bytefactory

Regarding your third point (decentralized web), I just discovered this recently: https://sandstorm.io/. Something like that might start becoming more common!

Keep in mind that you're one of the very small percentage of people that _can_ help humanity when it comes to global warming. Your being on HN suggests that you are probably in the small proportion of people that have the abilities and resources that can affect change.

Working to save money will give you resources that will let you participate in the decision making process. For example, let's consider a situation where you have $10000 that you would like to use to help. You could donate it to an effective charity, invest in Tesla, use it to lobby local government, buy solar panels, etc.

That means your job is actually enormously meaningful!

This is too big and strange to be true. Unless it is, in which case, wow.

I haven't seen anybody claiming all of this is a hoax yet, which is probably because there isn't much evidence either way?

Goddamn it, my dental hygienist told me to use mouthwash after brushing + flossing :(

Also at https://deepmind.com/blog

"In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York."

This part really incensed me. That's like describing SpaceX's rocket "as being based on similar technology as Wernher von Braun's V2 rockets in World War 2". I exaggerate for effect, but you get the point.

Edit: formatting.

Very frustrating read. Read more like an advertisement than an informative article.

The claims made would've made for a very interesting tech-dive into a novel use of machine intelligence, but no details were provided.

The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of articles on the subject:

1. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 2. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951

I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did grok was quite interesting.

Interesting idea, would you be able to expand or point to any interesting reading about this?

And games will have more variety in NPCs faces!

You mean something like this? :)

https://zeronet.io/

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I've often wanted to try K to help battle my nastier depressive episodes, but your comment definitely gave me pause. It's very tempting to look around at all the party usage of K and forget how dangerous it could potentially be.

> Standing in his simulated apartment and looking at a painting—Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”—Paul can’t quite forget that, when he turns around, the simulation will stop rendering it, reducing it to “a single gray rectangle” in an effort to save processing cycles. If we live in a simulated world, then the same thing could be happening to us: Why should a computer simulate every atom in the universe when it knows where our eyes aren’t looking? Simulated people have reasons to be paranoid.

Sounds uncannily like the quantum wave collapse, except that we shouldn't be able to so easily discover the phenomena (reboot/patch incoming?). Then again, maybe that's partly the goal of the simulation ;)

Thank you, that was an excellent summary!

On a somewhat related note, it seems clear that AI research and breakthroughs are occurring at breakneck speed. I wish there was a place where you could see expert commentary like your in layman terms on interesting or important papers that stand out.

Indeed, I can't wait for the day we see DeepMind (or its ilk) playing games like StarCraft, I expect it'll be quite uncanny.

He's not pulling those numbers out of his ass, he's reporting the results of a paper Nick Bostrom wrote: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf.

You might agree or disagree with Bostrom's paper, but one of those is a high-schooler/tripper/moviemaker's _idea_, and one is a scientific paper, which is meant to be repeatable, experimental, etc.

I agree with you completely!

At the same time, it's worth noting that it makes sense to approach the problem in a reductive (using the word loosely, not sure if it's completely accurate) manner, i.e., keep replicating features and capabilities of human brains until we possibly hit a wall in the form of consciousness, although it's quite possible that it turns out to be an emergent property [1], although I suspect it's a bit more complicated than that.

[1] It seems to me that most explanations that consciousness is "emergent" or an "illusion" would never _predict_ the experiences we actually consider consciousness, like "fire is caused by phlogiston": http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/. At the same time, I recognize that I couldn't tell the difference between this world and one populated by philosophical zombies (http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/).

Edit: I should clarify regarding my footnote that I don't believe in epiphenomenalism, I believe consciousness is a purely material phenomenon, I like to think of it as an overview process running in the brain, responding to the other stimulus to take appropriate action.

Interesting, but I wonder how profitable these kinds of micro-services will end up being. Seems like the margins must be pretty low, and I'm not sure what unique value you could deliver that a company couldn't more easily extract directly (by buying their own sensors, for example).

I've seen translation offered as another use-case of 21, but that seems like another mechanical turk kind of operation where there really isn't much added value outside of the low fee costs of using BTC as a currency.

