csee

How do these IEMs with their passive seal compare to active noise cancelling headphones for the purposes of unwanted noise attenuation

Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?

I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers.

This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.

Your comparison fails a test of facts. Yandex actively censors any perspective not approved by the Kremlin. Google does not do anything comparable to this.

It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.

It's not just on the apps. Evolutionary psychologists have a bunch of empirical studies that tease this out. We also see this in our genetic lineage, more female ancestors than male ancestors. The evolutionary theory behind it is pretty well worked out and supported by a lot of data.

> I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system.

I don't disagree that the point of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges is primarily to facilitate speculation and gambling, but they're just delta 1 derivatives (track the underlying 1:1) in the form of a CFD, different in mechanism but no different in use case to regular futures, which themselves are traded widely on traditional exchanges. And these perps are quite useful to temporarily hedge holdings, even more convenient than regular futures since you don't have to bother with rollover. The instrument itself is really cool. The criticism should be directed to the high amounts of leverage which is only ever useful in a gambling context, and the marketing + gamification aspects which are clearly targeted at encouraging gambling behavior. If Binance got rid of their perpetual futures, users could still gamble all the same using Binance's regular futures contracts.

It's happening, though, so it's not impossible.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israel-cyprus...

> For short term storage (hours/days) batteries are far more efficient.

Is that expected/known to be true even as the tech gets cheaper in 5-10 years? What's the level of confidence of this statement?

The alternative is the way things were 15 years ago, where people found mates via their physical networks, work, family, hobbies, religion, and day to day life.

The criticism is similar in nature to the criticism of Twitter and Facebook. These apps play to and encourage the worst side of humans in the way that their social dynamics are designed, which distorts relations between people for the worse.

In the case of dating apps, it's because the "first meeting" is viewing someone's curated digital profile instead of getting to know their full self in the real world, they strongly encourage selection based on trivialities like height, hip to waist ratio, income and other signals. You also encourage the same narcissistic performance games that Instagram encourages. It's also the sheer deluge of profiles. Like, our dopamine system isn't designed for that, and nor is it a fully free choice when the app has exploited that evolved system to hook users. And what's going to be the impact of designing a system that makes it easy for people to self select into opposing political tribes?

Of course most of this stuff happened to an extent 15 years ago too. But as with Facebook and their tendency to stoke outrage and division, the problem is how the app has turbocharged our worse tendencies while also creating dilemma like incentives that make it tricky to opt out from.

My point about low status men is that they often aren't bad mates. They're low status through the prism of hyper gamified dating apps that magnify the importance of trivialities. There's no question that there's people who've had it worse in this regard in the pre-dating app era (various low-caste/untouchables types in different societies), my point isn't that we are at rock bottom, just that dating apps are a pretty large step in the wrong direction.

That is the only way out on a local, personal level, since that's all we have much control over. But how is it not the app's fault? When Twitter and Facebook create social dynamics that encourage outrage and division, I blame them (or at least I blame the incentives and systems that cause them to do this). Ditto for the impact that these dating apps are having.

You give good advice but I was commenting on the well documented asymmetry and inequality in outcomes that cut across gender lines which are likely magnified by these dating apps. It's not bitterness to point out objective facts that are highly relevant to the topic of conversation. "Improve yourself" is always the healthiest mindset on a personal level but that's not exactly deep analysis on the impact that these apps are having on our society or the lives of lower ranked men.

Maybe not that extreme but it's a super well documented phenomenon across evolutionary psych and studies of dating app stats.

For the top few percent of men.

You make a good point about discarding the source of random noise that the one-time pad is being applied to, and just focusing on the thing that's generating that one-time pad.

But I still don't know where to draw the line and how to justify it.

If that source of random noise mapped to a Turing machine running consciousness.exe for a short period of time by sheer chance without a one-time pad being applied to it by an external observer, would that classify? If we observed that this mapping held true by sheer chance as we observed additional bits in this random noise source, what about then? Does it make a difference that it's a random noise source that happens to be corresponding to a Turing machine for a period of time, and not an "actual" computer? And if that matters, what about the point that actual computers aren't perfectly deterministic, either?

If the observable universe is too small, what about the observable universe sampled at multiple points in time? Or just an iron bar that's repeatedly sampled along a time interval, with the desired encoding changing between each sample such that the object doesn't need to undergo much change it state in order to map to distinct things. Each sample increases the number of physical states that we can create a mapping from. If we still don't have enough states, we can draw more samples over more points in time to create a longer string of bits for the mapping.

