fallingfrog

I wonder how this breaks down by region. I imagine a heavy car is probably bad in the snow.

Theoretically perhaps, but despite what our internal self-perception would suggest, none of us reading this are actually important enough to resurrect later.

Funny, in New England we call this a “New Jersey stop”.

Is the total mass of the organoids in your system greater than the mass of a single human brain?

Camden’s a nice town but yeah this is rich people acting like rich people.

There’s not much left of the Maine coast that’s owned by actual maine locals. Most of it is million dollar homes owned by people from out of state who just show up one week out of the year. It’s sad. But the real insult is when they block off access to beaches that locals have been going to for generations. It’s a common story though, it’s just another case of gentrification.

I love how a few years ago everyone was fretting over how to keep an AGI in a leakproof box, http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/LeakproofingtheSingularity.pdf

And now, a few years later we just give it a bash shell and full access to the internet. So much for the box! I can’t believe how naive we were to think that the people who developed an ai would prioritize anything over profit and how fast the genie would escape- it’s not even AGI yet but at the point where it becomes AGI, with this kind of precedent set it’s laughable to think that we will put any sort of guardrails on it.

All this time we thought it was a technical or philosophical problem but the real problem was capitalism and the glacial pace that the general public picks up on what is going on. It would take decades to get the people at large to agree that the threat is even real and decades more to get to the point where public opinion was decisive enough to counteract all that money, and only then do you get to even try to keep it contained.

The project itself is very well executed though

10/10 but a few years from now, I might do no better than chance. I was amazed in the Mount Fuji image that the reflected clouds were correct based on the ones it drew in the sky. Those details are on opposite sides of the image!

Let’s be real: in the long run, there’s nothing that humans can do that machines can’t do better. Nothing.

So what is going to happen?

Well, if AI is doing all the thinking work, there’s no need for an education.

Education is already in free fall due to it being taken over by people who just want to maximize profits. This will make the problem worse.

And technology continues to isolate us and act as a conduit for whatever ideas spread the fastest- that means anything that triggers your amygdala.

A population with no jobs and no education and social connections is an angry and ignorant one. That means conservatism and conflict. Liberalism is the politics of trust. Conservatism is the politics of fear. And ignorant, isolated people are easy to manipulate.

And we in the USA live in a country flooded with guns.

The end of result of all that, in the past, has always been war. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I doubt it. There’s dry tinder piled up everywhere, and we are playing with matches.

It’s not gonna all fall apart this year. But, in 20, 30 years, with climate change and mass migration thrown into the mix, things are going to get bad.

Oh ok. So bells theorem is wrong and I have to cite scientific sources to convince some random person on the internet.

Look: i have a degree in physics, and I also don’t have time to argue with you. You don’t want to learn? Your loss.

You’re one of those people for whom “winning” is more important than the truth, I think.

You know what? You win. You’ve outlasted me. You’ve successfully learned nothing, and nobody will ever care about your statements about bells inequality because they’re laughably wrong and nobody will read this anyway. Victory is yours!

>We don't know that. It is a statement of your belief in such interpretation of quantum theory.

No, Bell’s Theorem conclusively proved it.

From Wikipedia: “To date, Bell tests have consistently found that physical systems obey quantum mechanics and violate Bell inequalities; which is to say that the results of these experiments are incompatible with any local hidden-variable theory.”

No, that’s not correct- there are no hidden variables such that a particle really took only one path to a point and we just don’t know which one it was. It really did go through all of them. All the ones that are consistent with the current state of the system. (So, no I’m not talking about pasts that are not consistent like your popped knee).

And that’s super cool, and something not many people understand! It’s the basis of the schrodingers cat experiment- you’ve heard of it. The cat is really, actually both alive and dead before the system is opened to the world, assuming that no information leaves or enters the box. It’s not that we just don’t know. It’s actually in both states. And although it’s practically speaking impossible to do the experiment, you could throw different versions of the cat through some diffraction grating a zillion times and prove that yes, the live and dead version interfere with each other. They’re both real.

I hope I’m blowing your mind a little bit with this, or if not at least being entertaining :). It’s super counterintuitive!

“ This has nothing to do with quantum theory. It's from classical physics already, from chaotic systems”

Not exactly. What’s important here is that every past is real. In the sense that different paths a particle can take can interfere with each other. It’s not indeterminate in a some fuzzy intuitive sense of “something we don’t know.” every past that matches the current known state of a system is real. That’s something that is included in the package of “quantum weirdness.”

And, if you make the assumption that every future is real in the same way, that’s the many worlds/decoherence interpretation.

“There’s no technical reason why these algorithms need to be black boxes; the real reason is to maintain the power structure.”

I’m kind of amazed that the article has the courage to say this out loud. The New York Times or any mainstream publication would never have been so honest.