This sounds like a big deal, can somebody with some expertise in the field comment on it?

Seems like a manifestation of Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

I agree that the changing the incentive structure is a good idea, but public shaming seems a tad harsh.

Very impressive! The video from the paper is worth a watch: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9raQzOpizn1TkRIa241ZnBEcj...

From the paper: "We have empirically demonstrated that CNNs are able to learn the entire task of lane and road following without manual decomposition into road or lane marking detection, semantic abstraction, path planning, and control. A small amount of training data from less than a hundred hours of driving was sufficient to train the car to operate in diverse conditions, on highways, local and residential roads in sunny, cloudy, and rainy conditions. The CNN is able to learn meaningful road features from a very sparse training signal (steering alone)"

Wow!

I was wondering about that too! And apparently some efforts are underway:

1. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/putting-the-blockchain-... 2. https://www.gridcoin.us/ 3. http://www.coindesk.com/5-global-problems-bitcoins-proof-wor...

Sounds similar to what happens automatically via meditation [1]?

[1]: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-min...

Are you talking about this paper: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html? It appears to be the same as the linked PDF.

Ooh, it's Gwern! This should be good :) Modafinil, and nootropics in general sounds very interesting indeed.

OK, monologue time, hopefully this helps somebody!

I've been on a path of self-improvement these past couple of years, trying to create habits of working out, meditating, eating healthier, practicing CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), etc. I've had drastic, unbelievable changes in my lifestyle that I will be eternally grateful for!

I used to be have very bad periods of depression, self-doubt, under-confidence, loneliness, etc. that are rapidly diminishing with these amazing tools. Cannot recommend each one of them enough! If anybody's struggling with these issues, I promise you that these will offer you results, although you will have to work hard, and long for them to show (YMMV). I also had a session with a therapist which helped a lot, and in my case, I didn't really feel the need to go back. I found the very act of seeking help and acknowledging that I had a problem pushed me towards healing.

After I research nootropics for effectiveness and safety, I'd love to add them to the list! Also on the list: rationality in the style of LessWrong, although I'm trying to decide how much the cost-to-benefit ratio of pursuing "pure rationality" will end up being (I suspect the answer will be "a lot").

TLDR: Eat healthy, exercise, meditate and practice CBT if you suffer from depression :)

Can anybody with insight into more details than a layman comment on the attractiveness of a hydrogen-powered car vs. electric cars?

I know Elon Musk views them extremely unfavorably, I'm curious if that's just a blind spot, or if there's good reason to be skeptical of hydrogen-powered cars.

The fact that a huge amount of additional investment (paying off by 2030) is needed to set up hydrogen plants with renewable energy to make this tech 'green' seems to be one big disadvantage.

Edit: or anybody with an informed opinion, for that matter!

> will consider an AI to be "generic" when it is able to apply training from one domain to an entirely different domain without any manual "mapping" from humans. For example, being able to decently play checkers after learning chess and being given a description of checker's rules.

Want to butt in to this discussion, and post this link here for anybody who hasn't seen/heard about this amazing development from a while ago: http://robohub.org/artificial-general-intelligence-that-play...

"But it’s very clear that the human is one entity: mind and body are one. It sounds logical but it’s not how we looked at it before. We didn’t have the science to agree with what may seem intuitive. Now we have new data and new insights."

This is one of my favourite things about science. People of science aren't afraid of admitting that they are wrong.

Just replying to what I think is your objection, apologies if that's not what you meant.

I think the point being made was that a lot of things that we think of as outside our domain of expertise, and thus inaccessible, truly aren't.

It's worth attempting to construct the garden bed yourself, and you might find that it's not nearly as insurmountable of an obstacle as you'd imagined. In this particular case, treating the wood might have been part of the process of learning how to make the garden bed, as would using a saw, polishing the wood, etc.

> I might get some heat for this but I must say Windows is still the OS with the least closed garden or heck even a garden.

Surely you meant "OS with a significant market share" or something, because there's no way Windows is more "open" in any way than Linux!