5,570 karma · joined October 12, 2019
I can almost guarantee you are wrong about this, especially about Americans who would ever emigrate to New Zealand. You are voting based on xenophobia. The only reason it's not racist is because "American" is not generally considered a race. But it's xenophobic, nationalistic, and based on deep-rooted stubborn ignorance.
This is the racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.
Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?
It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.
Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.
Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?
Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.
Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?
Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.
Or write something that actually provides value to your reader, communicate that value effectively, and trust your reader to recognize that value. Which would you rather read: writing that was optimized for psychologically capturing your eyeballs, or writing that was optimized for providing you something of value?
So if my API happens to return text strings that always happen to have an even number of characters, I better make sure that all future versions of it also always return an even number of characters, just in case some moron decided to bank their application's functionality on that? No. If you decide to write a fragile application tethered to some incidental property of some upstream software, your application deserves to break.
There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters, and the authors generally know this. They can present tremendously one-sided information in the first few chapters, giving the spin that they want, and then in later chapters give a more balanced approach to shield themselves from criticism. Almost everyone who reads the book will read only the spin, but any criticism levied against the author will be met with "but I specifically say, in the later chapters ...". It's a slimy technique that you start to see everywhere once you're aware of it.
Inference costs cannot keep falling forever, but they do still have a long way to go.
> Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.
>> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".
> Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?
You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?
This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.
Yes, the also called lots of actual crazy people crazy. In fact the probability of actually being crazy, given people are calling you crazy, is very high.
This is the opposite of really striving to understand what your AI is producing.
Windows users are the ones who don't want to think about the OS at all. They want to get something else done and have the OS get in their way as little as possible. Linux fans want to dig deep into their OS and play with its internals; Mac fans want the OS to be an experience: trendy, sleek, reassuring. The kind of people who like it when the AI tells them "you're absolutely right!". Windows users generally understand that Windows is awful; the worst operating system, in fact, except for all the other ones.
Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.
This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"
Because the gravitational potential between two massive objects is equal to the amount of energy it would take to separate them (from touching) out to their current distances, and equal to the amount of kinetic energy they'd have when they impacted if they started from rest and eventually came together. This is not zero for any two massive objects that are any distance apart.
If you pulled two objects further and further apart in R3, the force required at each point would drop off proportional to 1/r^2, and the total energy would be the integral of that (let's assume total mass == 1). This integral approaches a constant: for a total mass of 1 and a starting (or "touching") distance of 1 (you can't use 0 or you can't pull them apart), this integral is 1. So no matter how far apart you pull them, potential never exceeds 1. But it must be nonzero, because you could extract energy from releasing them and letting them come together.
In R2, the force required to pull them apart at each point drops off as 1/r, so the integral grows as Ln(r), and so has no upper bound.
I recognize we basically agree on all this, I'm just clarifying why I consider the limit of the potential to be nonzero as distance approaches infinity. You could extract energy from the system with a "water wheel" setup, at least at every finite distance. You could argue "but not at an infinite distance, because they'd never come together, their attraction force is 0, and where would you put the water wheel?" but that problem only comes up at infinity. We're talking about the limit as r approaches infinity, so this problem never actually comes up.
The integral of const/r^2 doesn't drop to zero as r gets larger, but approaches some constant. Unlike const/r, which is unbounded as r gets larger. So potential is bounded in R3, but not in R2.
> Let's say I [the Netherlands] pay [!?] someone [Ukraine] to punch you [Russia] int the face every day. Then one day when you [Russia] punch me [Ukraine] in the face do I have a right to complain?
Ukraine is defending itself, and nobody is paying Ukraine to do that. Russia is the aggressor here. It's weird that I need to point that out. We're talking about Russia sabotaging someone for selling defensive capabilities to Ukraine. So a better analogy is this:
Let's say I punch you in the face every day. Then one day you buy a baseball bat from Gart Sports to defend yourself, so I go in and punch the manager of Gart Sports. Am I in the wrong?
Yes, very obviously, when you frame the analogy correctly, you are in the wrong.
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
> I think it's something similar with China
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.
Is your comment an example of this?
Man, the people who want to just get away with open corruption sure love you.
It's not necessarily clear that this statement requires infinity, if you're willing to treat "... =" as a shorthand. You might prefer something like "1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... -> 2" if it's more clear, where "->" means something like "gets as close as you like without ever getting further away than that", but really the "=" sign is already overloaded in all sorts of subtly different ways anyway, so there's not really any trouble using it here. Almost any rigorous definition you can write down of exactly what that statement means would not rely on the use of infinity.
We have record high levels of people needing support at the same time we have record high levels of spending on that support? What an outrage! Obviously nothing is working and government bad!
Of course the spending on support services goes up as more people need that support. We're supposed to assume that's some sort of failure?
> Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
If by "proven" you mean "kinda maybe arguable if you intentionally misrepresent correlational studies", sure.
I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
I feel like this is dramatically missing the point. It is trivial to come up with a communication system where signals travel at the speed of light. In fact, anything visual meets this criteria: sign language, semaphores, clicking your flashlight on and off. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. All of humanity became a giant "lightspeed-intelligent" brain when radio was first invented.
It really does matter what you're doing with those signals, how much information each contains, how many you're sending, how much power it takes to send and receive them, how they're encoded, etc. Focusing on the fact that they travel at the speed of light is silly.
> The advantage of this over biological computation is clear: Biological computation happens at max 100m/s, 6 orders of magnitude less than the speed of light
You are trying to compare computation power by measuring distances. You are basically saying "one biological computation" is a million times slower than "one silicon computation" because of how fast signals travel, completely ignoring what is actually happening in those extremely different computations. It's still not clear that brains can be compared to computers at all, but if you try to simplify it down to FLOPS (a much better measure of computation speed than "how fast do some signals go"), our best estimates are that one brain has the computational equivalent of somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 modern GPUs.