chimprich

It's been a long time since I've read TENM but I don't think Penrose argued that AGI was impossible, just that consciousness was not computable by a Turing machine. Presumably you could create AGI by utilising these quantum effects if it turns out that Penrose is correct and they do something.

I wouldn't particularly bet on Penrose being correct but until someone figures out how consciousness actually works or proves that it's somehow a big self-convincing illusion I don't think we can completely discount the idea that there's some kind of physics involved.

What is CDIC? How have you judged that you managed to do better testing than them? There have been a lot of tests of the efficacy of masks, not just from one organisation. Especially during the pandemic; there were many organisations across the world doing studies.

If you didn't manage to discover that the main benefit of lower grade masks is to restrict respiratory droplet movement then your literature search was very ineffective.

This is correct but I find it very confusing why this information (that masks prevent respiratory droplets rather than virus particles) wasn't more widely known during the pandemic. It felt like it was reported in thousands of news articles.

> That was when I started laughing at the whole thing.

In the GPs case I suspect they knew what result they wanted to find and avoided any articles about how masks worked, let alone checking the scientific literature.

From your article:

"The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette, France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time."

The beneficial effects of increased CO2 will also be more than counteracted by other problems as the world temperature rises, such as greater heat stress and lower soil moisture.

> Trillions of dollars have been spent to date on emission reduction with many incurring a consequent lowering of quality of life

It's cheaper to avoid the warming in the first place rather than deal with the consequences, so complaining about the cost is a false economy.

> To date (as far as I can tell) there has been no discernible reduction in the rate of increase in CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa station

It's possible that we've reached peak CO2 emissions:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

...however we need to cut them significantly.

If you want to go with that analogy, it's more like opening a community cafe and hanging a sign on the wall saying "please bring a dish for our free communal meal - we'd be happy to add it (when we get around to it, if we like it, and if the cafe is still open - good luck, because you probably won't know if it has closed!)

I have a fairly popular free/open source project and I both agree and disagree with the author. Mostly users are polite and non-entitled, but it's exhausting answering all the (very polite) questions and requests for help.

I've had to turn down dishes that wouldn't have worked for the cafe, and it makes me feel bad. I've requested users contact me before writing a PR but of course people don't read the FAQ.

> What I've observed is that nutrition, including nutrition research, has become as religious - meaning, following faith rather than data

Most of the people who make comments like this sound more religious than most.

> Maybe bacon is bad for you. I don't think so.

It's well established that processed meats containing nitrates, like bacon, are carcinogens.

> A lot, and I mean a LOT, of nutrition research is done by vegans and sponsored by vegans

That's completely backwards. Actually a lot of nutrition research is paid for by large multinationals who sell ultra-processed food. That's where all the cash is.

Who are these shadowy rich vegan organisations?

It's not just a question of individual research groups deciding to use a different tool.

Even if you're conscientious enough to handle this issue, the automatic conversion could come and cause you problems from anyone you share data with: medical teams, grad students, administrators...

Once a page has "This page was intentionally left blank" printed on it, it is no longer blank.

> We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess.

We've already innovated our way out of this mess. We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there).

Covid is a good example. In most of the liberal democracies people accepted the restrictions their governments argued were necessary to combat Covid. I think these restrictions were significantly greater than what is needed from individuals to combat climate change.

You might find it hard to believe, but it's significantly worse in the UK. We have significantly fewer doctors, nurses, hospital beds per capita, and pay less into healthcare.

Long term sick unable to work numbers have increased by a third in the last ~3 years: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/17/record-long...

That's surely not even cost-effective in the short term. It would be cheaper to pay to get them back working again.

The NHS is quite efficient I think compared to comparable health systems but it's massively under-resourced.

So it's all relative. It might not be "stellar" from your perspective, but France and Germany have probably among the best health systems in the world. The UK's used to be quite good only a few years ago.

I agree generally, though it's not simple to compare countries.

It's easier to compare UK history. It seems clear that we're paying more tax for significantly worse services compared to a decade ago.