If anything they would have said some weasel words like “some ex-associates of shipt have complained that the app’s compensation system is unfair.” Rather than just blurt out the truth, which is that it’s unfair by design because the owners of the app want to maintain a certain power relationship. It’s the kind of thing that everyone knows but is not allowed to say in printed form.

And, another big quantum weirdness is that matter has not only a probability but also a phase angle, so different possibilities can add but they can also cancel out, which is not how classical probability works where probabilities always add together.

There are many kinds of quantum weirdness. One of them is this: we think classically of the past as definite and the future in terms of possibilities- but in reality both the future and the past are indeterminate in exactly the same way (it’s just that typically there are a lot more possible futures for the current state than pasts, because of entropy). In fact you could define the past as being the direction in configuration space with the smallest uncertainty, and the future as being the direction with the most uncertainty. In this view, at the Big Bang since there is no direction with less uncertainty, there is no past at that point.

That’s not the only quantum weirdness, but it’s a big one.

Tangential and a bit hand-wavey but:

I think you can use a Turing-like argument to argue against the existence of a finite set of moral rules that covers every situation too. The argument goes: suppose you have some set of rules. Now engineer a situation where, if the rules are followed, you cause something bad to happen. That’s similar to the step where turing says, “now create a program that asks if p halts, and if so runs an infinite loop”.

Which means, no sacred text or set of commandments could possibly cover every situation.

Boomer brain worms. If you really want to get rid of propaganda, you should take Fox News off the air immediately.

Topical: just a few minutes from where I live, in Lewiston Maine, a former grenade range instructor walked into a bar recently and killed 18 people. His brain was found to have the same kinds of damage- he had been hearing voices and experiencing other psychotic symptoms and he had access to guns. It seems likely that the repeated concussions at the grenade range were a contributing factor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/maine-shooting-brain-i...

Exactly!

That’s just the worst reasoning I’ve ever heard. Your if.. then statement just doesn’t logically follow.

Honestly this whole thing reeks of the satanic panic type moral scares of the 80’s or the anti communist rhetoric of the 60’s repackaged in new form. Moral panic over something or other is an American tradition; right now it’s tiktok but god knows why.

Set yourself a reminder to come back to this comment in 10 years once the fervor has died down and you will read your own comments with bafflement.

How is it a risk?? Are the communists cackling with glee as they steal all those 30 second clips of teens doing the cinnamon challenge?

I don’t know about the lower back specifically, but I know that hiking/ walking long distances is medicine for your knees. And running is medicine for your whole circulatory system and spine. If I don’t exercise, I begin to feel the difference within a couple weeks. But if your knees start to hurt- you need to walk. Standing is no good. It’s walking that helps, and especially walking up and down mountains. Your knees might be sore the first couple times you do this but after a while they will respond to the stimulation and become much tougher.

The remainder of the quote is “in the next 20 years”.

The ones I’ve used (mainly Microsoft sql server) are not just bad, they’re abysmally bad for any query that’s not extremely trivial. Writing every query with explicit joins is a necessity almost 100% of the time. Maybe you’ve just never tried to do anything tricky with large tables with a lot of data? Query optimizers almost always resort to nested table scans as soon as you do anything even slightly complex.

Tl;dr: the original design idea behind sql was a failure and here’s why.

I know the intent was to write a declarative language where you just specify what you want and the system figures out how to get it- but I consider that project to have definitely failed considering that in order to get the sql interpreter to behave in a sane fashion you must use explicit JOIN statements everywhere and fetch table rows and index them to other table rows in a specific order using specific keys that the programmer chooses. It’s exactly the same as writing while loops, though the syntax is admittedly quite nice.

I’ve seen people try to interact with the interpreter with a great big god query like SELECT FROM A,B,C,D,E WHERE A.id=B.id and B.id2=C.id2 and so on, and that would be a declarative way to do it, but the performance of the interpreter in such scenarios is absolutely, universally, perplexingly dismal and in practice you can’t use sql that way. It was a nice idea though.

I think it stems from every one of their songs sounding like an imitation of “smells like teen spirit”. Except that Kurt cobain was- or at least is seen as- authentic, raw and vulnerable, whereas nickelback comes across as a pretentious imitation loaded with macho posturing. Kurt would have hated them, which is why many others do.

Besides that, their music is really boring- in the sense of being extremely predictable. Lots of other music you hear on the radio is boring too, of course. But it’s a double whammy.

There’s a word for being adept at “hacking” people and institutions, and it’s called being manipulative. It’s a dark triad sociopathic trait.

Difficult when those same people are now in charge of the regulatory industries.

I’m a musician too, and: yep, same. Many of my best songs occurred to me at work, or doing something else, and I grab a napkin or piece of paper and write down the chords and a melody and a few notes so that I can recall the idea later. But I don’t need an instrument in my hands to do this.

Omg PLEASE PLEASE do not do this. Do not piss in the well. Reddit needs to ban anyone who uses this.