is 0.08%, and 40-50 and 0.16% [1]

The probability of dying from one single vehicle ride to the hospital is several orders of magnitude less than 0.1% or even 0.01%. There are 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven in the USA [2]. Even if the hospital is 100 miles away, your odds of dying on the way there are 0.000125%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Progn...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

Are you talking about Bitwarden or bitwarden_rs? Because bitwarden_rs is simply a third-party implementation of the Bitwarden API server AFAIU.

> With our consciousness, we become curious and ask questions. We devise experiments that lead to quantum collapse.

You are mixing up intelligence and consciousness.

Could you elaborate on how you know "the amount of time a candidate took [on Goldmine] turned out to be a pretty strong signal."?

> Not open source, only partly, just like Telegram.

Signal is completely open source. I'm not sure why you think it's only partly open source.

Quoting Wikipedia[1]:

> All Signal software are free and open-source. The clients are published under the GPLv3 license, while the server code is published under the AGPLv3 license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

> For a given word you should have the definition and the forward and reverse translation.

Perhaps for simple/beginner words. But for more advanced words, it's important to realize that our active vocabulary is necessarily much smaller than our passive vocabulary. There are many words we can recognize but can't immediately synthesize ourselves on demand just from an idea or concept (or a translation, even). For anything beyond the most simple words, I think that having the reverse translation doesn't make a whole lot of sense and can be pretty counterproductive in developing one's passive vocabulary.

That's assuming that the same neurogenesis still happens in the absence of a conscious experience. Do you have evidence that supports this?

You seem to be implying that people who use Venmo and/or prefer to deal in exact numbers aren't decent human beings. I suggest you reevaluate that position and consider how greed might not be the root cause of someone behaving that way.

I'd also argue that using a Venmo doesn't take away the opportunity for someone to be generous. Venmo isn't much different from cash except that it makes it more convenient to be precise - it certainly doesn't force anyone to be precise though.

The awe you're describing and the "awe" of his friends are very different, AFAICT. What you describe is perfectly healthy and reasonable: GCC/etc are unquestionably complex systems that can't be fully understood without thorough long-term study and experience. Oversimplifying them would be reckless, and so the average user of them should possess a certain awe and respect for them.

But this is different from having no conception of how compilers work and how one might implement one. As complex as modern compilers are, the foundational principles still apply to them, and an understanding of these principles makes them much less awe-inspiring. I think that having a clear view of the big picture, rather than having certain areas of the picture blocked off entirely as magical black boxes, allows for better engineering choices.