Most people in most countries don't see the value in tax - if you read any forum, people want to pay less tax and have better public services, which isn't really very achievable.

Some people would prefer to follow a US kind of model of cuts to public services and low tax.

Other people (including me) would rather be taxed higher in a more European model and have well-funded public services.

The current UK government seems to have found a fourth option - high taxes and dreadful public services.

> So IMHO this restriction is an attempt at limiting the stock people have at home

Correct. But this isn't a bad thing - it means people are less likely to have a large supply of dangerous pills at hand if they get a sudden urge to kill themselves or attempt a cry for help during a depressive episode.

> Although I would argue this is none of the shop's business

In practical terms it appears that this actually does reduce suicides and poisonings; it's a significant reduction in suffering in the world.

The cost is a very small and temporary limitation on personal convenience. It's surely worth it. See also seatbelt laws.

> and, as far as I can gather, this is not a legal restriction.

It is in some countries, but the legal obligation is on the vendor, not the individual. If you are confident that you do need a larger cache of tablets then you can do that yourself with only minimal extra inconvenience.

I think it's an elegant solution. Suicides are reduced, but the state doesn't overrule individual decision making on what their needs are.

> However what is seemingly _never_ studied is how to finance such an operation

You haven't understood the concept of UBI. It doesn't have to be "financed". It's a different way of assigning tax and benefits.

E.g. imagine a population of only two people, Alice and Bob. Currently Alice pays £100 in tax, and Bob receives £50 in welfare payments because he's unemployed.

You could set up a UBI scheme to be net zero. Under this UBI system, Alice would pay £150 in tax, and receive £50 in UBI. Bob would receive £50 in UBI instead of benefits.

It doesn't have to cost anything (in theory). You could make it redistributive, but it doesn't have to be.

The proponents of UBI would say it's worth it because you wouldn't have the expense and unfairness of means testing for benefits, and Bob would have the incentive to look for work (any work) without any reduction in benefits. In addition people could do things like start companies on a small guaranteed wage with less risk.

Opposers of UBI would say some proportion of people wouldn't work at all if they were guaranteed an income.

There are likely many more advantages and disadvantages that would only become apparent if a country actually tried it.

> So does Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost.

Those are all very different things. Only Facebook is somewhat similar in that it has an algorithm that surfaces emotionally engaging content.

> I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet.

How about if it showed you 50 racist tweets? If repetition and exposure didn't have any effect on our behaviour then there would be no advertising market and no one would bother to spend vast sums on political campaigning.

> Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.

How about misinformation? As an example, I'd say the rise in anti-vaccination activity is an example of inherently dangerous information that has been spread primarily through social media.

See also some rather startling graphs in this FT article: https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12...

> I ditched emacs close to 20 years ago (for jEdit, later Sublime and finally IntelliJ) and have never regretted it in the slightest.

In that time I've carried on using Emacs, and have regretted it several times ;)

However, Emacs has come on a lot. It's much easier to configure than it used to be, and LSP has brought its semantic features back into the range of other editors. Its text processing abilities have always been stellar and far outshone anything else I've tried.

I'm very happy I stuck with it. I've kept many years of muscle memory and tricks and avoided having to reconfigure 3 different editors. Plus there are killer features like magit and org-mode.

> "taxing kerosine on international flights", "charge VAT for flights"

This is problematic. The more you tax flying, the more you make it only a rich person's activity.

Why only international flights? Domestic flights produce about the same amount of emissions, and are easier to substitute with something else, e.g. train journeys.

The other problem with aviation is that we don't have any tech that can really replace it, whereas we have the tech now to replace most other sources of emissions. My view is that if we can get all the sources of emissions down, then we can probably live with the 2% or so of emissions from aviation until we have the tech to replace it.

> or even "removing all subsidies for beef and pork production in the EU"

This is something I'd support. Reducing red meat consumption would likely improve health, the environment, animal welfare, and other things as well as reducing emissions. However, very difficult to achieve politically.

> But let's not pretend we are doing anything to save our (ability to live on) the planet here.