Or another way to do it would be to repeatedly sample the same object at the same point in time, and simply change the desired encoding on each sampling, e.g. on a first pass we use F_0(x), on a second pass we use F_1(x), and we concatenate the output of F_0(x) and F_1(x) into a single large bit array.

The Boltzmann Brain says that our conscious experience at the current moment is a chance quantum event. It might not even involve the whole universe, it could be a local quantum phenomenon. That seems distinct to the argument in the article, which is that physical states (quantum or otherwise) can be mapped to an arbitrary string of bits with the encoding chosen by the person doing the mapping, and the output of this mapping (which is itself a string of bits) can correspond to a computation on a Turing machine, therefore inanimate objects with sufficiently large numbers of physical states could be said to be running a proposed consciousness.exe, which leads us to an absurd/extreme form of panpsychism.

What about the arguments outlined in the article? You first dismissed the arguments because an iron bar couldn't have enough physical states. But we both accept that there are physical objects which do have enough physical states, even if we have to use the entire observable universe as the object that the mapping draws from (and that's not related to the Boltzmann Brain). So the arguments in the article seems to be either ignored or misunderstood.

Also, materialism =!= substrate independence and invariance to speed of computation. Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent.

  "To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe"

But the observable universe exists. So why can't the observable universe appropriately substitute for the iron bar in his argument?

  "As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious"

Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain?

Why do you think it's absurd? If we do eventually create an AGI that is significantly smarter than us in most domains, why is it that we should expect to be able to keep it under control and doing what we want it to?

Are they observer independent? From the article:

  "Of course it is simplest to build a computer where the high voltage states correspond to 1s and the low voltages states 0s or vice versa. But there is no requirement that we build our computers that way. We could build a perfectly valid computer where the high voltage states of even valued registers correspond to 1s and where they correspond to 0s in the odd valued registers, or a computer where the mapping flips on every 13th clock cycle. The system only “computes” because of the way we have encoded information."

  "AI is not going to ... destroy the world."

Bare assertion fallacy? This question is hotly debated and I don't believe it can be so easily dismissed like that. It is not obvious that aligning something much smarter than us will be a piece of cake.

WW1 and the famines after the revolution were more of a humanitarian low point for them than 1991. Even after considering the dip in life expectancy and the financial crises and the kleptocratic corruption, the 1990s doesn't compare to what Russians (not to mention the minorities like the Tartars) went through in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

I would only agree that the 1990s were an unprecedented low point from the viewpoint of national pride via the prism of nationalism, given the losses in territory and influence that Russia had. Which explains why Putin thinks it's the single biggest disaster - he's a fascist and ultranationalist. Such people care about national pride and empire above all else.

I was with you until you started with the credentialism stuff.

Being underestimated increases the probability that the enemy will miscalculate and decide to wage war against you, which leads to a lose-lose scenario. This has happened many, many times in the past. It is best to project strength (to deter) while not giving away information that can be used against you.

It's not about actual vulnerabilities (although it may also be), it is about the general public's confidence in the legitimacy of the election. Voting machines do not instill confidence, and that is a bad thing for a democracy. I don't care about the microcosm of improved efficiency. That's not the thing to try to make ultra efficient at the cost of legitimacy.

Safe to install random add-ons like this?

> I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them.

There's some truth to this, but you can do event studies to show that economic conditions play a very large causal role too. e.g. the massive quantitative spike in Hitler's popularity 1 year into the depression (this is the main data point I want to bring up, because it's quantifiable by polling numbers), or the 1917 Russian Revolution which only was successful because of the dire conditions brought about due to WW1, or the CCP only getting into power because of Japanese occupation and degradation of the KMT.

Islam is hugely important for explaining the failures of the US and Soviet Union in being able to exercise influence in the region. It provided ideological resistance to the spread of communism which largely explains communism's failure in the region[1]. It played a role in the overthrow of the US-friendly Shah in Iran, and that's in small part because it is a non-secular religion and so it can easily substitute for nationalism (although those two get intertwined) as a mobilizing political force. It's played a large role in the failure of US policy in Iraq post-Saddam, due to the sectarian conflict brewing between the now-dominant Shia and the Sunnis who feel displaced in society following the purging of anyone that was aligned with the Baathists. Although it's still an open question in my mind whether it's just a regular tribal marker (similar to national or ethnic identity) or if it is something beyond that.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/opinion/muslim-communism....

Technically true, but this reeks of false balance fallacy. The US recognizing that Yatsenyuk will inevitably take power (given that he was the most popular opposition politician by far) and strategizing about factional politics following a brewing revolution is just categorically different to annexing territory and poisoning opponent politicians.