We need a multi-pronged approach to simultaneously reduce emissions on all fronts. We can't just ignore 2% of global emissions if we're serious about tackling the problem.

> To remove at most 2% of greenhouse gas emissions?

The problem with this argument is that everything is a small percentage contribution if you break it down enough.

At the moment some UK politicians are saying the UK shouldn't be concerned about reducing emissions because the UK only contributes about 1% to global emissions (we also have ~1% of the world's population which I think rather negates this argument).

2% is a lot. If we want to tackle this problem in a reasonable timescale we need to go for the low hanging fruit, the high hanging fruit, and all the fruit in between.

I'm not too impressed with these examples. I mean it's impressive that it can build code, but it's a very long way off building entire games that you'd want to play.

The human still has to provide the creative input - the concept of the game, the rules, and multiple steps of guidance to get anywhere (when it works).

The code is sometimes generated correctly, but only if a) it's fairly trivial and b) the model can generalise from something else it's seen. There's squillions of maze examples out there so models build slight variations on this easily enough, but as soon as you inject some originality, the model flounders.

> unsustainable

I got the impression all the major streaming players made significant profits and grew substantially over the past decade.

Does "unsustainable" just mean they weren't making as much cash as they wanted to?

That's because it is a SPOF. However, a password manager seems to me the best compromise along the security / convenience axes.

I memorise good passwords for a handful of my most critical stuff (and have MFA). They don't go in my password manager.

If my password manager gets compromised then I probably could lose some cash, maybe get embarrassed by being impersonated on social media - it could get very inconvenient but not catastrophic.

One feature I wish Google calendar had is "weekend" view; a condensed view of upcoming weekends, hiding weekdays. You can hide weekends, but in my personal account planning weekends is more important to me than planning weekdays.

> We have evolved to eat meat

We evolved as opportunists and generalists. Humans are capable of taking nutrition from plants or animals.

> and only evolved to eat plants to supplement some small things

I believe this is backwards. There are examples of hunter-gatherer societies with meat-dominant diets, but more typically hunter-gatherer diets were/are predominantly plant-based. In most environments hunting was a less reliable source of food and more opportunistic.

> But really the main benefit of meat is that you get close to the right concentrations of everything by very definition.

Not really. Maybe if you were eating chimp... but chickens have very different compositions to cows, pigs, salmon or polar bears.

> You just put a steak in your mouth and you are 80% of the way there.

It really isn't that simple. For example, it is well established that excessive red meat consumption raises the risk of colorectal cancer and other bad things.

> What was the model of this shit? Oh it has NOTHING on the front because serial numbers are gauche.

I'd really like some kind of standard for model IDs. Maybe something like a domain name and a model number.

It would also be good if devices came with a QR code printed on them that linked to the manual.

> (I am not antivax, I am just too lazy to get it)

Startup idea - vaccine delivery service. Pay a fee or subscription and someone comes to your house or workplace and jabs you with flu vaccine plus any travel shots required.

Why would a human be taking the job of the general-purpose maintenance robot (which maintain each other, before you ask)?

Would we still have landlords in a post-scarcity future? Surely if all wealth is being generated by AIs, it's the end of capitalism.

Even if we introduced UBI today, this doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't mean everyone just gets more cash because tax would have to rise to compensate.

I think you're imagining that landlords would think, "oh everyone is getting an extra 100 zorkmids a month, so I can raise rents by 100 zorkmids". But it couldn't work like that because the cash has to come from somewhere; what would actually happen is that someone receiving 100 zorkmids in benefits now gets 100 zorkmids in UBI, and someone who was paying 100 zorkmids in tax now pays 200 zorkmids in tax and gets 100 zorkmids in UBI.

> a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done

In a heavily AI-oriented future, why wouldn't that be done by the floor-cleaning robot?

> You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call it a vaccine...

After almost 4 years of this virus, 3 years of covid vaccines, a presumably basic level of biological education, the baseline level of curiosity that I'd have thought would be present in anyone reading HN, and the world of free information at our fingertips, I don't rightly understand why people keep making elementary mistakes like this.